How to Pick the Best Affiliate Marketing Tool for Your Business

The affiliate marketing software market was worth about $1.5 billion as of 2023, and is expected to be worth over $7 billion by 2033. That’s because any brand with an affiliate program knows they need a little help from tech to gather valuable insights and keep revenue flowing. 

After all, you can’t make the most of your program if you don’t know which affiliates, channels, or affiliate campaigns perform best. 

So, how do you pick an affiliate tool to best manage and optimize your program? We’ll walk through the ins and outs of affiliate marketing platforms, key features to look for, and how to pick the best tool for your business. 

What is an Affiliate Marketing Tool?

Affiliate marketing tools help you track your affiliate program’s performance in real-time through cookies, pixels, coupon codes, or affiliate links. They usually offer advanced reporting features to help you visualize performance across your program, including individual affiliate performance in affiliate sales, total revenue, and trends over time. 

You can also communicate and share affiliate products and updates with your affiliate partners through software. This helps you ensure consistency across your affiliate marketing campaigns, as well as general engagement across your affiliates. 

Additionally, affiliate products tend to cost a monthly fee that’s tiered based on the features you choose. For example, Tapfiliate’s most basic subscription includes unlimited affiliates and programs, while our most comprehensive subscription includes white-labeling and MLM features at a higher price. 

The main goals of an affiliate marketing tool are to: 

• Streamline marketing tasks: The most effective and versatile affiliate marketing tools make your life easier. For example, Tapfiliate helped Optmyzr save 10-20 hours per month on their marketing tasks with our automation features and tracking capabilities. 
• Scale your affiliate program: The valuable insights you get from a software’s reporting features can help you narrow in on the most effective affiliate marketing strategies within your program to keep scaling. 
• Pay affiliates: Affiliate software helps you streamline the payout process by triggering payments to your affiliates right on the platform. They might integrate with a payment processor like PayPal to complete the transactions. 
• Share promotional materials: Sure, you could email individual affiliates the social media graphics you want them to post — or, you could share them directly on your affiliate platform. This streamlines your tasks and saves you from switching to multiple applications.
• Gain insights from reports: Affiliate tools help you gather valuable insights about performance that are easily accessible via reports and data visualizations. It might track metrics like conversion rate, average order value (AOV), and total return on investment (ROI) for each affiliate, product, campaign, or channel. 

But affiliate marketing tools are plenty — Post Affiliate Pro, Refersion, LeadDyno, Tapfiliate, and many more offer plans on the market. So, how do you pick the best one for your brand? We’ll explain in detail a selection process to help you make the best decision. 

How to Pick the Best Affiliate Marketing Tool for Your Business

Whether you’re an ecommerce, SaaS, or another type of brand, you can use this list to find the best affiliate tool for your brand. 

First order of business?

Step 1: Identify Your Business and Marketing Needs

Most brands launch affiliate marketing programs to see more revenue at a lower investment. But despite that shared goal, every business has a different landscape. 

Your time in the business, experience with affiliate marketing, industry or niche, target audience, and revenue goals all factor into unique business needs. And it’s vital to identify those business needs before you invest in an affiliate software. 

Here are some examples of business needs from our clients that we helped them achieve with Tapfiliate: 

Discover  more target audiences

Revenue goals stagnant this quarter? Sounds like you might need more customers to fill in the gaps. If you’ve exhausted your marketing efforts with content optimization, ads, and outreach, you might seek to add a brand-new affiliate program to your strategy. 

You’ll want software that can help you grow your affiliate network. That business need correlates to our partner recruitment features, specifically our automated referral program. This helps you recruit existing customers as affiliates through automated triggers that invite them to your program after they make a purchase.  

Nurture relationships with affiliates

Maybe you’ve already gotten your feet wet with affiliate marketing, but your connections to your affiliates could be stronger. You see this through flaky affiliates who might send you a lead or two but disappear after. 

Perhaps you don’t have the budget to invest in more onboarding, meetings, or engagement tactics with them, so you turn to software. 

Our client Master HandPan offers online music lessons and saw serious growth from word-of-mouth recommendations. They wanted a tool that reinforced the way they saw their affiliates: as ambassadors, not just a transaction. Tapfiliate’s flexible commissions, in-platform communication, automated referral program, and branded social assets helped them sustain longer relationships with affiliates and discover new ones. 

