What are the features and functions of a good affiliate tracking tool?

Affiliates are in a difficult space from a data perspective, as their data points are so scattered. And unfortunately, a lot of interesting things happen on platforms that they do not have ownership over. For this reason, working with a tool that gives them full visibility over their funnel is crucial. This is why we at Routy pride ourselves on being able to show the full funnel to our clients, helping them find the best opportunities to grow their business.

Platform has to be beneficial for you and for the Affiliates you will work with - look how flexible are the options to build the reports for Affiliates the way you like to present your data. Maybe you don't want to show certain details, or maybe on the contrary - you want to show more data, thus customisable reports is a must.

Each click needs to be unique, allocated to a source which is sending the traffic. A user funnel flow can be mapped from the sources it came, which offers / campaigns it passed, to which operator/advertiser it was delivered, and ultimately if it converted or not. I have seen big companies that just operate blindly, send traffic (both SEO and Paid) as if there is not tomorrow and then if money comes in, it comes in. No optimisation or anything. As long as money is seen in their accounts it's ok. If that traffic is optimised i'm pretty sure the revenue will double with just using a proper tracking and revenue platform.

The most important thing for analytics in affiliate marketing is tracking conversions from click on the platform to target action on the advertiser's page. In terms of this, the most important thing for an analytics platform is the postback feature. Unfortunately, This function is not available everywhere, and it makes it impossible to build the full funnel of traffic.

One of the oldest tricks in the book is creating unique campaigns to segment your traffic by different sources or different parts of your sites or channels. For example, if you create unique campaigns for the homepage, review, comparison page, blog, newsletter, socials, etc... you'll end up with richer data that shows where all your sales are coming from. It is maybe the top 1% of affiliates that do this and they gain valuable insights from it.

Most affiliate tracking solutions will provide a lot of information downstream from the affiliate click e.g. conversions, basket value, basket content etc. However it's important to be able to see upstream from the click i.e. how did the user arrive on the page, via what channel, what site navigation was used etc. This can help build up a picture of your best converting user journeys which can then be optimised.

As an affiliate marketer, I expect a good affiliate tracking tool to have the following features: 1) The tools should be able to track all clicks, links, commissions, and sales. 2) The tool should be able to craft customizable reports for individual affiliates, top-performing campaigns, and program performance. 3) The tool should manage to sign up for unlimited affiliates to grow your performance and reach a huge audience. 4) Above all, the tool must be able to detect frauds and scams.

The best affiliate tracking tools will show you how your affiliate marketing efforts impact your other channels. They will also give you the tools to discover sites that genuinely influence a consumer's choice of product, not just connect you with sites that deliver revenue.

Tracking multiple sources allows you to learn where your traffic is coming from and where can you invest more. It's ideal to double down on the relationships where it's driving the most value.

GPT Selecting an affiliate tracking tool requires a strategic balance between cost-efficiency and expansive reach. Opt for a solution that not only aligns with your budget but also amplifies your market presence. It's vital to evaluate the tool's scalability and integration capabilities, ensuring it grows alongside your business. Consider features that offer detailed insights and analytics, enabling you to refine your affiliate partnerships for optimal performance. Remember, investing in a tool that extends your reach without compromising on affordability can significantly enhance your affiliate program's success.

Having a dedicated traffic manager on staff is crucial for effectively managing links and creatives in digital marketing. This role specializes in creating, customizing, and testing various digital assets like banners, landing pages, and videos. A good affiliate tracking tool is invaluable here, as it allows the traffic manager to track the performance of each asset—measuring clicks, impressions, conversions, and analyzing their quality and relevance. By closely monitoring these metrics, a traffic manager can optimize campaigns for better performance, ensuring that your marketing efforts are not only targeted but also efficient and effective.

Look for feedback, and ease of creating links and managing creatives - otherwise you will be stuck with constant tracking issues.

Let's be real, banners are nearly obsolete and more than 50% of the world has some form of adblocking software. You should have a link manager to redirect your affiliate links and you should consider creating custom CSS/html ads to replace banners so they will not only convert higher, but not be blocked by adblockers

Either links, or creatives - make sure to consider the needs of your Affiliates, like dynamic tracking etc. Some of the more simple tracking solution either do no have it, or it is very complex to setup. It's always better to invest a bit more - but make sure there is a full setup that you need.

A competent affiliate tracking platform effortlessly handles the management of links and creatives. It enables the creation, customization, and testing of various versions to optimise performance. With robust tracking capabilities for clicks, impressions, and conversions, these platforms ensure you can monitor each asset's effectiveness. Quality and relevance tracking further allows for the refinement of affiliate strategies, ensuring that your marketing efforts are both efficient and impactful. This functionality is pivotal for maximising affiliate program success.

