Affiliate marketing continues to experience exponential growth year-over-year. Quickly referencing recent affiliate marketing statistics shows that affiliate marketing has ballooned to become an industry that is worth over $17 billion. Moreover, of the 80 percent of brands that run affiliate marketing programs, 20 percent of brand marketers report affiliate marketing to be their most successful channel.
This means that, in order to maximize affiliate marketing revenue, utilizing affiliate tracking software is critical, as these sorts of tools enable brands to understand which affiliates and strategies are performing best and then aim to replicate those efforts.
But before we start wandering off into the weeds, let’s go ahead and gain a quick overview of what affiliate tracking software is, what to look for in a premium affiliate tracking software option, and some of the best platforms available to ecommerce brands today.
Let’s get started.
What is Affiliate Tracking Software?
Put simply, affiliate tracking software is an online tool that provides all the tools necessary to track, manage, and thereby grow all aspects of their affiliate marketing program and campaigns.
Speaking more specifically, affiliate tracking software gives brands the functionality needed to monitor affiliate sales, track and calculate commissions, manage payouts to affiliates, and eliminate potential marketing fraud.
However, in order for brands to get the most out of their affiliate tracking software, it is vital that the tool is capable of integrating with a reliable ecommerce platform.
On that note, let’s take a look at the must-have elements of a good affiliate tracking platform.
What to Seek Out in An Affiliate Tracking Software
There are a lot of different affiliate tracking software options on the market today. However, not all of them are created equal. Thus, there are some key features that ecommerce brands will want to look for when choosing an affiliate marketing software, including:
Intuitive Interface
The affiliate tracking software that a brand opts to leverage should be easy-to-use, simple to navigate, and provide dashboard summaries for all of the brand’s campaigns and partnerships.
Integration Options
The ability for an affiliate tracking software to seamlessly integrate with other ecommerce and marketing platforms the brand uses is essential for ensuring that the tools are more of a benefit than a burden. Thus, the software should feature a sizable number of integrations or offer the tools necessary to create custom integrations.
Various Trackers
Given that affiliate tracking software is all about tracking, it must be capable of various means of monitoring, including tracking impressions and traffic sources, different types of conversions (sales, app downloads, etc.), coupon tracking, SKU tracking, and more. Additionally, all of this must remain in compliance with various internet privacy laws, such as CCPA and GDPR guidelines.
Commission Management
In addition to tracking clicks and sources of traffic, a good affiliate tracking software enables brands to record sales, manage affiliate commissions, and even make payouts based on various conditions.
Fraud Detection
As unfortunate as it is, online fraud is prevalent in all areas. This means that a good affiliate tracking software will be capable of detecting and preventing affiliate fraud from occurring.
Top-Notch Customer Support
No matter how intuitive a platform may be, questions are an inevitability. Thus, affiliate tracking software options that provide excellent customer support are essential.
With these features covered, let’s take a look at some of the best software options brands have at their disposal.
Affiliate Tracking Software: Eight Excellent Options for Driving Growth
As it stands, there are a variety of great affiliate tracking software options available that include all the features mentioned above, as well as a variety of others.
Some of the best options include:
1. Refersion
For those who are unfamiliar with our platform, Refersion is a premier affiliate tracking software that enables brands access to a panoply of features for creating, monitoring, and managing their affiliate marketing campaigns.
Using Refersion’s platform, ecommerce brands can gain access to SKU-level tracking, coupon tracking, and the ability to track a multitude of affiliate performance metrics. Additionally, users can create custom commission offers, track affiliate sales, manage affiliate tax forms like W-9s and 1099s, and even pay affiliates directly.
Refersion also gives brands access to a variety of campaign, partnership, and individual affiliate dashboards – including custom dashboards – that provide all of the details needed to quickly gain a high-level performance overview.
Of course, Refersion also offers tons of ecommerce and marketing integration options, including integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, Amazon, Salesforce, Klaviyo, and more than 2,000 other applications.
