The Complete Guide How to Pick Referral Tracking Software

What is the best way to market your products in 2024? Referrals, baby — at least, that’s true for the staggering 92% of consumers who trust referrals over any other form of advertising. Pair that with the 82% of customers willing to promote your products (perhaps for an incentive). 

Sounds like referral marketing is a match made in heaven for both brands and consumers. 

Only obstacle? Progress tracking is a tedious business without solid referral tracking software. If your referral program picks up and all you have is a spreadsheet to keep tabs on progress, you could be stuck at work all night making updates — and still make mistakes anyway. 

That’s where referral tracking software like Tapfiliate comes in. Every update becomes automatic, and on top of that, you get analytical insights to improve your strategy. We’ll walk through the referral tracking options, essential features to consider, and how to implement referral marketing software into your referral program. 

3 types of referral tracking 

Referral tracking helps you monitor the people who refer leads to your brand, how much money those new referrals spend, and historical time periods and trends that surround the data. 

Wondering who refers the most people to your brand? You can find out with these three types of referral tracking: 

Manual Referral Tracking (Spreadsheets)

Manual referral tracking is the process of manually recording data from your referral program. You might note it down in a company binder or online in an Excel spreadsheet. Some things you might record include: 

• Customer name 
• Referred customer name
• Referral order value
• Date and time
• Recurring sales from the referral
• Commission or incentive

Sure, this might be a cost-effective and familiar way to operate if you’re only working with a handful of referrals. But when your referral program expands, you’ll find yourself spending a lot more time manually tracking things. 

Here’s the thing: some old-school marketing tactics still work because we’re still humans at the end of the day. For example, we still notice billboards and flyers and they work for certain types of businesses. 

But when it comes to record-keeping and organization? 

We’ve come a long way from physical file systems  — loose papers get lost. And the same goes for Excel spreadsheets — they’re prone to human error, plus they’re tedious to update. 

On top of that, Excel spreadsheets can’t do much beyond data organization. It won’t interpret historical trends, recommend optimizations, or flag suspicious customers, for example. 

A better option?

Freemium Software

A customer referral program software helps you track referrals automatically instead of manually. You’ll have access to various tracking methods like pixel or cookie tracking with referral marketing tools, to know which customers you can attribute referrals to. The software might also offer affiliate links (more common for specifically affiliate marketing software), where you can share custom links with customers to share with potential new audiences. 

Other common software features for referral marketing include incentive adjustments, performance reports, and integrations with other marketing tools in your software stack. But we won’t dive too deep into features here because, chances are, you won’t be able to access them all with freemium software. 

This might look like basic software or the free, bare-boned version of a proper paid referral marketing solution. Free referral marketing platforms are a great way to test the waters and assess what features your referral program can benefit most from. 

But once you get the gist, you’ll realize that freemium tools have limited features. And you’ll want more powerful referral software. 

Paid Referral Marketing Software

Paid referral marketing software is a platform that offers more robust referral tracking and reporting capabilities. You can track larger numbers of referrals, access more customized reports, integrate with more tools, and scale your referral program to new heights. 

Costs for referral platforms vary greatly and often come in subscription tiers, with cheaper subscriptions limited to a set number of tracked actions and limited features and more expensive subscriptions covering more functionality. 

6 things to consider before you pick a referral tracking software

The referral marketing software market is expected to hit $1.2 billion in value by 2032. That’s a ton of software brands competing for your brand’s attention and investment.

So, how do you decide which one is best?  We’ll help you narrow things down with these must-have features to assess. Remember that a referral software simply having these features isn’t enough — instead, you need to look at how those features would support your brand’s business goals.

Rewards Management 

People (even your loyal customers) don’t usually do things completely for free. Sure, they might casually mention your brand in passing. But to leverage word-of-mouth marketing, you’ll need to give them a reward or incentive.

Referral tools often have rewards management features to help you distribute, customize, and automate rewards. These might look like:

• Coupons for specific products or promotions 
• Percentage-based discounts
• Gift cards
• Flat or percentage-based commissions 
• Performance-based increases and bonuses 

Integrations

Integrations help you make the most out of your referral platform. They allow you to automate business processes across multiple types of software. If you’re an e-commerce brand, you might use Shopify to access sales data or MailChimp to manage email referral campaigns. 

Hint: Tapfiliate integrates with both.

If you don’t see your tech stack on a referral software’s integration list, look for custom integrations. These offer more integrations with a little help from developers, though a lengthy direct integration list is always ideal for plug-and-play functionality.

Reporting & Analytics

The most important part of your referral program? Data and insights — these help you assess whether your program is successful or not. The best referral management software has real-time analytics on metrics like conversions and conversion rate, referral rate, commission value, average order value, and sales numbers to help you visualize just how well your referral program works for your business. 

