First and foremost, the purpose of the link is to track traffic to the landing page by affiliate. This is why every affiliate in your system has a unique link for them for every campaign. In order for us to track, this link has to be the one that is used to drive traffic to the landing page. Every time an affiliate link is clicked, four things happen
1) We create a click in the system
2) We drop a tracking cookie on the browser
3) We create a hit ID for that user
4) We redirect the link to the redirect to link you have assigned in the campaign
*Keep in mind that we can't record a conversion or pixel fire unless there is a click associated with it, so unless the affiliate link is clicked, there will be no sale in the system even if the person converts! That is the most direct relationship between the link and the pixel fire that follows it.
