Link cloaking can be very useful.
Take a situation where someone reads your blog or website and thinks that SFI is appealing, but dislikes something else about you, or your site. They then hover over your link and see that it ends in an 8-digit number, so they correctly assume this is your referral ID. They may decide to copy your link to Notepad or something, remove that number, and then copy the resulting link (without your ID) into their browser, hoping they will then be signing up directly with the company.
Many companies would assign a direct sign-up like that to one of their most productive affiliates, which might mean the new sign-up receives better support from their sponsor than those who sign up under an inexperienced sponsor.
If your link is cloaked, it is much harder to do that.
The main drawback is that some cloaking programs cause conflicts with key codes you are using in your link, so tracking where your results are coming from might be harder.
A better solution is to use a program that both cloaks and tracks for you. You just need to make sure you can identify which of your ads is associated with which cloaked link.
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Link cloaking can be very useful.
Take a situation where someone reads your blog or website and thinks that SFI is appealing, but dislikes something else about you, or your site. They then hover over your link and see that it ends in an 8-digit number, so they correctly assume this is your referral ID. They may decide to copy your link to Notepad or something, remove that number, and then copy the resulting link (without your ID) into their browser, hoping they will then be signing up
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