3 challenges to affiliate marketing software & how to fix them

A day in a brand marketer’s life is hectic. You’re overseeing tons of content marketing efforts and initiatives, advertising budgets, social media marketing strategies, staff — and affiliate relationships for your affiliate program. 

So you try out an affiliate marketing automation software to lighten the load and improve your conversion rates. 

You also predicted excellent customer service, engaging pieces of content, more sales, and positive customer scenarios. 

Yet you’re still wasting valuable time and resources on problems you thought the software would solve. 

Sure, you might have a dashboard and marketing hub to track revenue; but how do you source quality affiliates, prevent fraud, and avoid paying commissions on refunded items?

Luckily, we thought of all those challenges when we launched our turn-key affiliate solution, Tapfiliate. We’ll explore these problems in greater detail and demonstrate how Tapfiliate’s simple, customizable, easy-to-use platform solves them for every brand. 

Problem 1: Fraud

Imagine the traffic your affiliate program brings in each month. Maybe it’s 800 unique web visitors, leads you pay commissions on. Except that number is closer to 720. Why? Because experts predicted that 10% of affiliate traffic was fraudulent in 2022. Some affiliates get greedy, clicking on cost-per-click links to make more money off an unassuming brand.

But it’s not just fake traffic. Even savvy marketers in the affiliate world deal with cookie-stuffing schemes, chargeback fraud, and transaction fraud. For example, an affiliate could purchase products with a stolen credit card while receiving commissions. By the time you realize? 

Unfortunately, even many of today’s modern affiliate marketing solutions don’t stop the fraud. And you’re left with the bill. 

Of course, you have a few strategies to prevent fraud. Careful affiliate vetting, strict terms and conditions, and analytics software could mitigate the risk. You might also dedicate a staff member to fraud prevention tactics. Still, all that takes up a lot of time and resources. 

Next step? Invest in affiliate marketing software that has fraud detection capabilities. 

Solution: Detect fraud before it becomes a problem

Tapfiliate has a few fraud checks to catch fraud before it eats into your revenue. 

• Attribute blacklisting: Tapfiliate automatically reviews attributes like IP addresses and domains, specifically if conversions have the same IP addresses as your affiliates. We also conduct sliding window checks.
• Approval function for self-driven conversions: Brands have the power to approve or disapprove conversions stemming from the same IP address as affiliates. 

Quick reminder: Tapfiliate’s fraud checks significantly reduce the chance of a compounding issue, but it doesn’t assure a 100% fraud prevention rate. Here are some tips to reduce the chance of fraud:  

• Examine purchase value: Say you have an average order value (AOV) of $50, yet you notice a purchase of over $1,000. A discrepancy like that could indicate fraud and warrants your attention.
  
• Flag purchases from the same IP address: Most people don’t make a bunch of different purchases in one sitting. This could indicate one fraudster making multiple purchases  
• Use term and condition assurance tools: You might consider Brandverity to ensure compliance across affiliates with your terms and conditions.  

Problem 2: Finding affiliates to promote your brand

It’s not easy to find a worthy affiliate. Here’s why: 

Affiliate relationships are unique from your typical brand rep or in-house marketer.  

• You’re trusting them with your potential customer relationships and that they’ll have a positive impact on engagement. 
• You’re allowing them to represent your brand with their personality, actions, and online persona. 
• You trust their integrity to find high-quality leads for your brand, and report on business intelligence without fraudulent clicks and conversions. 

It’s a big responsibility that they don’t get paid much for — an affiliate commission is a significantly smaller reward than a sales team salary or another business arrangement. 

Yet it works beautifully for the right partnership. 

Still, affiliate discovery and relationship management isn’t a common feature in most affiliate software. They put it all on you, the advertiser. Of course, you could join an affiliate network like ShareASale or CJ to find some candidates. 

But that takes endless business hours and resources, plus the separation isn’t convenient for your business. It’s much more efficient to have partnership discovery efforts linked to your affiliate management solution in one place. 

Solution: Find affiliates quickly and easily with our connection to Admitad Partner Network

Tapfiliate gives you all the benefits of robust affiliate management software AND the opportunity to source new affiliates through our Admitad Partner Network. This subnetwork links you to over 100,000 verified affiliates and seamlessly allows you to review their audiences, reach out, and immediately start working together. Some good news: you’re not limited to only one type of affiliate. 

Explore partnerships with: 

• Coupon apps and websites: The customer lifecycle usually includes more engagement if a discount’s in the picture. 
• Email marketing specialists: Either create pre-built email templates to promote your brand or let the pros do the heavy lifting. 
• Cashback services: These guys can easily predict future customer actions with the right loyalty reward. 
• Influencers: Trust them to know your customer profile to the ‘t and report on story replies, instant messages, comments, and other engagement sources. 
• Digital content sites and publishers: Take your pick of high-traffic sites, even news sources that create content into print.
• Social media influencers: Offer them branded templates or let them take the lead on slammin’ social media content to convert your Instagram audience. 

Admitad offers easy management services to both affiliates and brands, ensuring a mutually beneficial and streamlined partnership. Your new partners have access to reporting features, brand creatives, and affiliate links all in one place. 