Having a tool to manage your links is essential, but you also need to be able to create links to educational content as well. This means you can properly nurture your audience in order for them to get to know the brand and then pitch them the product. If you can't do this with your links, you make affiliate marketing harder for yourself. Not impossible, just harder.

Key metrics are still too often based on a conversion. knowing that more than 80% of all affiliate campaigns are based on a last click attribution many affiliate marketeers still do the mistake to give all credits to lower funnel affiliates. A good affiliate tool allows the advertiser to see the real contribution of all active affiliates (with or without registered conversions), reward them and allows to easily see the impact of this on a global scale.

Despite affiliate stats tools being on the market for decades, they are rarely known in the affiliate marketing space. Most affiliates don't know these tools exist and some of them are tools like StatsDrone, Nifty Stats, Affluent, Trackonomics and Affilimate to name a few. These tools are half of the tracking tech that affiliates should be using so they can get all the insights as to what campaigns are working best and easily measuring KPIs like EPC.

Think not only about yourself - but also about the Affiliates. You should be able to adjust, what details they see in the reports. There are cases, when not all of the info could/should be shared with the Affilaites - or the other way around, make sure that your tracking solution has that.

Affiliate marketing dashboards vary in complexity but are crucial for both newcomers and seasoned marketers. A superior affiliate tracking tool offers in-depth analytics, showcasing real-time and historical data on key metrics such as conversion rates, EPC, CPA, ROAS, and LTV. It allows for detailed segmentation by traffic source, device, location, or time, enhancing campaign insights. Additionally, the capability to export data and integrate with tools like Google Analytics or CRM systems empowers marketers to refine strategies for optimal performance. This analytical depth enables effective optimization of marketing efforts, driving improved outcomes.

Analyze your data and insights: Get detailed reports on clicks, conversions, earnings, and other KPIs to inform data-driven decisions.

The first thing any affiliate should do is create or use an affiliate link manager. It is where you have a central system for linking out with your tracking links so you can segment however you wish whether A/B testing, separating campaigns by GEOs or by parts of your site channels. The most important thing any affiliate should do is monitor their impressions vs clicks to understand the conversion rate of all of these links. In an ideal world, you would have a dashboard visualizing all of your links and campaigns to know where to send more traffic and where to send less.

Not all of these extensive features are needed - yes, they do enhance the work, but you can differentially scale a successful affiliate program without A/B testing, split testing, or multivariate testing in Affiliate tracking solution itself.

A robust affiliate tracking tool should possess key features such as accurate conversion tracking, real-time reporting, customizable commission structures. These tools enable businesses to precisely monitor the performance of affiliate marketing campaigns, ensuring transparency and accountability. Additionally, an effective affiliate tracking tool should offer seamless integration with various platforms, providing flexibility for businesses to manage , optimize their affiliate programs efficiently. The tool's user interface should be user-friendly, facilitating easy navigation for both merchants & affiliates. Together, these features empower businesses to maximize the impact of their affiliate marketing strategies & enhance performance.

Put your mouth where bread is. Test multiple sources, multiple banners and then monitor which ones convert most. Reduce budget from the ones that are not converting / revenue generating and shift the budget on the converting campaigns. This is one of the reasons why daily revenue automated checks helps you to get more visiblity, and if the operator has realtime postbacks (usually only on leads and initial deposits (not qualified FTD)) it is already a guide on which campaigns are doing their job.

Optimize your campaign and conversion: Use A/B testing, targeting options, and landing page optimization to improve conversion rates.

Not all tracking tech will provide notifications and it isn't easy detecting fraud or data errors. Instead, what affiliates have to do is monitor their data using affiliate stats tracking tools so they can discover when campaigns are underperforming.

Not all the tracking tools / platforms are as advanced with features - and if the platform is smaller, it might be difficult to implement various features - always look for reviews/feedback about that.

Very advanced tracking tools aside, what should be achievable for most organisations is tracking of key metrics and monitoring when those suddenly change. If you can pin-point a drop on a specific element of your campaign to the minute, it should provide enough clues for an expert to go and identify/solve the problem. It's important to have a range of time scales to review; in-day monitoring by minute can spot a problem with user journeys, month-on-month trends can spot broader issues that are not perceptible on a daily report.

Having fraud detection tools like: - Coupon Leak Detection - SafeLinks (Social Snowball Product) where the link only shows the coupon based on trusted referring sources - Commission Delay Filters Set Past Return Windows - Adjusting Cookie Duration Settings All of the above can help protect your brand from affiliate fraud.

Some affiliate networks place a higher emphasis on fraud prevention, employing advanced security measures like link cloaking, encryption, and SSL to protect campaigns and commissions. These platforms utilize tracking pixels, postbacks, and APIs for precise conversion tracking and commission attribution, ensuring reliability. Alerts, notifications, and backups are also integral, allowing for real-time monitoring and quick issue resolution. This focus on security helps safeguard marketers' interests, ensuring that their efforts and earnings are well-protected against potential fraud or disputes.