Outside of these kinds of features, Refersion also offers a slew of tools for growing affiliate marketing programs, including a marketplace of more than 6 million affiliate partners, onboarding features, and much more.
2. impact.com
Another of today’s more revered affiliate tracking software options is impact.com. For those who are unfamiliar, impact.com bills itself as a “partnership management platform” and gives ecommerce brands everything they need to track, grow, and optimize their affiliate marketing program.
Through its intuitive interface and streamlined platform, brands can automate workflows, track various actions (sales, app installs, conversions, etc.), identify top performers, monitor fraud, and much more. Moreover, impact.com employs cookie-based and non-cookie-based means of tracking conversions across devices, which helps to future-proof brands against recent and upcoming changes to the online marketing landscape.
Additionally, impact.com offers a broad ecosystem of technology partners, thereby ensuring that ecommerce brands can integrate this affiliate tracking software with most (if not all) of the other platforms they use to power brand growth.
Outside of its powerful tracking capabilities, impact.com also features robust fraud protection tools, branded interact elements, means of discovering and recruiting new affiliates and other types of partners, and tons of other valuable features for growing ecommerce brands.
3. Voluum
Cloud-based ad tracker for affiliate marketers, Voluum, aims to make tracking, optimizing, and automating affiliate campaigns incredibly simple. In many ways, this affiliate tracking software achieves that aim, presenting ecommerce brands with “legendary speed and reliability” that ensures ecommerce brands always have the data they need to make profitable decisions. Additionally, Voluum offers users with data on visits, clicks, conversions, profits, and more, all from an easy-to-read affiliate marketing dashboard.
With Vollum, brands can track a variety of conversion types throughout the visitor’s journey, different forms of traffic, impressions, clicks, redirects, and much more. Vollum also integrates with a multitude of other platforms through the company’s Automizer feature, which enables users to “connect Voluum with your traffic sources via API integration and perform various actions on your campaigns.”
Of course, all of these tracking and integration features are supported by premium analytics and reporting features that allow brands to extract actionable insights from their campaigns to strategize, orient, and optimize performance.
Finally, Vollum also ensures that campaigns are kept safe from malicious actors with its fraud protection features that detect and block bots on sight.
4. Tapfiliate
Tapfiliate is one of the most popular affiliate tracking software options online today. This is, in part because of the robust affiliate marketing features the platform provides. Through Tapfiliate, ecommerce brands can easily track and measure the performance of their program’s affiliates using options like query sting, hash tracking, or custom methods.
On the customization front, Tapfiliate providers nearly 40 copy and paste integrations with popular ecommerce and marketing tools, as well as custom integration options via the company’s REST API.
Additionally, Tapfiliate gives brands access to a variety of other management and recruitment tools, earning it a spot among the top affiliate networks for growing an ecommerce brand as well.
For brands that are serious about growing their sales through affiliate marketing, Tapfiliate is an affilaite tracking software that should be seriously considered.
5. Post Affiliate Pro
Billed as “the #1 affiliate marketing tracking software,” Post Affiliate Pro has been around for nearly 20 years. As a result, this affiliate tracking software is the platform of choice for many prominent ecommerce brands and is quite refined in its offerings and capabilities.
Using Post Affiliate Pro, ecommerce brands gain access to advanced tracking methods like flash cookie tracking that facilitate fast and accurate data on sales, conversions, and traffic sources, in addition to data on clicks from affiliate websites, eCommerce platforms, email campaigns, and other sources.
Alongside Post Affiliate Pro’s powerful tracking features, this affiliate tracking software also provides a customizable user interface, commission management features, fraud detection, various reporting options, a multitude of ecommerce and marketing integrations, and other valuable features for optimizing campaign performance and maximizing affiliate marketing revenue.
Additionally, Post Affiliate Pro is always available to help its members via a comprehensive knowledge base and around-the-clock customer support.
