Top 6 Affiliate Tracking Software You Must Know from Mila's blog

Someone once said, “if you want something done well, do it yourself.” Today, this couldn’t be farther from the truth, especially when it comes to the world of digital marketing. There is no better way for brands to expand their reach than by virtual word-of-mouth through their own affiliate programs. 

Affiliate marketing programs are an effective way for businesses to expand their reach. Who is better at promoting your product than those who love it and know your verticals, after all?

Real talk; by working with affiliate partners, you aren’t “doing it yourself.” And while we’re getting others to sell your products, why not get some help to collect and track every customer interaction and data from all touchpoints?

And why not a bit of hand-holding from marketing tools to turn that data into business growth, too? For all that, look no further than affiliate tracking software! 

Affiliate tracking software helps you manage and track the performance of your programs and partnerships. These platforms streamline the process of monitoring traffic and conversions. Your marketing partners can be bloggers, influencers, or any other content producers. Whichever, you’re kept in control thanks to accurate tracking.

Essential features of any affiliate tracking software include:

•  Affiliate tracking code and link generation
•  Dashboard with analytics and reports
•  Tracking sources of traffic
•  Tracking affiliate performance (clicks, conversions, traffic, lead generation)
•  Fraud detection

Affiliate tracking platforms make it easy to manage everything from one place. Dashboards give you customized views in real-time with just a few clicks.

Automation of offers, payments, and much more saves your valuable time. Spend that time elsewhere, like on your other marketing campaigns. Affise’s CPAPI solution saves businesses even more time with automated offer pulling. 

Like SEO, affiliate marketing optimization requires lots of data.  Customizable and detailed reporting lets you take a deeper dive into the statistics. You will gain a better understanding of your target audience and ad networks.

Live reporting and analytics tools boost campaign optimization. And your team will be better equipped to leverage insights and find the right marketing partners.

Your team will get more done in less time. And automatic fraud detection means you only pay for authentic performance metrics.

Affiliate tracking tools make it easy for you to get a better ROI. You can discover your best customers and affiliates to streamline your campaign growth.

Affiliate marketers need to use software with the best features.

Affiliate tracking software is mainly about, well, tracking! And no matter how new and shiny a piece of tech looks, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket! 

Regional compliance and third-party browser tracking protections are here to stay. The best affiliate marketing platforms feature tracking methods like pixels and postback URLs, among others.

This should go without saying. Customizability is very important in any partner tracking software. First, this helps you find the right fit for your affiliate program as you hit the ground running. And it also allows for you to tailor your platform as your network grows and becomes more successful. 

There’s no point in using an affiliate tracking solution if you can’t have intelligent reporting. Customizable reporting options help your team connect the dots and find hidden gems. 

Many businesses are blind to the black-hat tactics within the affiliate industry. Using an affiliate platform that cannot detect fraud is the blind paying out of pocket to be led by the blind!

Any affiliate tracking system should have up-to-date fraud detection functionality. Your business cannot afford to be paying out for clicks and views that have no potential ROI. 

Most affiliate tracking platforms are designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. But many times, they require more technical knowledge to set up properly. A business like yours should opt for an affiliate tracking service with a smooth onboarding experience and a 24/7 customer support team.

There is a sea of options when it comes to affiliate tracking software. Don’t get tossed around by the waves of industry noise and hype. Here are six of the best affiliate tracking solutions available today.

The Affise platform encompasses a wide range of affiliate marketing software. Affise’s Tracking and Attribution Software product has everything your business needs. From one platform you can manage, track, analyze, and optimize online advertising campaigns in real-time. 

In terms of tracking you get:

• Click tracking – Trace user engagement via tracking URL clicks
• Impression tracking – What visitors view can be leveraged to improve lead generation
• Conversion tracking – Better explore the relationship between offers and campaign performance
• Special pixels and postbacks and promo codes

Affise records attribution at each customer touchpoint and credits the correct sale channel. Choose from a range of models including last-click/last touch and first-click/first touch attribution. But you also get models like probabilistic attribution, which is better suited to measure mobile attribution from iOS. 

Affise has a streamlined onboarding experience with smooth migration. And the automated offer pulling service, CPAPI, makes transitioning even more of a breeze.

Other features include:

• Complete and total control over your affiliate spending limits 
• Alternative cost per action (CPA) commission fees, such as pay per conversion 
• Loads of API integrations including AppFlyer, Adjust, and Kochava
• Extensive targeting options
• Shortlinks
• Excellent 24/7 technical support! 

Affise is perfect for SMEs and larger enterprises looking to level up or get a head start in affiliate marketing programs. Plans start at $499 per month. Contact Affise for plans that include Affise Academy and pain-free migration services.

iDevAffiliate has been a mainstay in partner marketing solutions for over 20 years. Their affiliate plugin is a flexible solution for affiliate tracking and management. 

Source (idevdirect.com)

The iDevAffiliate plugin can help businesses create and launch an affiliate program within an hour. With that being said, maximizing the iDevAffiliate toolset can have a bit of a learning curve, making it a less attractive option to Affise. But subscribers do get access to over 40 hours of video tutorials (if you’ve got time for such things!).

Other features include:

• Dashboard to monitor general leak tracking, affiliate performance, commissions, top referrals
• Social media sharing for Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter
• Several commissioning options including coupon codes and product-specific
• 175+ integrations including Bigcommerce, Magento, WordPress, and Shopify

iDevAffiliate is a decent option for businesses on a tight budget. And for those with good technical knowledge or willing to spend time learning the platform.

