Choosing and Setting Up Affiliate Tracking Software

Getting leads from affiliates is one of the best types of traffic as it tends to convert better than other traffic sources.

Why?

It’s because its word of mouth and also free because you only pay a commission once a sale or lead has been acquired.

There are businesses generating seven and eight figures each year just through affiliate marketing – it’s a powerful source of traffic that can mean you literally have an affiliate army being your sales force.

Having affiliates on board is a win-win as long as you have both a decent product and quality affiliates with traffic. That’s why more companies are using this traffic source and it’s expected to grow to be $8.8 billion per year in 2022 (source).

Do it right, and you can literally have your own affiliate army sending your sales day after day!

To leverage affiliates as a reliable traffic source you need excellent tracking. This article looks at some of the affiliate tracking platforms available and how you set up your affiliate program.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Before we jump into choosing and setting up an affiliate marketing software, we first need to ensure we know exactly what we mean by affiliate marketing, sometimes called referral marketing or performance marketing.

In simple terms, it’s a revenue sharing model whereby if you own a product and are looking to sell more, you can offer a percentage of the sale price to people to promote it.

On the flip side, if you don’t have a product to sell you can promote other peoples.

How you can promote products using affiliate marketing online is out of the scope of this article. But it mostly involves either paying for advertising in Google or Facebook Ads, search engine optimising and having your website appearing high in the search engines, or from email marketing.

I did a fair amount of affiliate marketing to making money online a few years ago now.

Affiliates come in various sizes, from the small solopreneur who promotes offers to visitors to big organizations such as comparethemarket.com, who earn money from recommending different services.

Why Use Affiliate Management Software?

To promote your online product or service you need to be able to track referral clicks to your website and subsequent conversions.

So, affiliate tracking software gives you tracking and reporting functionality to ensure for both advertiser (you the product owner) and affiliate have proper tracking of;

• Clicks
• Conversions

From this data both the product owner (merchant) and the affiliate can analyse the following information:

• Conversion rate
• Earnings Per Click (EPC)

By analyzing this data carefully affiliates can calculate if its profitable for them to promote your product/service. Conversely, merchants see their best-performing affiliates and ensure they remain profitable with few if any refunds or chargebacks.

How to Track Affiliate Sales and Conversions?

Without great and reliable tracking, you won’t have affiliates promoting your product – at the end of the day they want to be paid!

You as the merchant to need to know how effective affiliate campaigns are working.

Tracking is usually via a unique link that is given to each affiliate for a particular campaign. A visitor clicking on the link is tracked via the affiliate management software and redirects them to the product/service website.

If the visitor, then proceeds to make a purchase the affiliate management software is notified via a tracking pixel on the confirmation page.

You have most likely seen tracking links before, they typically have the domain name followed by a series of variables, for example:

https://[domainname.com]?id=34342&utm=ad

There are two common types of affiliate tracking methods, which are cookie tracking and Postback URL tracking (source).

Cookies and Conversion Pixels

This is the most common type of affiliate tracking method. When a visitor to a website clicks on that link, the affiliate ID is stored on their browser within a text file, known as a cookie. The cookie stays in the customer’s browser for a short period of time or until the cookie is cleared from the browser manually.

A small piece of code known as a conversion pixel is placed on the merchant’s page that loads up when a customer has completed the desired action.

There are disadvantages to using cookie-based tracking in that it persists within the specific browser. And so, opening another browser and completing the action there won’t be tracked.

This is the same for visitors using different devices though irrespective of the tracking method used.

Postback or Callback tracking

In contrast, a postback tracking URL is cookie-less and doesn’t rely on data stored on the visitor’s browser but uses the server to server communication.

Once the visitor clicks on the affiliates link information is stored within the affiliate management software storing the tracking data within a “session”. As long as the merchant has set up a “call-back” URL then when a conversion signal is generated (for example the visitor makes a purchase) then the session is updated.

This method is a little more technical to set-up and so may not be straightforward for beginners.

The advantages are that the information is stored on the merchant’s server and this means that no code needs to be placed on the advertiser’s website.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Software?

There are a number of software solutions available that can track and manage your affiliates.

Selecting the best affiliate marketing software is an important decision, as once you have set up your affiliate software and have active affiliates promoting your brand it’s not easy to change.

Why? Well once you’re set up and have recruited your affiliates, they will have a unique tracking link to promote your brand online. Often these tracking links are formatted to the specific affiliate tracking solution.

Changing affiliate management software at a later date likely means asking your affiliates to update their links – affiliates DO NOT like updating their links, as you can expect!