6. LeadDyno
Another fantastic affiliate tracking software is LeadDyno, a platform that has tracked over 240 million referrals since 2014. Through LeadDyno, ecommerce brands can quickly and easily create tracking links for campaigns and monitor visitors, leads, sales, and even cancellations.
One of the highlights of LeadDyno is its incredibly clean user interface, which makes this affiliate tracking software easy to use and understand. At the same time, LeadDyno offers a plethora of different campaign management and growth features, such as lead management tools that automatically collect email addresses, customizable commission plans, payment options, tax reporting tools, communication features, and much more.
LeadDyno also offers users affiliate recruitment features to continue bringing new partners into a brand’s program.
Like many of the other affiliate tracking software options listed above, LeadDyno offers more than 25 different integrations with various ecommerce and marketing tools, including popular platforms like MailChimp, Shopify, PayPal, BigCommerce, and others.
7. CAKE
Founded in 2010, CAKE is the preferred affiliate tracking software for more than 500 prominent brands around the world, including companies such as Lyft, LifeLock, LendingTree, and others.
Using CAKE, brands can gain access to impression tracking, product-level tracking, mobile campaigns, various events, and more. Additionally, CAKE supplies users with real-time and customizable reporting options that will help companies gain a better understanding of how to optimize their affiliate marketing efforts.
In addition to its robust tracking and reporting features, CAKE supplies users with advanced fraud detection and prevention features, such as pixel whitelisting and custom alerts that identify aberrant campaign behavior.
CAKE also features a white-labeled interface that allows brands to customize the platform with company logos, color schemes, and other such elements.
In addition to all of this, CAKE is always available for its members, providing an extensive knowledge base, an online ticketing system, and 24/7 phone support.
8. AffiliateWP
While many affiliate tracking software options are geared toward brands using platforms like Shopify and Magento, AffiliateWP is focused on supplying WordPress and WooCommerce users with top-notch affiliate tracking capabilities.
Employed by more than 30,000 brands, AffiliateWP is a WordPress plugin that acts as an affiliate tracking software within a brand’s WordPress dashboard. AffiliateWP provides ecommerce brands and other WordPress users with advanced affiliate tracking features for direct and referral links, coupon codes, custom landing pages, and more.
This affiliate tracking software also gives brands access to detailed affiliate reports that supply actionable insights into what is working for a brand’s affiliate campaigns and what needs adjusting, thereby enabling campaign optimization.
AffiliateWP also features various affiliate management features such as registration, onboarding, and in-platform payout tools. Alongside that, this affiliate tracking software includes a custom affiliate dashboard that arms affiliates with all of the information they need to know about the program and ongoing campaigns.
Moreover, this plugin offers smart fraud detection technology that serves to detect and prevent affiliate fraud, thereby keeping a brand’s program safe.
As far as integrations are concerned, AffiliateWP is fully customizable, featuring hooks, filters, REST API, and templates. Plus, the plugin’s smart wizard enables brands to sync their products and get this affiliate tracking software up and running in minutes.
Using Affiliate Tracking Software for Ecommerce Growth
Many brands implement performance marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing because of their cost-effective, low-risk, high-ROI nature. While this is all true, it is still necessary to optimize affiliate performance to get the most out of the methodology. This is precisely why utilizing affiliate tracking software is critical to ecommerce growth.
However, in order to reap the benefits that affiliate tracking software has to offer, it is critical that brands opt for an exceptional solution that arms them with the features needed to monitor, manage, and optimize their campaigns to the fullest.
All of the options listed above are excellent choices for those shopping for affiliate marketing software to help grow their ecommerce brand. Be sure to thoroughly review each of the options to establish which one suits your brand best.
That said, if you are interested in our company’s first-in-class affiliate tracking software, program management, and affiliate recruiting tools, then reach out to Refersion to discuss how we can help your brand accelerate its growth and achieve an average of 5X ROI over other marketing strategies.