Improve marketing ROI

Does it feel like you’re spending way more on affiliate marketing efforts (or general marketing efforts) than you’re getting back? Your ROI might be lacking. Of course, you’ll need eyes on key data points and customizable reporting views to figure out exactly what’s causing the slump. 

In this case, your ideal affiliate software must have advanced reporting features with filters and segmentation to identify what’s working and what isn’t. You should also look at key marketing metrics like conversion rate, clickthrough rate, and affiliate revenue by individual affiliates to assess performance. 

Boost customer engagement and trust

Every brand wants an engaged and trusting customer base — but sometimes, things happen that sacrifice that good standing. For example, companies might feel a reputational hit from internal scandals, lawsuits, questionable business protocols in terms of ethics, or poor-performing products. If you’re recovering from any of the above setbacks, customer trust becomes more important than ever. 

We can link that business needs to affiliate software that prioritizes quality affiliate recruitment and branded, shareable assets. The branded assets help you secure a consistent brand image even across multiple affiliates, which Shopify says builds customer trust and loyalty. 

Step 2: Evaluate Key Features

Most affiliate platforms have the same core features:

• Affiliate dashboard
• Integrations
• Reports
• Click or conversion tracking
• Commission structures

There’s no doubt you need all of these for a successful affiliate program. However, every affiliate tool handles these key features differently. It’s up to you to assess each feature and decide if it works for your business. 

For example, a SaaS brand should prioritize flexible commission structures that include recurring commissions, where affiliates see monthly payouts. This builds a strong reputation for your brand and helps you retain quality affiliates. Similarly, ecommerce businesses might prioritize lifetime commissions to reward affiliates for repeat customers. 

Reporting dashboards also look different across each platform. Some only show affiliate sales and revenue for each affiliate, while others allow you to generate data visualizations to compare performance with multiple affiliates. Additionally, you might want to assess whether certain products sell more through your affiliate program — in that case, you’ll need reports based on specific product performance and perhaps even product-specific commissions.  

We’ve compared business needs with some handy features in affiliate tools. Now, let’s look at those features in action. 

Step 3: Compare Top Affiliate Marketing Tools 

The affiliate marketing game has tons of software players vying for your subscription. It’s your job to decide which one deserves your investment the most. Don’t worry; we’ll help you make an informed decision based on features, pricing, and reviews from some of the most popular tools on the market. 

Tapfiliate

Tapfiliate is our affiliate tracking system that prioritizes scalability, flexibility, and affordability in our features and subscriptions. Our reporting features are customizable, meaning you can generate data visualizations and reports on the metrics that mean most to your business, including affiliate performance comparisons, historical revenue trends, conversion rates, and more. 

We also offer real-time affiliate tracking for both clicks and conversions, white-labeled pages and affiliate portal for brand consistency, flexible commissions that you can automate to increase based on performance, as well as an in-platform communication tool to customize your conversations with affiliates. 

On top of that, our automated referral program helps you recruit the most qualified affiliates to discuss your products — the people who already love them, your customers. Here, you can pick from hundreds of templates or customize emails on your own to send to customers after they make a purchase. 

• Best for: Ecommerce, dropshipping, SaaS, and subscription-based businesses
• Pricing: $74 to $124, plus custom pricing options for enterprise businesses
• Integrations: 30+ direct integrations to Shopify, Zapier, WooCommerce, Teachable, PayPal, and many more; custom integrations for tools not listed
• Reviews: Generally positive, with a 4.5-star average rating on Capterra

Partnerstack

Partnerstack is a B2B SaaS specializing affiliate software that’s known for its lead nurturing feature, where you can integrate with a CRM platform and share qualified leads to your affiliates. It also offers an in-platform learning management system, where you can create custom, interactive courses to onboard your affiliates. 

• Best for: B2B SaaS businesses
• Pricing: Not listed; assumed expensive based on customer reviews
• Integrations: 8 listed direct integrations to marketing software like Salesforce and Hubspot, plus custom integrations via API
• Reviews: Generally positive, with a 4.8-star average rating on Capterra

Refersion

Refersion is an affiliate tool that specializes in tracking and reporting for ecommerce affiliate programs. It offers diverse commission structures, including SKU-specific commissions, as well as customizable email marketing campaigns to engage affiliates, prospects, and customers. 

