Most affiliate managers still test offers the slow way. You launch one offer, watch it for a few days, swap in another, watch again, and try to remember which combination of traffic and creative actually worked. Meanwhile your affiliates get a single link and hope it holds up. When that one offer caps at noon or the advertiser pulls it without warning, every click after that point is wasted. The traffic keeps coming. The offer has nowhere to send it.The routing logic should sit inside the link instead of inside a spreadsheet you update every morning. That is exactly what RPM Links does. We built RPM Links to close that gap. It is a smart link feature inside HitPath that puts multiple offers behind one URL and decides, click by click, where each visitor should go. This post walks through how it works, the two ways you can run it, and the situations where it earns its place in your setup.
What is RPM Links ?
RPM Links is a smart link. Instead of pointing an affiliate at one campaign, you point them at a rotation of campaigns and let HitPath route the traffic.
You start by creating an RPM Link campaign inside HitPath. You select the offers you want in the rotation, up to 10 campaigns per RPM Link. From there you choose how the rotation makes its decisions. You can hand that decision to the system with Smart Technology, or you can keep it yourself with manual weights. That single choice is the difference between automatic optimization and full manual control, and you can run either one depending on the traffic.
The affiliate never sees any of this. They get one link. Behind that link, HitPath is doing the work of matching each click to the offer most likely to convert it.
Smart Technology. An Automatic Affiliate Offer Rotation
When you add a campaign to the rotation, each one has an option to enable Smart Technology. Turn it on and HitPath rotates traffic across your selected campaigns based on performance, with no manual intervention from you.
The system watches how each offer converts and shifts more traffic toward the winners as the data comes in. If one offer starts pulling a stronger conversion rate, it earns a larger share of the clicks. If another offer softens, its share drops. You are not logging in to adjust anything. The rotation adjusts itself.
This is what removes the manual split testing most teams still do by hand. Rather than running one offer, reading a report, and swapping in the next candidate, you load the candidates into a single RPM Link and let the system run the test continuously.
Manual Weight. A Full Control Over the Rotation
Smart Technology is not the right call for every situation, and RPM Links does not force it on you. If you leave Smart Technology off for a campaign, you set the weight yourself.
That means you assign each offer a fixed percentage of the traffic. Campaign A takes 40 percent, Campaign B takes 30 percent, Campaign C takes 30 percent. HitPath splits the clicks to match those numbers and holds them there until you decide to change them. Nothing rebalances on its own.
Manual weighting is for the cases where you already know what you want the rotation to do. Maybe you are honoring a volume commitment to an advertiser, protecting a relationship with a specific offer, or feeding a new campaign a controlled slice of traffic before you trust it with more. The point is that affiliate offer rotation stays a decision you make, not one the system makes for you.
Evaluate Global Campaign Performance. A Rotating on Network Wide Data
There is a third setting worth understanding, because it changes where the optimization data comes from. It is called Evaluate Global Campaign Performance, and it is only available when Smart Technology is enabled.
By default, Smart Technology optimizes on the traffic flowing through that link. Turn on Evaluate Global Campaign Performance and it selects campaigns from the rotation based on system performance across your entire network, not just one affiliate's clicks. The rotation starts drawing on network-wide conversion data instead of a single traffic source.This matters most for affiliates who do not send enough volume to optimize cleanly on their own. A small affiliate might take a week to gather enough conversions for the system to trust a pattern. With global performance evaluation, that affiliate benefits from what every other source in the network has already proven. The winners surface faster because the sample size is the whole network, not one modest stream of clicks. It is affiliate traffic optimization that gets smarter as your network grows.
Where RPM Links Earns Its Place
The feature makes the most sense when you look at specific situations rather than the general pitch. Here are four we see often.
An insurance offer caps at noon.
A network running insurance campaigns knows the pattern. A strong offer hits its daily cap by midday and stops accepting traffic, and everything after that is dead weight unless someone notices and reroutes it. With RPM Links running Smart Technology, the moment that offer stops performing, the rotation shifts to the next best performer on its own. The afternoon traffic keeps converting instead of piling up against a capped offer.
Testing five new offers at once.
An affiliate manager with five fresh offers to evaluate would normally test them one at a time, which stretches the process across weeks and muddies the comparison because market conditions change between tests. Load all five into a single RPM Link and the system tests them simultaneously under the same traffic, then surfaces the winner. You compress weeks of sequential testing into one clean run behind one link.
A smaller affiliate using network data.
A newer or lower volume affiliate does not generate enough conversions to optimize on their own quickly. Turn on Evaluate Global Campaign Performance and their rotation leans on the entire network's conversion history. They get the benefit of decisions informed by far more data than their own traffic could ever produce, which levels the field between them and your high-volume partners.
A media buyer who wants the wheel.
A media buyer running specific traffic sources often has strong opinions about which offer fits which source, and does not want an algorithm second guessing that. Manual weighting gives them exact control. They set the percentages per campaign, lock the rotation to match their strategy, and adjust it themselves when they decide the mix should change.
Creating and Reporting on RPM Links
RPM Links are managed directly inside HitPath, from creation to performance reporting.
To create a new RPM Link, go to:
Campaigns > RPM Links > Add New RPM Link
From there, you can create the link, save it, choose the redirect settings, and add the campaigns that should be included in the rotation.
The basic flow is:
Add New RPM Link > Create Link > Save Link > Choose Redirect Settings > Add Campaigns
This allows the network to define the RPM Link first, then decide how the traffic should be routed. Depending on the strategy, users can enable Smart Technology, evaluate global campaign performance or manage the rotation manually by assigning campaign weights.
Once the RPM Link is active and traffic begins running, performance can be reviewed through RPM Link reporting.
RPM Links Reporting in HitPath
Inside the HitPath system, RPM Link reporting can be accessed from:
Reports > RPM Links
This report gives the network a full view of RPM Link performance from the system side. Users can review the RPM Link name, clicks, sales, conversion rate, EPC, paid amount, earned amount, net, and margin.
The report also allows users to expand the RPM Link and see performance broken down by campaign, affiliate, and date. This makes it easier to understand how traffic is being distributed, which campaigns are producing results, and how the RPM Link is contributing to overall revenue.
For affiliate managers, this view is especially useful because it connects the routing strategy to the actual numbers. You can see how each campaign inside the RPM Link is performing, compare results across the rotation, and make adjustments when needed.
RPM Links Reporting in the Partner Portal
Affiliates can also view RPM Link performance from the Partner Portal by going to:
Reports > RPM Links
This gives affiliates a clear view of the RPM Links available to them and how those links are performing.From the Partner Portal report, affiliates can review key performance metrics such as clicks, sales, conversion rate, EPC, and earnings. They can also expand the RPM Link to see reporting by date and by campaign, giving them more visibility into how their traffic is performing across the rotation.
The affiliate experience stays simple. They promote one RPM Link, while the network manages the campaign routing behind the scenes. At the same time, the reporting gives them enough visibility to understand performance without needing access to the full system-side reporting view.
Together, the system report and Partner Portal report give both sides the information they need. Networks get deeper control and financial visibility, while affiliates get a clear performance view of the RPM Links they are promoting.
Get Started with RPM Links
RPM Links is available now inside HitPath. If you are already a HitPath client, you can create your first RPM Link campaign today from your dashboard. If you are not on HitPath yet, request a demo and we will walk you through how it works with your offers.
Request a demo and we will set up your first RPM Link campaign live on the call.