Affiliate Marketing
Scaleo Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing
Affiliate Marketing
Scaleo is a relatively new partnership marketing platform specializing in niche industries like finance, cryptocurrency, iGaming operations, ad agencies, SaaS, and ecommerce. It offers standard tracking, reporting, and analysis features, customizable affiliate marketing campaigns, fraud detection features, and a unified tracking software and affiliate network to see everything in one place.
The main downsides? The price point makes it pretty inaccessible for small businesses and startups, among other kinks. We’ll walk through the ins and outs of the Scaleo affiliate management platform and present Tapfiliate as a more affordable, excellent, value-for-money alternative.
Scaleo has a broad client roster in niche industries that track millions of dollars in monthly affiliate sales. We’ll look at some core features that enable them to do so, like its vast integrations, intuitive dashboard, API, and reporting.
Easy Navigation and Functionality
Many customers cite satisfaction with Scaleo’s intuitive dashboard. It’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, and customizable to display the information most important to your affiliate business priorities.
Quick Setup:
With 26 integrations to affiliate networks and software, ecommerce platforms like Shopify, and web hosts like Squarespace, Scaleo offers a few pathways to streamline the setup process and integrate your affiliate program into your workflow. They offer an out-of-the-box solution to make the set up as seamless as possible. Another pro for setup ease is their integrations for your affiliates, including RedTrack, Keitaro, and Binom.
Most integrations are easy enough to enable on your own, though you might require a developer for a select few.
One thing to note: Scaleo’s pricing fine print lists a $2,400 one-time setup fee to integrate your business’s affiliate program and an additional $1,000 for every subsequent brand you integrate with their system.
Visual Data and Reporting
Scaleo tracks 30+ data points to provide detailed reporting on metrics like clicks, conversion rate, profit, and earnings per click (EPC). They also offer customizable data visualizations on a streamlined dashboard and graphs to make it easy to interpret your reports. The customizable partnership tools also allow you to set default metrics for your performance dashboard.
API:
While Scaleo’s list of 26 integrations is competitively not as extensive as other affiliate marketing solutions, Scaleo also offers an API to help brands build 3rd-party integrations. This allows you to build a custom affiliate portal, automate data transfers, and make your tech workflow more cohesive. Just remember that you’ll almost always need to hire a developer to enable API integrations since marketers won’t usually have the technical expertise to do it.
Fraud Prevention:
Scalaeo’s anti-fraud algorithm is a plus for business security, as it catches fraudulent traffic and multiple accounts and addresses each threat in real time. It also notices suspicious activity to help prevent fraud before it happens. Many of the platform’s reviews on popular review sites mention satisfaction with this feature.
Scaleo tracks both clicks and conversions, with attributions based on customizable filters like affiliate, time and dates, device, locational traffic sources, and more. The platform’s integrations with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify also make it easy to set up your own affiliate program that fits your ecommerce business’s needs.
Additionally, brands can leverage Scaleo’s combined affiliate management software and network to help you streamline affiliate tracking onto one single dashboard instead of logging into two separate reporting dashboards.
Yes, Scaleo is well-known for its cutting-edge AI technology, which enables customization features to help niche businesses make the most of their programs. We’ll walk through a few of their customization functions.
Design customization
Businesses can make their platform dashboard and affiliate portal as on-brand as possible with customizable design elements like:
You can also opt for completely white-labeled pages to remove the “Powered by Scaleo” text at the footer of the page. Just keep in mind that this is only available for the much more expensive, custom, premium plan at $2,200/month.
Content customization
Adjust what you see in the platform down to section names and adjustable report displays like:
Additional pages customizations
Finally, Scaleo offers the option to add completely new pages to enhance your program and affiliate experience. Choose to add static or dynamic content like app sharing, tools, guides, and promotions to boost engagement. Additionally, you can include customizable internal and external links and custom menu points to make navigation more brand-aligned.
Scaleo offers a few different pricing options to meet diverse business needs. They have two sets of tiers: one for ecommerce businesses for brands that sell online products or services, and another more expensive tier set for all other types of niche businesses.
Additionally, Scaleo offers a 20% discount for businesses that opt for annual billing.
Scaleo has customers in specialty niches like ecommerce, finance, iGaming, SaaS, crypto, and partnership marketing niches. Here’s a quick look at some of their customers:
Popular review sites like Capterra and G2 generally display high ratings for Scaleo in the high 4s on a 5-point scale. However, it’s important to note that there aren’t too many reviews on each platform (31 on Capterra and 23 on G2), which might not show the most all-encompassing picture of their customers’ experiences.
Positive reviews praise Scaleo’s intuitive and customizable, fresh interface, easy setup, and responsive customer support team. Points of criticism include limited integrations, sporadic bugs, limited payment options for affiliates, and an expensive price point.
One user Henno says that they wished the platform had more integrations and reporting features:
Curious if Scaleo is right for your affiliate program? Walk with us as we guide you through a bulletproof selection process to ensure your affiliate software choice is the best fit for your brand’s needs!