This software falls short in terms of scaling and affordability. The mid-tier plan, priced at $299 monthly, limits tracked conversions to only 200. You’d need to pay for a more expensive, custom tier to access unlimited conversions, though this might be suitable for businesses with more expensive products and fewer customers. 

Additionally, recent reviews show frustration with the lack of a manual affiliate approval option, as auto-approved affiliates sometimes lead to scams and fraud. 

• Best for: Enterprise ecommerce businesses
• Pricing: $119 to $299 monthly, plus custom pricing options for enterprise businesses
• Integrations: 30+ direct integrations + access to integrations with 2,000 apps through an integration to Zapier
• Reviews: Relatively positive, with a 4.2-star average rating on Capterra

Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro is an affiliate tool that stands out for its in-depth reporting features, including map overlays, rankable affiliates, audit logs for internal activities, and trend reports that show transactions by date, affiliate, channel, and more. It also offers customizable themes and intuitive interface views for enhanced user experience. 

Unfortunately, reviews for the platform are quite negative on TrustPilot. Common points of criticism include poor customer support and a high learning curve to learn how to navigate the platform. 

• Best for: Diverse roster of clients; no listed specialization of niche
• Pricing: $139 to $649 across three subscription tiers
• Integrations: Abundant integrations via plugins
• Reviews: Relatively poor, with a 2.7-star average rating on Trustpilot

Affise

Affise offers three different kinds of affiliate software products, including performance tracking, audience reach, and mobile ad analytics. It also offers features for flexible commissions, workflow automation, and an impressive 250+ integrations to other software tools. 

Some customers lament the lack of customization in reporting dashboards, as you can’t compare different metrics together. The platform is also quite pricey, with subscriptions starting at $500 per month. 

• Best for: Mobile apps
• Pricing: $500 to $1,500+ across three subscription tiers
• Integrations: 250+ integrations
• Reviews: Relatively good, with a 4.6-star average rating on Capterra

Step 4: Consider Pricing and Budget

Subscriptions for affiliate software vary drastically in pricing. Depending on the tier you choose, tracking capacity needed, stage in your business, and general niche, monthly costs for affiliate software range from $50 to $5,000+. 

While the most affordable plans appeal to your finance team, we recommend examining each tier for the features that best meet your business needs. 

For example, Tapfiliate’s Essential tier is affordable at $74 monthly for basic features if you pay annually. It includes unlimited affiliates and programs, 2,000 tracked conversions, and access to our flexible commissions, reporting dashboards, and integrations. This is the perfect tier for a new business or one that’s just getting started with its affiliate program. 

Our Pro plan is priced higher at $124 monthly, but the benefits are profound for a business that’s scaling. Ecommerce businesses will enjoy more powerful features, like product-specific commissions, and all business owners can scale with up to 10,000 tracked conversions. You can grow your affiliate program even more with our multi-level marketing (MLM) features to find new affiliates through your existing ones. 

In other words? That $50 difference monthly could result in a seriously high return if your business is in the right place for it. 

Apart from Tapfiliate, other affiliate tools might charge higher for features you may or may not need. For example, Partnerstack’s pricing is notoriously expensive, according to their reviews (not listed on their website). It’s important to ensure a high price tag is both aligned with your budget and worth it. If you can find the same features you need the most at a cheaper price, you don’t have to shell out the big bucks. 

Step 5: Read Reviews and Testimonials 

It’s easy for a brand to tout their benefits on their website — but how do you know what other customers think of their product? 

That’s where reviews and testimonials come in handy. First, you can look at testimonials on a company website. These are genuine accounts of a customer’s experience with the product, and you’ll usually see a full name and logo to identify the customer. 

Here are some testimonials from Tapfiliate: 

Now, these are great for assessing customer satisfaction. But there’s a reason why companies feature those testimonials — they’re from their happiest clients! Of course, you won’t see an adverse testimonial on a software company’s site. 

So it’s important to look deeper on software review sites like G2 or Capterra. These sites allow customers to submit their own experiences with software without filtering from the software company. Here are some examples of reviews on Capterra for Tapfiliate: 

Testimonials and reviews speak to customer experience, but they don’t always cover specific results and benefits. We recommend looking at case studies, too. These are longer-form articles documenting a brand’s experience with the software, including the pain points they had before using it, company background, and results experienced after using the software. 

