Affiliate Software

Are you a marketing professional looking to expand your reach and drive sales through affiliate marketing but don't have hours to spend setting up and managing an affiliate program? If yes, then affiliate software can help.

With the right affiliate software, marketers can easily set up and manage multiple affiliate programs, freeing time for you to focus on other important business aspects. These tools automate affiliate onboarding, contracting, reporting, activity tracking, and payments in an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing and tracking software provides an easier and more efficient way of creating, managing, and scaling your own affiliate program.

This guide will cover what affiliate software is, the benefits of affiliate tools, common features, and more.

What is affiliate software?

Affiliate software enables businesses to set up and manage an affiliate marketing program—a performance-based marketing strategy in which businesses reward affiliates for each customer brought to them by the affiliate's marketing efforts. These tools help businesses manage all aspects of an affiliate marketing program, from affiliate onboarding and referral management to commission management. With features such as affiliate tracking, lead generation, and affiliate campaign management, the software enables marketing teams to grow their referral programs, pay affiliate commissions, and track the activities of affiliate partners.

Affiliate marketing software can be used by businesses to track referrals, recommendations, or endorsements made by an individual or a business to purchase their products or services. The tool also has built-in fraud detection to ensure the safety of online business processes.

What are some common features of affiliate software?

• Affiliate campaign management: Oversee and coordinate affiliate campaigns—from recruiting affiliates, setting commission rates and payment schedules, providing affiliates with promotional materials, and tracking links to monitoring the affiliate performance.

• Banner management: Create and manage banner advertisements, typically placed on websites, social media platforms, or other online platforms to promote products and services. The banner management feature also encompasses performance tracking (number of clicks, impressions, and conversion rate) and A/B testing.

• Fraud detection: Identify and prevent fraudulent activities in an affiliate marketing campaign, including fake clicks and impressions, fake leads or sales, and affiliates who engage in deceptive or unethical practices. An affiliate marketing tool detects fraud using various tools and techniques, such as link tracking, internet protocol, conversion tracking, and manual review.

• Lead generation: Manage the process of attracting and converting business prospects into leads. Businesses provide affiliates with a range of promotional materials and tracking links, such as banner ads, text links, and landing pages, which they use to promote the business's products or services to their audience and track the leads they generate through the software.

What are the benefits of affiliate software?

• Enhances marketing campaign management: Affiliate marketing software tracks, manages, and allows easy accessibility to campaigns in one convenient and centralized location. These tools provide businesses with real-time data and detailed reports on the performance of their affiliates. This helps businesses identify which affiliates drive the most traffic or sales and adjust their performance-marketing strategies accordingly.

• Automates affiliate marketing procedures: Affiliate software automates many of the manual tasks associated with affiliate marketing, such as tracking clicks, impressions, and sales, as well as managing affiliates and paying commissions. This frees up time and resources for businesses to focus on other day-to-day tasks.

• Builds trust with affiliates: Affiliate software improves security by implementing measures such as secure login, sensitive data encryption, and regular security updates. It includes fraud detection and IP blocking to prevent unauthorized access to the system, ensuring that the information of both the company and its affiliates is protected. This helps build trust with affiliates and ensures that the affiliate marketing program runs smoothly.

• Offers customization flexibility: Affiliate software allows businesses to customize their affiliate marketing programs to meet their specific needs and goals. This includes the ability to set different commission rates for different affiliates, as well as to offer a variety of promotional materials and marketing tools to affiliates. Many affiliate software programs use encryption to protect sensitive data, such as financial information and personal details, from being accessed by unauthorized parties. Besides that, these affiliate tracking software solutions often include access controls to ensure that only authorized personnel can access certain areas of the program. This helps prevent unauthorized access and misuse of the software.

What is the cost of affiliate software?

Affiliate management software costs fall in the following price ranges*:

• $15 - $99

• $100 - $139

• $139+

Most affiliate marketing platforms in the market are priced on a “per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.

What are the key questions to ask when choosing affiliate software?

• Does your software offer real-time reporting? Ensure that the reporting capabilities of the software are designed for your affiliate marketing needs. Most affiliate marketing platforms include an affiliate dashboard with robust reporting (e.g., total conversions, conversion amount, and commission amount) on every level of your program, which enables you to optimize performance to drive your affiliate program effectively.

• How well does the tool integrate with other software solutions? Consider whether the software can easily integrate with your existing technology stack and affiliate commission structure. It’s crucial to choose end-to-end software that delivers functionality that fits your specific needs.

• Does it offer affiliate customization capabilities? The ability to own, brand, and customize various affiliate programs is key to providing a personalized experience, as it allows you to build strong relationships with partners and affiliates. An effective affiliate marketing and tracking software solution will offer a myriad of customization options on the platform.

• What kind of lead generation services does your software offer? An ideal tool provides commission management, affiliate tracking and reporting, integration with social media platforms, email marketing, and landing page and website building. Before investing in a solution, check whether the affiliate platform covers the lead generation channels your business requires to grow its customer base.

• How robust is your solution’s customer support? Occasionally, users can experience software bugs. Other times, navigating a particular section of a tool can be confusing. Whatever the reason, the best affiliate software should have a quick and easily accessible customer support team for 24x7 assistance in case of any queries or software-specific issues.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from GetApp’s affiliate software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the GetApp’s directory that offer them.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of January 09, 2023. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products. The above list includes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features such as unlimited affiliates, unlimited payouts, lifetime commissions, recurring referrals, coupon codes, custom affiliate slugs, Google Analytics, and push notifications.