Imagine a particular business referral garners you the highest order value you’ve ever seen. You’d want to check out all the data surrounding that referral and customer so you can achieve similar success for your next campaign. 

Security & Fraud Prevention

Referral fraud is a real risk to brands across the globe. For example, one study found that 23% of coupons in referral programs were used fraudulently. 

Plus, you get affiliates referring customers from the same IP address — a common indicator of fraud and lost revenue. The best referral software has mechanisms in place to protect your brand from fraud, such as: 

• GDPR Compliance
• IP tracking
• Suspicious activity alerts

Ease of Use

Think you landed on the most attractive referral software on paper? Looks great — but does it feel great for your marketing team? If you can’t navigate a software or feel overwhelmed by its technicality, even its most robust features won’t improve your referral program because you can’t maximize them. 

That’s why free trials are so important to assess ease of use. Consider how easy it is to customize each feature, navigate to each feature, and generate reports. You should also take this opportunity to test out customer service — are they responsive? Do they seem knowledgeable about the software and capable of supporting you through any mishaps? 

Budget

You won’t find an average price for referral marketing software tools. The range is wide because different tools have different tiers, functionalities, and specialties. 

Enterprise plans will usually cost more to accommodate more robust tracking needs and larger volumes of reporting data. Similarly, specialist software for certain industries might cost more as well. Either way, you need to assess your budget with software pricing and determine whether the investment will give you the desired results. 

One way to find out? Customer reviews. And we’re not talking about testimonials on a software’s homepage. Check out software review sites like Capterra and G2 for objective experiences. You’ll want to pay special attention to reviews from brands like yours in industry, size, and marketing goals. 

• Security & Fraud Prevention: Secure data storage and fraud prevention measures
• Ease of Use: Consider the technical expertise needed for setup and management.

How to Implement Referral Tracking Software in Your Marketing Strategy

We’ll show you how to use Tapfiliate for your brand’s customer referral program!

Start with a free trial

Free trials help you navigate software hands-on and give you the most accurate picture of how it would function with your referral program. Tapfiliate offers a free 14-day trial that gives you access to all our features, including in-platform communication, reporting dashboards, automated referral tracking, and much more.

Pick a pricing plan

Tapfiliate offers three different pricing plans to meet brands where they’re at in their partner programs. We recommend reviewing your initial referral specs to help you decide on a tier:

• Essential ($74): 2,000 conversions and 20,000 clicks tracked per month, real-time reporting deep links, coupon codes, and automated workflows
• Pro ($124): 10,000 conversions and 100,000 clicks tracked per month, affiliate groups, bonus system, multi-level marketing (MLM)
• Enterprise (Custom): Unlimited tracking requests, white-labeling, custom wording, unlimited team members

Once you’ve decided on a pricing plan?

Integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) system

3. Integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) system

Your CRM can automatically integrate your full list of customers and relevant data, purchase history, and conversations with your referral marketing software. This will leave you precious time recording and organizing that data manually. 

Don’t see your CRM on our deep integrations list? No worries — get a hand from a developer to create your very own custom integration via the Rest API or JavaScript. 

Automate your customer referral program

Think of how many customers your business has. Let’s say 100. We see that as 100 potential affiliates to promote your program. 

You can automate triggers with Tapfiliate to send automated invites to customers once they make a purchase. 

From there, you can customize the email templates that go out, along with the commission type, amount, and performance increase schedule.  

And once your customers get onboard? Our laser-sharp tracking helps you keep tabs on progress from every referral, including order value, time periods, individual performance, and group performance.

Plus, you can dive even deeper to keep optimizing your referral program.

Monitor performance

Notice one particular product that’s popular among referred customers? Or perhaps the majority of leads from referrals come from Instagram. Performance insights by referrer, social channels, asset, affiliate group, time period, and product are some examples of metadata fields you can use to filter and customize your reports and detailed analytics with Tapfiliate. 

And if you want a bird’s eye view of your referral program? Our real-time main dashboard helps you see clicks, commissions, and conversions in one accessible place. 

Performance tracking is essential to improving and optimizing your referral program. Our clients gain access to all the metrics and historical reports they need to continue earning sustainable referral revenue.

Start using referral marketing software today!

Bottom line? You can’t have a revenue-generating referral program without solid referral marketing software. It’s vital to track performance, engage customers with incentives, communicate with your partners, and optimize your program over time. 

Even if you’re about to start your program from scratch, Tapfiliate’s affordable yet scalable solution can support your brand with real-time tracking, attribution, and optimized revenue. Our clients have some of the most effective referral programs that sustain serious revenue. Ready to join them?

Not a Tapfiliate user yet? Start 14-day free trial today!