Customizing Affiliate Links: From Referral Codes to Vanity URLs

November 9, 2026

What’s in this guide?

Personalized Referral Codes: How to let affiliates change their own link identifiers.
Anonymizing Links: How to switch to secure, non-descriptive tracking parameters.
Vanity & Custom Links: An advanced, developer-led approach to removing ?ref= entirely.

Personalized Referral Codes

Standard affiliate links typically look like this: https://your-site.com/?ref=nlmjdis.

Affiliate Customization: You can allow affiliates to change the random string (e.g., nlmjdis) to something that reflects their brand (e.g., ?ref=johndoe). If your affiliates would like to change their referral code, refer them to this article: Editing the Referral Parameter in Your Link
How to manage: Affiliates can personalize these codes from their own dashboards, ensuring the link is easier to share and recognize.

Anonymizing Your Links

If you prefer links that do not show names or recognizable codes, you can issue anonymized links consisting of two parameters (tap_a= and tap_s=) followed by strings of letters and numbers.

How to enable:
1. Go to Programs > Advanced.
2. Toggle the Referral codes option to Off.

Technical Guide: Setting Up Custom Affiliate Links

This advanced feature is for users who want to get rid of the ?ref= part of the link entirely or prevent affiliates from changing their codes.
Note: Custom links are an advanced feature. You will need the help of a developer to implement this. These cannot be set up if you are using the redirect tracking method.
Migrating from another platform? Custom links also let your existing affiliates keep the links they have already shared. If their old links point to your own website (for example, https://yoursite.com/partner/johndoe), save each affiliate’s existing identifier (johndoe) as their short_code metadata and use the same format for your landing page URL. Links already published in emails, blogs and social posts keep working, and your website maps them to the right affiliate using the steps below.

Implementation Steps:

Generate Short Codes: Use a trigger to call an API on your end that generates an affiliate short code and saves it in a lookup table alongside the affiliate’s tracking parameters.
Save as Metadata: Store this short-code as affiliate metadata using a key like short_code.
Update Landing Page URL: Modify your landing page URL in Tapfiliate to include the metadata value: https://yoursite.com/partner/${affiliate.meta_data[short_code]}.
Set Tracking to “Custom”: Navigate to Programs > Gear Icon > Advanced and set the tracking method to “Custom” to ensure standard parameters are removed from the URL.
Retrieve Parameters: Create code on your website that checks the URL component’s value to retrieve the tracking parameters from your lookup table.
Track the Click: Use those parameters to track a click with the following tracking code:

<script src="https://script.tapfiliate.com/tapfiliate.js" async="" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  (function(t,a,p){t.TapfiliateObject=a;t[a]=t[a]||function(){
  (t[a].q=t[a].q||[]).push(arguments)}})(window,'tap');

  tap('create', 'YOUR ACCOUNT ID');

  var trackingParam = {
    referral_code: '...' // Get from your lookup dictionary
  };

  tap('click', trackingParam);
</script>

Next Steps

Developer Help: If you don’t have an in-house expert, visit our guide on Need a Tech Expert? How to Find the Right Developer for Your Program
Setting Unique Landing Pages per Affiliate Discover how to assign specific destination URLs to individual affiliates, ensuring their traffic lands on a tailored page or co-branded experience.
Tracking Conversions via Sources: Identify New vs. Existing Users Learn how to pass source data or use metadata to differentiate between first-time customers and returning users for more granular reporting.