Affiliate Software

What is affiliate software?

Affiliate software, also known as affiliate marketing software, helps businesses manage and run affiliate marketing programs, which enable individuals (affiliates) to earn a commission by promoting a company's products or services. The software tracks referrals, clicks, and sales for affiliates to calculate the commission earned. It also assists in processing payments and generating reports on overall campaign performance.

Affiliate marketing tools simplify the task of tracking performance metrics for each affiliate partner. They also ease the administrative burden of managing partnerships with multiple affiliates, allowing businesses to focus more on growing their brands while ensuring each affiliate partner is fairly compensated for their contribution.

What are the common features of affiliate software?

• Affiliate management: Oversee and optimize affiliate marketing programs. This feature typically includes tools for onboarding new affiliates, tracking affiliate performance, and automating payments. It also monitors sales and conversions to help identify top-performing affiliates and campaigns. 

• Commission management: Calculate, distribute, and track commissions earned by affiliates. This feature automates the process of setting up different commission structures, such as percentage-based rewards or fixed commissions based on criteria such as sales volume or product category. 

• Fraud detection: Detect suspicious activity that could indicate fraudulent affiliate behavior. This feature uses algorithms to identify anomalies, such as click spikes or unusual conversion rates from a specific source. It helps your business maintain the integrity of affiliate programs by preventing fraud.

What are the benefits of affiliate software?

• Tracks affiliate performance: Affiliate platforms track metrics such as clicks, leads, sales, and revenue to assess each affiliate's performance. By analyzing this data, you can identify top-performing partners and develop strategies to improve weaker-performing affiliates.

• Automates commission payouts: Affiliate management software automatically calculates commissions based on predefined criteria or rules and processes payments once affiliates reach a certain threshold or at specific intervals. This automation saves administrators the hassle of manually calculating each affiliate marketer's earnings and processing payments individually.

• Monitors fraudulent activities: An affiliate marketing tool helps monitor fraudulent activity by tracking clicks, conversions, and traffic sources. It identifies suspicious patterns, such as sudden spikes in referrals from a single source or multiple visits without purchases. By preventing such malpractices, it ensures the integrity of affiliate marketing programs and helps your business get real value for the money spent on commissions.

What are the potential issues with affiliate software?

• Delayed payouts: Delayed payouts can negatively impact the relationship between affiliates and your business. This issue often arises due to inefficient payment processing, manual errors, or inefficient fund management. When affiliates experience delays in receiving commissions, they can become frustrated and lose trust in your affiliate program.

• Limited reporting features: Limited reporting capabilities hinder the software’s ability to analyze performance, track conversions, and evaluate program success accurately. Without comprehensive data analysis capabilities, your business may struggle with strategic decision-making or identifying potential improvements for your affiliate network, which could adversely affect revenue generation.

• Limited customization: Limited customization can restrict your business’s ability to tailor affiliate programs to specific user needs or campaign goals. When the software offers only a standard set of features and lacks customization flexibility, it can prevent your business from creating unique commission structures, personalized marketing materials, or customized reports. This limitation can hinder the effectiveness of your affiliate program.

How much does affiliate software cost?

Most affiliate software products on the market are priced on a “per month” basis, and their entry-level pricing plans typically range from $49 to $175+.* An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as AI-powered analytics, fraud detection, affiliate onboarding tools, dynamic commission structures, and priority support.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of June 27, 2024.

What is affiliate software used for?

Affiliate software helps run affiliate marketing programs. However, based on the data you feed into the system and the available software features, it can have multiple use cases.

• Affiliate recruitment: Affiliate marketing platforms allow you to set up automated recruitment campaigns that target potential affiliates through different channels, such as email, social media, and online advertisements. The software provides customizable registration forms to embed in your business website or share online to capture essential information about potential affiliates. It also offers onboarding tools, such as tutorials and guides, to ensure new partners understand the program, its benefits, and how to promote your business effectively. 

• Campaign management: An affiliate platform allows your business to set up and run multiple affiliate marketing campaigns. You can define the campaign parameters, including campaign duration, commission structures, and target products. The software typically includes a centralized dashboard to manage all campaigns from one place. This dashboard offers an overview of affiliate campaign performance, key metrics, and real-time data for informed decision-making. 

• Legal and compliance management: Your affiliate partners must adhere to necessary regulatory standards to maintain your business’s reputation. Affiliate marketing software monitors affiliate activities, such as their compliance with your program’s terms and conditions and advertising guidelines. It also enforces program policies by automatically flagging or blocking affiliates who violate the terms and conditions. Additionally, it ensures compliance with various regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Which software tools integrate with affiliate software?

Affiliate management software integrates with various tools to enhance functionality. We looked across thousands of user reviews to identify products software users frequently mention integrating with their affiliate tools:

• Shopify is an eCommerce platform that integrates with affiliate software to help track affiliate-driven sales and conversions directly within the Shopify store. The integration simplifies the management of affiliate commissions and payouts based on sales data from Shopify. 

• Stripe is an online payment processing platform that integrates with affiliate software to automate the financial aspects of managing an affiliate marketing program. This integration facilitates the processing of affiliate commissions, ensuring timely and accurate payouts. 

• WordPress is a content management system that integrates with affiliate software to simplify the process of managing and optimizing affiliate marketing campaigns directly within WordPress. This integration allows you to embed affiliate links, banners, and promotional materials into your content.

• Groove is an online sales engagement and tracking platform that integrates with affiliate software to help monitor and manage affiliate-driven sales. This integration ensures sales data from Groove is accurately tracked and attributed to the right affiliate marketer. 

• HubSpot CRM is a customer relationship management tool that integrates with affiliate tracking software to help manage customer relationships and affiliate marketing efforts. The integration enables accurate tracking of affiliate-driven leads and conversions directly within the CRM.

We identified these integrations mentioned most often in verified reviews of affiliate software published on GetApp within the past two years (as of June 27, 2024).

Key considerations when purchasing affiliate software

• Check support for various payment methods. Software compatibility with various payment methods ensures your affiliates receive their commissions without any hassles. When purchasing affiliate tracking software, make sure it supports multiple payment options, such as bank transfers, direct deposits, checks, and debit cards, so you can process transactions easily for affiliates from different countries or regions.

• Consider multiple commission structures. Support for multiple commission structures offers the flexibility to incentivize affiliates based on different criteria, such as their performance, type of promotion, or products they promote. This helps attract more partners to your affiliate network and optimize marketing efforts by rewarding higher-performing partners with better commissions.

• Evaluate the tracking and reporting capabilities. Tracking and reporting capabilities provide comprehensive insights into the performance of your affiliate marketing program. Features such as customizable reports, intuitive dashboards, affiliate performance comparisons, and report sharing enable you to monitor affiliates' performance, assess which campaigns or strategies are effective, track commissions owed or paid out, and receive insights for optimizing future marketing efforts.

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 GetApp's directory that offer them.

Disclaimer

This affiliate software buyers guide was authored by GetApp's content team. We develop our guides using the author's expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from artificial intelligence tools.