I think there are layers of "protection" that an affiliate tracking tool can offer. The basic level is SSL and validation of the data that's been sent to the tool, this is usually now in the form of a unique click or session id. It validates that the data sent to the tool has come from a valid source. S2S and API allows for more secure ways of data transfer, when setup correctly. A reliable S2S or API solution can allow brands to supplement conversions with information that can't be securely transmitted in the session. More advanced protection, like SEM monitoring, adhijack protection, etc. is only offered on a few tracking tools, and usually is found in other Martech.

Operating blindly will not give you returns you are looking for. Operate smart, see which sources are converting and which not, monitor app events and revenue patterns. These are all eye openers in case something "outside the norm" is happening. Configure thresholds and capping to avoid over spending and abuse

Protect your campaign and commission: Prevent fraud, detect bots, and ensure accurate commission tracking with robust security measures.

When automating tasks, make sure it doesn't decrease the quality of your operations/communication - unless this is really repetitive task.

This is a really basic feature and to be quite honest a standard across all networks. If you cannot delivery links and creative efficiently on your current tracking platform then most certainly re-think this into 2024. Your platform should be intuitive, fast and reliable - including being live at least 99.99% of the time!

Automating your tasks is important to manage your time well - you can do so by using tools like Zapier or Make. I've automated payments to affiliates that allow me to focus on other priority projects - a time-intensive task.

There are numerous affiliate tracking tools on the market and I recommend affiliates consider using versus building their own especially when launching a project. Simply put, you'll want to track impressions vs clicks and ideally segment your links so they are used in specific channels like newsletters, blog posts, product review pages, comparison pages, etc... This way you'll get to learn which channels on your own network are driving the real revenues and you can effectively measure ROI.

Support your growth and scalability: Handle increasing traffic, affiliates, and sales without performance degradation or downtime.

Scalability is a very tricky situation to handle. As this usually comes at a cost. You can go full blown out on platforms such as GCP or AWS which will empty your pockets or do a hybrid setup which can still do the job but keep costs under control.

Affiliate platforms have to do three things well: tracking, reporting and payments. Ask questions about the robustness of each. What’s the tracking logic and futureproofing? How quickly do publishers get paid and how easy is the reporting is to understand. All these boxes need to be ticked. Everything else is decoration.

Another two things to consider are flexibility and transparency. Whilst operator should be able to send as many data KPIs as they want so that they can build tailor made NetRevenue formula or create more complex CPAs, the platform should allow full transparency to the affiliates, where all the data columns are also displayed to affiliates, in order for them to understand how their earnings are being calculated.

3rd party cookies are dead - make sure your platform fully supports 1st party (ideally S2S) and that you work with them to ensure that you have the most robust tracking out there and that you make it a priority to ensure that you regularly test the tracking and keep it updated.

Well, first and foremost is a reliability of the tracking platform because affiliates and publishers are always concerned with the reliability of their traffic and sales. The features of the dashboard are also important. If you have a nice cilia dashboard with nice features that helps.

Customer Support if very important feature when choosing Affiliate platform / tracking tool. With a variety of campaigns and Partners, and especially with extensive tracking features if the Customer support is not fast & competent - it will create a lot of roadblocks.

Affiliate activity does not exist in a vacuum, so it's important to be able review the data alongside the activities of other areas of the business to help understand the wider context behind trends. One example I saw was a sudden drop in affiliate conversion rate, turned out the e-com team were testing new user journeys and redemption mechanics which impacted affiliate performance negatively. Quite often these issues are only solved by being able to give a precise date and time for a drop in a given metric, then asking the organisation "who changed what?".

Always be in touch with the owners of the tool. These tracking tools never cover all affiliate programs. Maintain a good relationship and they might add the missing affiliate programs that you need tracked to measure ROI.

Consider how seamlessly your marketing site integrates with the affiliate signup process. It should be a smooth experience. Also, if you're relying on the software provider to supply your marketing page or pages, ensure they are optimised for SEO. You'd be surprised how often these two factors are overlooked!

Today's tracking tools need to level up. It would be great to see tracking tools have better automation of unique click IDs so affiliate marketers had a better chance of deeply understanding where their sales are coming from. At the moment, S2S tracking with postbacks and dynamic variables seems to be the most confusing part of affiliate marketing for people to setup. Sure, they are advanced tools but the winners in the affiliate tech space will be the ones that simplify it for affiliates so it is has minimal setup, min tech requirements and accessible so anybody can do it.

When looking into an Affiliate tracking platform, decide what you're actually going to use it for. If you select to work with a network and pay for an Account Managed service, realistically as long as your tracking setup is robust, reliable and the platform is accessible, a lot of the above points can be automated, picked up by your AM or delivered to you via API. If you were to look at a self-managed service, understanding how quickly you can access a point of contact to receive answers to any questions you have about the platform is paramount.