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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.