Once you pick some affiliates to promote your brand, you can easily manage those relationships with Tapfiliate through personalized messages, custom commission structures, bonuses, and customizable templates for creatives and dynamic content. Our clients love how easy a social media post becomes with clear brand guidelines and templates for different campaign variations.

Then, you can track your new partners’ performance automatically through Tapfiliate’s dashboard. So, Tapfiliate stands out with our unique capability to bring affiliate discovery into your management platform.

What else does Tapfiliate’s Admitad subnetwork access offer to brands?

Benefits of working with a subnetwork:

A subnetwork linked to your affiliate management software offers your affiliate program more cohesion. But what does that cohesion look like? Here are some benefits to consider:

• Quicker business growth and scaling: A subnetwork linked to your affiliate management platform gives you an unparalleled opportunity for growth. You won’t have to put off your multichannel campaigns anymore — launch them in seconds, instead. You’ll notice quicker sales and revenue, and the robust reporting capabilities help you maximize your affiliate marketing strategy and eliminate any hiccups in real time. 
• Affiliate type variety: You don’t have to rely solely on influencers or content publishers as partners — the world is your oyster with Admitad’s various affiliate types, including media buyers, business development partners, cashback services, coupon websites, and much more. 
• Bigger sales, revenue, and traffic volumes: The sheer speed of finding affiliate partnerships on a subnetwork exponentially improves your metrics. You could have ten or 100 or even more affiliates promoting your brand with digital media campaigns at once, taking your revenue and traffic to unprecedented heights!
• Quicker relationship building: The affiliates on Admitad already want to start promoting your brand. You can access partnerships with them immediately and spend less valuable time building those relationships. 
• Efficient payouts: You just need to worry about one payment to the subnetwork — no extra time is needed to pay the affiliates, too, as Admitad takes care of that on their end. 
• No extra commission fees: Many affiliate networks have registration costs and additional commission fees. But when you join the Admitad subnetwork, you only have to worry about the commission you’re paying your affiliate. Admitad will take a 30% cut for themselves and leave the rest to the affiliate. Let’s say you’re used to paying a 15% commission to affiliates. That figure doesn’t change when you use Admitad’s subnetwork. In this case, Admitad will take 4.5% for themselves and leave 10.5% to the affiliate. 

So, what are you waiting for?

Get connected to Admitad Partner Network

Once you sign on with Tapfiliate, accessing the Admitad Partner Network is easy as pie. In your Tapfiliate dashboard, you’ll see an option to connect to the Admitad Partner Network.

You’ll be prompted to plug in a few details about your brand, including contact details, logo, an affiliate program description, brand bidding preferences, and a few technical items like VAT number and address. 

Then, Admitad reviews your info and either approves it or requests more details before uploading your profile to their directory. Now, you sit back and watch as your new affiliates start promoting your brand!

Learn more about our Admitad partner integration. 

Problem 3: Avoid Disputes and paying commissions on refunds

You pay a 10% commission on your average $50 product. If one customer returns the product, you’re out $5 on a commission for a sale that didn’t last. Now, $5 might not seem like a big deal, but every eCommerce, SaaS, and brick-and-mortar business owner knows how quickly those can add up. Multiply that by 1,000, and that $5 turns into $5,000. 

That’s why it’s so important to ensure you DON’T pay commissions on refunded products. But it’s not always easy to catch them. Combing through your affiliate sales is tedious, especially if you have tons of affiliates and a high volume of orders to review. 

On top of that, you run into issues with your affiliates. They might start a dispute and feel they earned the commission regardless, especially if some time has passed. 

If only your affiliate software had integrations to help catch any refunds and manage disputes for you…

Solution: Connect with marketing software that declines commissions on refunds

Tapfiliate has over 37 integrations, some with payment and shopping platforms like Stripe, Woocommerce, Moonclerk, and Memberful (for your SaaS subscription). These integrations automatically decline any commission payments for products with refund requests. Plus, they automatically handle disputes for you, saving you valuable time to focus on other business initiatives. 

Do you use a platform we don’t integrate with? Chances are, we do — you just need a developer to set up custom integrations with a little extra coding. 

Get started with Tapfiliate today

Your marketing software stack should simplify and enhance your affiliate program, not make your life more difficult.

Unfortunately, many affiliate marketing automation software pose significant hurdles to a smooth-running, revenue-generating affiliate program: difficulty finding partners, commissions on refunded products, inefficient dispute resolution, and fraud. 

Here at Tapfiliate, we know the affiliate marketing industry well. We’ve studied other affiliate software and heeded client feedback over the years. Our research and attentiveness have helped us tweak and tailor each of our powerful features to overcome all these challenges.

The result? An end-to-end affiliate marketing platform with smarter insights that streamlines every aspect of your affiliate program. Aka, a fantastic marketing tool for modern marketers who value data-informed strategy. Our clients make more money, build brand awareness, and have seamless, rewarding relationships with their affiliates. 

Ready to become revenue-generating, first-class marketers? Try our free 14-day trial today!

Chrissy Kapralos

Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.