Pricing plans range from $39-$79 per month, depending on what options you require. The base package includes unlimited affiliates and commissions. Premium options include larger click-based traffic per month and custom subdomain parking.

OSI Affiliate Software offers a range of tools for affiliate programs. The platform emphasizes customer referral programs as part of your affiliate network.

The customer referral program is driven by website popups, forms, and auto-signups. These features target website visitors and new customers. You can also incentivize brand advocates with a customizable Smart Rewards program.

OSI Affiliate boasts many, but not all, of the must-have tracking features, including:

• Promo code tracking
• Social media sharing – Integrations with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• One-on-one customer support sessions
• Use your own domains, including custom affiliate links
• Email templates
• Detailed reporting
• Banners and landing page templates
• Discount codes and coupons

OSI Affiliate Software is a fair choice for businesses looking for simplicity and flexibility. And it is useful if you are looking to focus on customer referrals with your affiliate network. The service pricing starts at $47 per month, but you can try it for free with a 15-day trial.

Tapfiliate is a service aimed at those dealing principally in ecommerce and SaaS. Tapfiliate focuses a lot on playing well with your existing business applications. The software integrates with your website whether it’s built around Woocommerce, Shopify, WordPress, or 30 other platforms. 

The platform also comes with many tools for affiliate recruitment and ad promotion, including on social media. 

Besides affiliate reporting and tracking, other features included are:

• Branded dashboard and links for your affiliates to use
• Custom signup fields and payout methods
• Six supported affiliated languages
• Support for 37 integrations including Zapier, Mailchimp, and Stripe
• Adjustable, recurring, or lifetime commissions
• Performance bonus options
• Automation of commissions and payment

Tapfiliate is a sensible choice for businesses running on ecommerce or SaaS platforms that want minimal setup. If you have more diverse needs, though, you may need to look elsewhere. Pricing for Tapfiliate starts at $89 but you can try it out with a 14-day risk-free trial. 

Anytrack.io provides an affiliate tracking platform for your existing marketing stack. The platform is essentially a tool to connect your data streams. You will have a consistent and up-to-date view of your affiliate marketing activities and statistics.

With just a few clicks, the platform automatically sends all tracking to Google Analytics. This allows your team to view all types of traffic performance. And they can quickly glean actionable insights. The tracking automation works similarly with the Facebook Conversion API. Having to rely on various different platforms and outlets, though, isn’t exactly intuitive or user-friendly. 

Other features include:

• One tag system for easy automation of all data tracking and synchronization
• AutoTag for funnel tracking and attribution
• More than 60+ integrations with affiliate networks
• Custom audiences
• Connection of traffic and conversion data to your analytics tools

Anytrack is a decent option for larger businesses with a proven marketing stack looking to raise their affiliate game with real-time insights. 

ShareASale has earned a reputation as one of the most trusted performance marketing networks. The network boasts over 225,000 active affiliates. And network publishers include companies like Forbes, Business Insider, and CNN.

ShareASale offers affiliate management software for merchants that streamlines partner marketing. 

Features include an intuitive interface and automation tools for things like marketing emails, as well as: 

• Real-time affiliate tracking for clicks and conversions
• Custom tracking values and scenarios–e.g., new customer acquisition, coupon code usage, mobile
• Audience segmentation 
• Custom commissions rules like PPC, CPA, and more
• Cookieless coupon tracking
• Clickstream reports
• Access to training webinars

ShareASale is an option for those looking to tap into their powerful partner network, but also want an affiliate tracking solution. 

Effective affiliate tracking is only one part of a greater whole that is your partner marketing program. With Affise, you get robust features to boost your performance marketing across the board.

Affise Analytics and Business Intelligence tools let you dive deeper into the data. You will gain insights and make more accurate forecasts by relying on an simple interface with an easy-to-use dashboard.

Highly granular customizable reports with affiliate reports, customer reports, fraud-related reports, payment reports, and so on. It allows you to make unique correlations with all data viewable on one page. These reports are easily shareable with partners. 

Affise includes several options to protect your affiliate marketing campaigns from fraud. It has a complete security system with fraud detection, general internet security, and data privacy; This includes click-level fraud prevention, third-party tools, IP monitoring, and many tracking metrics.

CPAPI makes it a cinch to transfer offers instantaneously between all sources in your system.

Affise helps to eliminate the time spent on repetitive tasks. You can automate activities like opening offers to publishers, partner communication, and billing.

Besides invoice generation, you can automate partner payouts with Affise. And you can choose from a list of different currencies and payment providers

Affise provides plenty of connection options with multiple integrations. But the platform has a feature-rich API that also allows you to conduct any needed custom integration yourself to ensure your networks are always perfectly in tune. 

Find out other features to maximize the opportunities that you can find on the Affise ecosystem:

• Easy integration with eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, and other eCommerce products;
• Product feed with imports, edits, and downloads;
• Product level tracking to set commissions on a product level;
• Media Management with the ability to host, import, export, and replace various media types (jpg, png, video banners, text links, HTML5, etc.);
• External Data Integration with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc;
• Key Metrics Tracking and payments on CPA, CPL, CPM, CPC;
• S2S Postbacks to set up postbacks on affiliate accounts directly from the interface.

If you’re not effectively tracking and collating data from your partner program, you’re already losing the battle. You can’t afford to wait any longer. Connect your business affiliate tracking solution today.

With a robust platform like Affise that helps your affiliate program reach for the stars, you gain insights to optimize your campaigns and grow your partner networks like never before.