You’re at a board meeting (or Zoom call) with your marketing team. The topic: What’s the biggest obstacle to your affiliate program? This helps you identify key features and functionalities crucial for any affiliate software you integrate with your program. Important functionalities include real-time tracking, detailed analytics, customizable commission structures, and easy integration with your existing systems.
You should also consider the unique phase of your affiliate program. If you’re pre-launch, you might seek a platform that offers affiliate recruitment. If you’re established, you might look for software with scaling potential.
Cue the comprehensive market research. Peruse through performance marketing industry journals and roundups to find affiliate software candidates with a solid reputation. You can also check out industry reviews, customer testimonials, and case studies to assess an affiliate tracking software’s strengths, weaknesses, and ideal client type.
Remember, affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing and evolving industry. Meaning? Give equal attention to the veteran affiliate software players with decades of experience and the newer players with innovative solutions.
Think about your answer to step one and narrow it down to specific features that you simply cannot sacrifice in your affiliate software choice.
These might include functionalities like fraud protection if you’ve lost revenue to shady affiliates in the past, accurate tracking across multiple devices, or customizable reports to deliver the most important metrics and insights for your affiliate strategy. Keep a checklist of these non-negotiables to help narrow down your options.
Seamless integrations aren’t just convenient — they’re essential for a smooth affiliate operation and accurate tracking. Look for affiliate tracking software that can easily integrate into your existing tech stack. But don’t just stop at the software’s online list of integrations. Check compatibility with your website platform, CRM, payment gateways, and any other tools you use.
Affiliate software costs range significantly depending on the platform’s niche, subscription tier, add-ons, and additional fees for premium features and setup. Research realistic figures for software to help establish a clear budget for your platform of choice. You might also check online review sites to get an idea of what similar businesses to yours are paying for software.
Affiliate software fees can quickly add up. That’s why a free trial is an essential component of your selection process to give you peace of mind before making a financial commitment. Check if the software providers offer a free trial or demo version. This allows you to test the software’s functionalities, user interface, and compatibility with your business needs.
Is it easy to navigate from point A to B? Adjust affiliate commissions? Interpret conversion data? Export important data reports? The best affiliate software has a user-friendly, intuitive interface that softens the learning curve and streamlines your experience.
Affiliate programs deal with financial transactions, personal data, and confidential business details. Meaning? Security is paramount and a non-negotiable for all brands looking to adapt their affiliate program to new software. As you assess each software candidate, look for security features like:
Customer service can make software adoption smooth or a downright nightmare. If you notice countless complaints about customer support on review sites for a particular software, that’s a huge red flag.
Look for customer support praise as well as a wide variety of support options like email, chat, and phone. Software with 24/7 available live chat (like Tapfiliate) are ideal for quick resolutions when you need them.
Speaking of Tapfiliate…
Scaleo attracts plenty of niche brands to its platform for its experience catering to specific niches like iGaming, cryptocurrency, and unique SaaS brands. But despite its robust customization features and niche experience? It’s still an astronomically priced affiliate solution compared to other options like Tapfiliate.
Craving an affiliate solution with abundant features and seamless integrations at an affordable price? Tapfiliate is a solid fit.
Tapfiliate offers pricing and software plans to suit businesses of every size, stage, and affiliate program phase. Our fees are much lower than Scaleo’s regardless of the tier, and you get more bang for your buck when you look at tracked conversions and other valuable features. Plus, our overage fees for conversions are lower at $15 per 1,000 conversions (and $10 for the pro plan), while Scaleo’s sit at $20. This makes Tapfiliate the natural choice for brands with lower clicks and higher conversions.
Here’s a quick peek at our pricing plans:
Commissions aren’t a one-size-fits-all aspect of your affiliate program. They need flexibility and consistent tweaking to truly garner you the results and revenue you crave. Tapfiliate’s flexible commissions offer ultimate control with flat-fee or percentage-based commissions, recurring and lifetime commissions, and even product-specific commissions (pro plan) to ensure your payouts are consistent with the ROI you’re comfortable with.
Beyond that? Set up automated commission increases to retain high-value affiliates. Dollar per lead, percentage increase, higher commissions for specific products — the choice is yours, always. Contrarily, Scaleo only offers this level of customization for commissions with an enterprise ecommerce plan, which gets pricey and much less affordable for smaller businesses compared to Tapfiliate.
Tapfiliate’s MLM capabilities leverage the networks of each and every one of your affiliates. Incentivize them with bonuses and commissions to recruit other potential affiliates to your program, with adjustable commission MLM levels to best suit the value each affiliate brings.
Tapfiliate has 35+ integrations to a wide range of software across niches like email marketing, web hosting, payment processing, ecommerce solutions, and more. Some of our most popular integrations are Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Wix. Additionally, our direct integration with Zapier makes it easier than ever to automate workflows in and around your affiliate program so that your operations don’t miss a beat.
