7 Tips on How to Choose the Affiliate Marketing Software for a Network
Affiliate marketing network software is the backbone of every affiliate network. It helps manage partners, optimize performance, and increase revenue.
To enable your affiliate marketing software to grow and scale your business, you’ll need to choose a platform meeting specific requirements. But what are they?
In this article, we’ve outlined some key factors you should consider when choosing the best network marketing affiliate software. Let’s go!
1. The ability to manage affiliates
Partnerships are the key to success of any network. But finding, onboarding, and organizing partners takes a lot of work. Luckily, if you opt for the right software, it’ll help make partner management much easier.
And even though there are tons of aspects of affiliate management, make sure that your solution can do at least the following:
- Manage affiliate accounts
- Manage affiliate payments
- Manage affiliate marketing campaigns
- Managing affiliate marketing content
2. Fraud prevention
It’s no secret that affiliate marketing is highly exposed to fraud. Motivated traffic, botnet traffic, and fake traffic have become annoying obstacles to growing and scaling any network.
Therefore, fraud prevention and detection is the second-most important consideration when choosing software.
Fraud can be stopped by using different types of performance marketing platforms and strategies. But make sure the solution of your choice has enough power to:
- Profile affiliate registrations
- Detect motivated traffic
- Identify fraudulent conversions
- Catch fraud affiliate payout
- Drill down transaction data
3. Affiliate campaigns optimization
As an affiliate network, you probably know that campaign optimization can multiply overall efficiency and performance. Here are some tips:
- a) Make sure that the affiliate platform offers a variety of options for publishers to monetize their traffic.
This might mean working with direct offers, smartlinks, or smart campaigns where affiliates can cover all the traffic parameters (geo, type of traffic, and device) and literally monetize every click.
- b) Make sure that the affiliate marketing software provides variable payout modes. Typically, this includes ratio rate and fixed rate.
However, if you want to make the most of your affiliate business, you’d better opt for solutions that offer more flexible options.
This typically implies PPL mode for publishers that can’t send much traffic to the offer; and Cumulative mode that sets the particular commission for the incoming conversion, regardless of its total amount.
4. Visibility of partner relationships
When choosing the best affiliate network tracking software, you will want to guarantee that it offers visibility into partner relationships.
While many networks provide data on all of their active affiliates and can track performance at a glance, some may offer a different level of insight.
If you are interested in analyzing who is doing well and why they are doing so, then having access to this information would be very helpful in making decisions about which affiliates should be kept around or kicked out of the network.
5. Ability to get customizable reports and data dashboards
The next thing you should be looking for is the ability to access reports and customize them per your requirements. The standard report package normally includes the following:
- Performance for each affiliate
- Performance for each campaign
- Performance for each product or category
- Performance for each publisher or site
It’s also good if the system offers some way for visualizing this data which could be either through tables, graphs, or charts, depending on how big each category is.
6. API integration with third-party applications
API integration is a key feature of any affiliate marketing software. It allows you to connect your databases and systems with other services in order to automate the processes of data transfer, reporting, and analysis.
You can use this functionality for the following:
- To gather data from various sources, including sales reports, and social networks
- To send emails based on predefined rules
- To display relevant ads on your website according to a user’s preferences
7. Dedicated user interfaces and real-time alerts
For the best affiliate network software, it’s vital to have an intuitive interface that every user can navigate with ease and effortlessly understand its features.
Per the best-case scenario, the affiliate network platform should also provide customization options so that it can be designed according to your needs.
Also, the software should have a dashboard where you get critical insights into your network’s performance and also be able to communicate with other users or administrators.
As per real-time alerts and messaging, they’re essential to notify publishers about affiliate payments, ads, campaign outcomes, and other important information.
This feature can help improve the overall user experience because it allows you to send out detailed reports right after an event has happened.
Final thoughts
As you can see, to successfully grow and scale as a network, you must choose affiliate marketing software combining several features.
Apart from pretty obvious user-friendly interface and convenient partner management, it should securely protect your business against fraud, provide flexible options for publishers to monetize traffic, and ensure variable payout modes suitable both for affiliates and your network.
If you want to employ software with all these options without getting out of the box, consider UCLIQ. We are a market-leading SaaS platform with Smartlinks, AI Traffic Delivery, multi-layer Anti-Fraud system, and Brokerage tools, allowing you to launch and grow your network in 1-2-3.
Still have questions? Don’t hesitate to ask us anything that bothers you! We’re always happy to help you find the best way out.
