Affiliate Tracking Software

Affiliate Program Software Buying Guide

To build a successful affiliate program for your business, you need a good affiliate tracking software that is designed to track every aspect of your affiliate program. Choosing the right affiliate tracking software is not easy, since there are various different tracking software and services being offered at a competitive price. The best rule to follow is to find the program that will cater all your affiliate business needs, while at the same time keep your expense at the minimum.

When you take a look at several affiliate program software online, you will know that the cost of those services are often really expensive. However, each of the pricing plan is usually geared toward the utilization of features that are being offered in such services, meaning that the more features you get from the service, the higher the price for it.

SaaS Vs Self Hosted

Some affiliate program software will not only provide tracking services for your affiliate business, but they will also provide tools for managing your affiliate business as well as promoting it. Some programs also offer different types of pricing, the one being a monthly pricing plan, and the other being one-time pricing plan. Monthly pricing plan means that you will lease the software as Software as a Service (SaaS), which means that you don’t need to install the actual program into your server. On the other hand, one-time pricing often means that you are buying the license of the software, which grants you the rights to install it on your own server.

Easy Customization Option

When it comes to using the right affiliate management program for your business, you don’t want to use the software that is rigid and difficult to customize. Branding is always important for your business, since it will inspire trust in the minds of your customers. Thus, you want to inspire the same trust in the minds of your affiliates by rebranding your dashboard. A good affiliate tracking software will allow you to customize your dashboard and rebrand the logo freely and easily.

Payment Integration

Payment integration is the most important aspect of a good software. The more compatible it is with many available payment processors, the better. A tracking software with only a limited payment integration option will usually get you stuck in the middle, since you cannot flexibly change your payment processor when the need arise. When this happens, you will be forced to switch into another software that will be able to cater your business needs better.

Detailed Reports & Analytics

What you seek most often from an affiliate tracker is the affiliate performance reports. You will always need the performance reports to monitor your affiliates and partners on a regular basis. With these reports, you will be able to see which campaigns are good and profitable, and which campaigns are bad and not profitable. The more detailed the reports, the better it will be for your business, since a detailed report will give you a better picture about your affiliate business. The best affiliate tracking program will provide you with the most detailed reports for your affiliate's performance.

Affiliate Tracking and Management

Obviously the software should come with features for easy affiliate recruitment. Affiliates often hates to fill boring and long forms just to access an affiliate program. At the same time merchants can’t afford to have minimum information about their partners. There are some software which allows affiliates to send email directly for a new promotion or coupon, which can really be a handy feature.

There are several tracking software which allows users to create a redundancy tracking system which don’t just use cookies but also use IPs or sessions and also allows to track more than one affiliates (first affiliate, the second affiliate etc.) for fair tracking.

Customer Support

Working with software which deals primarily with technicality might be easy for you, but sometimes, when there is a technical problem with the software, you want to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Here, the role of customer support for the program is very important. A good affiliate tracking software will be backed with a good customer support to ensure that every user of the software is satisfied with it, and especially, to ensure that each problem will be resolved as soon as it happens by the technical support team. It is also important to note that the support needs to be able to be reached anytime, and it needs to be willing to provide solution promptly.

Conclusion

Choosing the right affiliate tracking program for your business is perhaps difficult and complicated, but as long as you understand the characteristics of the best tracking software, it will become easier for you to pick between many available options. Pricing, program features, and support are the most important considerations to choose the right affiliate marketing program for your business, and moreover, the prompt communication from the support staff should also come into consideration when it comes to choosing the right tracking software for your online business and products.