And if you don’t see your favorite tool on our integration list? Harness the REST API or JavaScript for completely custom integrations to best suit your program.
Let’s see how Scaleo and Tapfiliate compare in program management features, pricing, customer support, and affiliate tracking.
Affiliate Program Management:
Scaleo’s omni-channel dashboards and overall user experience allow brands to view all performance marketing channels in one place. This is a valuable feature for larger brands or agencies with multiple affiliate programs or large-scale affiliate programs with several moving parts. You can also keep tabs on each affiliate and offers they’re promoting, as well as banner performance, and leverage those insights to grow your program.
Tapfiliate’s affiliate program management features are more inclusive to suit large and small businesses alike. We offer affiliate recruitment through an automated customer referral program to incentivize customers to promote your brand. On top of that, our multi-level marketing capabilities help you leverage your affiliates’ networks to bring in more affiliates to promote your brand as well.
As for commissions? Our flexibility and variety are a source of engagement and retention for your affiliates. You can easily group affiliates with different affiliate commission rates and types, and automate performance-based increases or bonuses for further affiliate engagement. We also make it easy to share branded materials and social media assets to smooth out your affiliate’s workload. The best part? All these features are available at a much more affordable price point than Scaleo.
Tracking and Reporting Analytics
Tracking and reporting functionalities are pretty robust on both platforms. Scaleo focuses its affiliate tracking based on performance goals by metric. For example, you can set up goals based on cost per lead (CPL), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA) and view them all within the same reporting dashboard. The platform’s in-depth reporting features include individual affiliate stats, revenue figures, payouts and status, profit and percentage-based changes for easy interpretation.
Tapfiliate offers in-depth, customizable, real-time reports with rich filtration potential to dive deeper into the metrics that matter most to your business. View performance insights based on dates, affiliates, assets, landing pages, operating system (OS), browser, country, metadata, and affiliate program (if you have more than one).
Customization:
Both Tapfiliate and Scaleo offer brands a suite of customization options. Scaleo allows brands to customize content like section names and reporting metrics, design attributes like themes and colors, as well as additional pages like promotional materials and affiliate guides.
Tapfiliate also offers customization across the entire platform, like:
While both Tapfiliate and Scaleo offer white-labeling features to solidify your business’s branding, Tapfiliate offers this feature at a lower price.
Support:
Customer support channels are similar across both platforms. Tapfiliate and Scaleo offer supporting documentation and helpful articles to help marketers and brand solve issues autonomously.
Additionally, both offer dedicated account managers depending on the subscription tier you choose. However, Tapfiliate stands out with its 24/7 live chat feature for immediate resolutions, while Scaleo only offers a 24-hour window for response (6 hours for the more expensive, $2,200 subscription tier). Tapfiliate also allows you to see the system status of our software in addition to speaking to customer service agents.
Pricing
Scaleo’s pricing is prohibitive for new startups or businesses just starting out with affiliate marketing. Similarly, you can find more value for money in Tapfiliate’s offerings, no matter your business type.
For example, Scaleo’s ecommerce plan features up to 40,000 clicks tracked at $500 per month. On the contrary, Tapfiliate offers over 100,000 tracked clicks at a much more affordable $149 in our pro plan. And if you’re not an ecommerce business, you’ll face even higher fees with Scaleo’s standard plans that start at $1,400 per month.
Scaleo is an affiliate tracking software with real-time reporting, click and link tracking, and robust customization features that cater to brands in niche industries like iGaming, cryptocurrency, ad agencies, and more.
Scaleo has expensive pricing that alienates brand with new affiliate programs, startups, or businesses with simply lower budgets. Furthermore, customer reviews cite dissatisfaction with the platform’s value for money, limited integrations, and high learning curve. And while the platform offers custom API access and webhooks, workflow automation will always be limited without a seamless Zapier integration.
Tapfiliate: Tapfiliate is a cloud-based, commitment-free affiliate tracking software that enables businesses to create, manage, and optimize their own affiliate programs with real-time reporting, multi-language support, customization features, flexible commissions, and affordable pricing plans.
Everflow: Everflow is an affiliate marketing platform with analytics, attribution, and automation features to track and optimize performance campaigns in real-time, though they require a hefty 6-month commitment from all users.
Post Affiliate Pro: This widely used affiliate tracking software offers a comprehensive set of tools like pixel and cookie tracking, promotional materials and banners, audit logs, and flexible commissions to manage and scale your affiliate program.
Affise: This performance marketing platform helps brands track campaign performance in real time, automate mass actions, and recruit new affiliates from their global network.
Impact: This all-in-one management platform provides a suite of products for recruiting and managing various forms of partnerships, including affiliates.
Ready to level up your affiliate program with more efficient workflows, customizable branding, and streamlined affiliate sales and revenue? Sign up for 👉 Tapfiliate’s free 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.