In some cases, you can redirect the old affiliate tracking links, but this isn’t always possible and not ideal as it can increase the time it takes to redirect the visitor to your product.

Best Affiliate Tracking Software

It’s nigh on impossible to mention, never mind review all the affiliate tracking software platforms out there.

There are a lot of software options that vary according to actual Affiliate Networks (Managed affiliate solutions, such as MoreNiche) to software as a service option (see Capterra’s list here).

I wanted to manage my own program internally and so I am only interested in the self-managed affiliate tracking solutions.

So, I reached out to a few friends in the industry who have their own products and use affiliate tracking software.

They suggested two software solutions; Post Affiliate Pro and iDevAffiliate.

I looked at both solutions to see which one would be best suited for my Super Greens brand and the e-commerce platform I am using.

Post Affiliate Pro (PAP)

One of the big pros of Post Affiliate Pro (PAP) is the SEO friendly links that can be good for the product sites backlink profile.

Boosting over 30,000 affiliate programs powered by Post Affiliate Pro, clearly, these guys have a good loyal following.

The software comes at a price though and costs from $97 to $477 per month depending on the features and the number of tracked links.

For my solution, we're most likely looking at the $197 per month package (Ultimate) due to several of the features we need that the entry-level “pro” package doesn't have as standard.

There are a bunch of onboarding videos that give you an overview of the functionality and how to set it up. One point here is clearly the interface has been updating recently, well since the videos were recorded anyway, as the interface does look a lot different.

The interface looks a LOT BETTER now though.

What I Really Liked About Post Affiliate Pro

The cost of PAP is steep compared to iDevAffiliate but you do get some awesome features.

One of which is their Lifetime Commissions feature that after the first affiliate sale will continue to attribute re-orders to that affiliate EVEN without any subsequent tracking links used!

This is a great feature for anyone looking to provide an ongoing referral commission to affiliates who introduced the customer to the product<, which is exactly what I am planning to do.The second feature I really like is the SEO friendly links where you can use just the domain name to track the affiliate referral. This means no strange combination of letters and numbers after the domain name in the query string, just the bare domain name!

iDevAffiliate Affiliate Tracking Software

Although the software may look a little dated now it comes highly recommended as its very cost-efficient and integrates into most shopping carts, including my cart of choice, WooCommerce. If you’re using a different cart, you’re most likely to find it in the integrations.

So, no need to be messing around doing any bespoke coding to get this up and running.

I really like the fact I can also have commissions on a coupon basis too. This will be perfect if you’re looking to do social media marketing with influencers as they can simply use a unique coupon code and be attributed to the sale.

The cost of iDevAffiliate is incredibly competitive too. When comparing the cost of other solutions, such as PostAffiliate Pro, these start at $100 per month. Whilst this isn’t an issue if you have an active affiliate program generating thousands of dollars per month when you’re just starting out this is an added expense.

How Much Does iDevAffiliate Cost?

What I liked about iDevAffiliate is the option to either use their hosted solution or to host yourself on your own servers. Opting for the hosted solution you pay a very reasonable monthly fee ranging from $39 to $59 per month.

Alternatively, the self-hosted version is a one-off fee of between $199 and $399 depending on the number of bundled plugins you want. For a small fee, the iDevAffiliate guys can help install the software and configure it for you.

As I wanted to test out the software first, I went with the hosted solution to save me having to get involved in setting this up on my hosting account.

And lastly, there are no caps on the number of tracking requests per month (unlike Post Affiliate Pro).

Which Affiliate Tracking Software?

I am still evaluating which affiliate management platform I will use for my Super Greens supplement but have narrowed it down to either Post Affiliate Pro or iDevAffiliate.

Both have their pros and cons.

Once I have confirmed which platform, I will update this article.

Summary

I have worked with a few merchants who have successfully used affiliates to scale their business to seven figures per year. Done right, you can leverage an affiliate army to be your online brand ambassadors sending you tracking 24/7.

How effective affiliate marketing for merchants can depend on the product but also the tracking solution and the quality of affiliates.

Remember not all affiliates are created equal and it’s worth spending the time on those that will add value to your brand and can send reliable traffic.

I am still testing both Post Affiliate Pro and iDevAffiliate platforms to see the best affiliate software to manage and track clicks/conversions.

Remember not all affiliates are created equal and it’s worth spending the time on those that will add value to your brand and can send reliable traffic.

Taking the time to set-up an affiliate program correctly and signing up quality affiliates can mean you have 24/7 salesforce paid only on performance.