The best case studies show measurable and tangible results about performance, like these percentage-based ones from Tapfiliate: 

If you click on one of our case studies, you’ll learn about each customer’s full experience with Tapfiliate. 

Here’s an example from our client MDHearingAid — a hearing aid provider that doubled its network of affiliates within one month and improved conversion rates by 40%:

Since adding Tapfiliate, we’ve had one of our highest weekly conversion rates this calendar (also our fiscal) year at 1.76. Prior to Tapfiliate, we were averaging a 1.26 weekly conversion rate!

Still, other customers’ successes don’t automatically mean you’ll see similar results. That’s why you need to take your affiliate software on a test drive. 

Step 6: Test the Tool 

Most affiliate tools will offer a free trial — look for one that offers a 14-day trial instead of 7 (like Tapfiliate). Once you sign up for your free trial, you can test out key features and assess the software against your business needs. 

Here are some things to consider when you navigate a tool in trial mode: 

• User experience (UX): Is the tool intuitive, and can you go from feature to feature with ease? Consider the load time to get from page to page, as well as the logical flow for the tool’s features. 

• Commissions: How many options are there? Do you see flat-fee, percentage-based, and other structures, or just one? Test out toggling commission rates for different affiliates to assess customizability. 

• Reports: Look at the metrics included in the reporting dashboards. Can you see the conversion rate, organic traffic, total affiliate sales revenue, and order amounts?

• Customer support: If you have any questions about a feature, reach out to the company’s customer support team. See if they’re prompt in their solutions and knowledgeable about the tool. 

• Integrations: It’s easy for a company to say their software has direct integrations — but it’s another entirely for them to link seamlessly. Test out any integration you plan to use to ensure it works properly. 

We recommend testing multiple affiliate software trials to compare ease of use and the above features. Once you get a feel for a few different options, you’ll feel more prepared to….

Step 7: Make an Informed Decision

Phew, that was a long process! But trust us, you need to complete all these steps before you decide on an affiliate platform. After all, you’ll pay monthly for the subscription, so you want to make sure it’s worth your investment. 

Now that you’ve examined multiple affiliate software options, pricing, free trials, customer reviews and case studies, and key features, go back to the original business needs that we began with. Assess whether your top software contenders meet those needs to make an informed decision. 

3 mistakes to avoid when selecting an affiliate marketing tool

1. Accepting limits on affiliates

Some affiliate tools place limits on how many affiliates you can invite or approve to your program. Others might give you a higher capacity for affiliates if you shell out money for more advanced subscriptions. Our take? Both aren’t ideal. 

One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is its potential to scale exponentially — and you can’t scale with limits on affiliates. 

For example, Tapfiliate offers unlimited affiliates for all three of our subscription tiers because we value the ability to help brands scale their programs.

2. Not leveraging each feature

Some software might feel intimidating to fully leverage. For example, Tapfiliate has nearly 100 customization, tracking, automation, commission, and reporting features that take time to sift through. 

But if you don’t invest time into learning about your affiliate software, you leave efficiency and potential ROI on the table!

We recommend getting in touch with the software’s customer support team and leveraging onboarding features to make the most of your affiliate marketing tool. 

3. Neglecting security features

Did you know that about 17% of affiliate traffic in 2022 was fraudulent? Sure, 17% doesn’t sound like a massive number — until you connect it with the significant $3.4 billion lost by brands to fraud that same year. 

This means security and fraud prevention features are more vital now than ever in affiliate software. Without these in place, not only do you risk lost revenue, but you also risk lost trust among your affiliates and customers if fraudsters get their hands on your data!

Get Started with Affiliate Software through Tapfiliate!

The most successful affiliate strategies aren’t carried out alone. Every affiliate program that brings in 5 or 6-figure revenue is backed with a powerful affiliate software that tracks performance and optimizes revenue. 

We know tons of affiliate marketing tools are available, but you’ll need some time to try them all out. 

But if you want to save some time and experience a sure path to revenue, we invite you to try Tapfiliate first. Our affordable, scalable plans can suit your business at any stage. Plus, our affiliate tracking and real-time reporting help you gain valuable insights into your program to boost revenue every quarter. 

Ready to launch an affiliate program in a few steps?  Start our free 14-day trial today!