I recently signed up for an affiliate program where im supposed to create leads to an online program.

Did my research and found out that there is no/little Adwords competition and that the keywords can be purchased for 1/40 of the money I will get per lead.

But after doing some research on aff links and Google Adwords i got a couple of doubts:

- Can I simply insert the affiliate link in the ad and directly direct visitors to the website of the company I am generating leads for?

- If it is possible to directly direct traffic to the affiliate via Adwords, can I be sure that software is tracking this as a lead as the lead hasnt come from the main website with which I signed up to the partnership.

Direct linking is a whole 300 page lesson within itself, here are a few of the tons of concerns about direct linking campaigns:
1. First and foremost you gotta ask permisson from the vendor. Many vendors are also advertising on google and will not allow you to use their domain name at google since google will never show the same domain name for more than one url.. so if your quality score, bid was better than the vendor the vendor would never show.. and they would be competing with you. (and if their rules say no direct link... guess who will never get the first commission from them.)

2. You cannot hide or cloak or forward the url with google, as they require the destination url and the actual url to be the same domain... that does not mean the display full url has to be the same, just the domain must be the same...
For example I do recommend the following:
say the destiantion url = mydomain.com/bull.htm?cat=weightloss&rat=6
make the display url = MyDomain.com/WeightLoss
See all the formating that is important for display url and you do not even need to have a directory called /WeightLoss but the visitor will love how clear the url is... but remember the domain must match and google will never show two of the same domains on any page.
And the rules go on and on.....