A common problem faced by online business owners is the difficulty of attracting customers. Sometimes you can invest huge sums in advertising, but it still won’t attract anyone. Or even if thousands of people see your ad, there is no guarantee that any of them will be really interested in it. This problem is solved by affiliate marketing and affiliate software, which helps businessmen get relevant traffic.
The affiliate marketing includes two main sides: advertisers who need to publish ads effectively, and webmasters who want to make money on the promotion of other people’s ads. The affiliate tracking software helps these parties to find each other, interact productively and make profitable deals. You will learn about other features and advantages of affiliate manager software from our article.
How does it works?
There are three parties in affiliate marketing, each of which performs its own functions:
- Advertiser.
- Affiliate manager.
- Webmaster.
Webmasters are the owners of some traffic sources (social networks, websites, channels, etc.). In the personal account, the webmaster can choose an offer – that is, a product or service that needs advertising – and use a special referral link (SubID) to bring the necessary traffic through software affiliate programs. The advertiser uses the same link to affiliate monitoring and tracking the effectiveness of the performer’s work. Statistics of targeted actions are collected on these links by affiliate tracker and payments are made to the webmaster according to the Cost Per Action (CPA) model, that is, for the actions of site visitors.
An affiliate manager is an intermediary between the customer and the contractor. He provides affiliate software services and receives a commission from the funds that the advertiser pays to the webmaster. This commission may vary in different networks.
Target action
As already mentioned, affiliate marketing deals are based on customer actions which are monitored by affiliate tracker. Depending on their type and quantity, the webmaster or the arbitrageur who brought the traffic receives a payout. So, here are the types of payments:
- CPL – payment for lead, application
- CPI – payment for installation
- FTD – payment for deposit
- CPS – payment for sale
- CPA – the amount of remuneration to webmasters for the target action
As you can see, affiliate marketing is a complex system with its own rules and formalities. To facilitate the work of all three sides of the market, affiliate management software was developed.
What is the use of affiliate programs?
Software affiliate programs automates and simplifies the work of an online business to promote its products. Like any innovation, it has several important advantages and functions, including:
- Simplified search and involvement of masters. Thanks to affiliate management software, advertisers can quickly contact arbitrageurs without searching for them all over the Internet.
- Partner network management. Affiliate marketing management involves not only launching and affiliate monitoring, but also interacting with webmasters and even deducting payments and commissions.
- Convenient analytics. Using the account in affiliate software, you can monitor the work of your advertising, the amount of traffic, visitor actions, and so on in real time.
- Automation of the process. Affiliate manager software helps to forget about the long search for partners, drafting and agreeing terms, calculating information and setting up advertising.
What specific tasks does it help to solve?
Automation, which was mentioned above, is the essence of the work of affiliate management software. Creating an effective affiliate advertising campaign requires performing several steps that are more convenient to perform in affiliate tracking software. For example:
- Search for partners. It is important not just to find a webmaster, but also to make sure of his honesty and reliability, as well as to get guarantees of the effectiveness of his work.
- Agreement on the terms of the partnership. When the webmaster is found, you need to conclude an agreement that will specify their and your responsibilities, including the volume and quality of traffic, targeted actions and its payment.
- Affiliate monitoring. Affiliate monitoring is necessary to observe how the partner works at all stages of cooperation, and not only when announcing the final results. Affiliate tracker helps with this.
- Settlement with a partner and payment of commissions. This action also requires attention, since the work must be paid depending on compliance with the agreement, the quality of traffic and other factors.
All these actions can be performed independently, using a variety of resources to find a partner, communicate with him, monitor the work, make payments. Or you can use affiliate manager software and reduce your work to a few clicks.
How to choose software
Affiliate marketing management continues to develop, and the number of services is growing. Therefore, it is especially important to choose the most suitable and comfortable affiliate software. We offer you an instruction that says what you should pay attention to when choosing the best affiliate software:
- Reputation. There are two ways to verify the reliability of the open source affiliate software: read user reviews and read information about the company in reliable sources, ratings and reviews.
- Functional. Find out if the software affiliate programs has all the tools and capabilities you need, otherwise you will have to urgently change or close the campaign after its launch.
- Price. It is important that the commission charged by the site does not exhaust your budget and does not interfere with the work of the advertising campaign.
- Safety. It is not uncommon for fraudsters to hack the affiliate tracking software mechanisms and steal customer data. Despite the fact that protection is increasing every year, it is important to choose reliable services.
- Training and support. Make sure that the service of the affiliate software helps customers understand and learn how to use its functionality, as well as provides support in solving problems.
And yet, which service is the best?
Everyone chooses the best affiliate software based on their goals and preferences. Let’s look at two examples of good services. First, Tapfiliate is a software for managing, tracking and optimizing affiliate programs.
Tapfiliate allows you to create your own affiliate programs and ads based on triggers – user actions that automatically launch ads. The Tapfiliate partner network can be integrated with many other services, for example Mailchimp, MoonClerk and Slack.
The second option is HilltopAds. Just like Tapfiliate, it has all the tools necessary for an advertiser and a webmaster. HilltopAds helps to save time and resources when launching campaigns, as well as provides flexibility and scalability of projects and guarantees an individual approach to each client.
