Trouble getting the desired revenues in affiliate marketing? You might be missing out on tracking your affiliate commissions. Yes! It is one of the biggest reasons why you’re not getting a good commission.
Ask a question yourself, how could you determine which affiliates are most productive and which ones need assistance until you have a system in place to monitor their commissions? How can you know which affiliate activities are bringing in the most clicks?
Of course, you can’t. Luckily, with affiliate commission tracking software, you can quickly begin tracking affiliate commissions and setting individual rates. You may choose which affiliates to reward or offer with some additional aid by analyzing clicks, visits, and transactions.
Affiliate marketing now relies heavily on quantitative metrics. Tracking software included in your affiliate dashboard makes it easy to discover which approaches provide the highest conversion rates.
In this article, we'll walk you through the process of calculating affiliate commissions through affiliate commission tracking software. So, let's begin!
How does affiliate tracking software work?
Now that we've covered why and how affiliate tracking software is used, we can move on to more complex subjects like tracking strategies for affiliate marketing. Advertisers may use a variety of tracking mechanisms for affiliate marketing. We cover the fundamentals in detail below so you may pick and choose the ones that are most applicable to your company.
1. Cookies
Cookies are the standard tracking mechanism for affiliate marketing. We don't need to learn anything new about them since we encounter them at so many locations today. The purpose of this tracking mechanism is to recognize the user during its subsequent visit to the site.
Cookies will remember information about a returning visitor, and after two months, the advertiser will get a comprehensive report on those facts. After the introduction of the GDPR regulation, many users erased cookies from their browsers, thereby resetting the tracking report for marketers to 0.
2. Monitoring redirect URLs
Postback URL Tracking is one of the most used techniques of tracking now since it is also one of the most precise. The advertiser's server keeps all the necessary information for Postback URL Tracking to function, thus the resulting tracking report is always correct. Additionally, the accuracy is much higher than that of regular cookies.
In addition, implementing this way of monitoring couldn't be simpler. ID tags are appended to the advertiser's URL by an affiliate network. When a customer sees a particular landing page, the ID included in the URL is immediately changed to reflect the customer's current session.
It's more of a technical and difficult process, but the end product is worth it. Postback-tracking URLs are a great option for those who use many affiliate networks.
3. Per product tracking
This method is useful for retailers that provide different commission rates for different ad campaigns. This method allows you to keep tabs on each product separately, keeping your commissions straight across various marketing efforts.
You may modify them to reflect your own tastes, such as for a certain brand or kind of item. This choice might be useful if you run many virtual stores.
4. Impression tracking
Using this technique, information about every ad or link a person sees is made visible. In this context, "impression" means that the person encountered the ad but chose to ignore it. Finding out what turns off prospective buyers from your advertisements is a great way to figure out where you can make improvements.
You'll see a rise in sales if you start satisfying your customers' wishes. These are the most common approaches used to measure the effectiveness of affiliate marketing. However, there are certain forms of software that warrant the use of more sophisticated methods.
5. Offline monitoring
With coupons, you can even monitor them offline. Affiliate marketers and social media influencers typically promote discounts by adding a unique code and their name to existing promotional offers. Some kinds of software have this functionality to trace the bought track, even if it comes in an offline manner if a client employs this technique and fills in the influencer's name.
6. Lifetime commissions
Lifetime Commissions is one of the best affiliate marketing monitoring solutions, however, it's only compatible with a subset of applications. When an affiliate refers a customer to your company and that customer subsequently registers or makes a purchase, the software may automatically credit the affiliate with the sale.
If the program provides this capability, the consumer may continue to use the same device or switch locations without losing their place in the transaction. In this setup, the advertiser is solely responsible for selecting the information that will be used to associate the affiliate with the customer. An email address, customer loyalty account, etc.
7. Action tracking
An action tracker monitors how a user interacts with a certain advertisement. When a consumer clicks on a limited-time offer, some kinds of software may trace their path to your site to see whether they are interested enough to watch a video you provided.
In addition, you may use this function to see which aspects of your website are most appealing to visitors. That is to say, you will learn which articles people read the most and which ones hold their interest the longest.
Tracking may be done on a product-by-product basis, which is very useful for companies running several affiliate programs with different compensation rates for each product. In such a situation, you should seek a program that has the option to monitor employees' by-products used.
Incorrect commission calculations for non-campaign-related products may be avoided by using this strategy to keep tabs on each product individually. You may easily set it up to be different for each product, category, or store.
Affiliate commission tracking: What you can expect
Affiliates are essential to the success of any affiliate marketing business. This concept is effective because it incentivizes word-of-mouth promotion from independent artists by providing financial incentives.
Affiliates receive a commission when they refer new, paying consumers to your website. Your company may benefit from increased revenue while also rewarding affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing has a high return on investment (ROI) since you only pay for successful sales.
However, keeping tabs on affiliate earnings is a must for program success. You may ensure that you're paying your affiliates fairly while making the most of your revenues by comparing your sales income to total affiliate commissions.
In addition, commission monitoring allows you to see how well each affiliate is doing. Inactive or underperforming affiliates might be encouraged with words of praise or sent branded materials to use in their campaign.
Features of affiliate tracking software
Thanks to the technology that has made it easy for humans to monitor their useful information in a short amount of time. If we look at the crypto industry, many people have been using auto bots like Bitsoft 360 to track their trades and monitor price fluctuations.
Similarly, affiliate marketing software has multiple features, each of which works together to provide you with precise data. But before we get to it, let's take a look at the best features of affiliate tracking software.
1. Various tracking choices
Affiliate tracking is essential, thus any good program for this purpose should include several different methods. Protections against geolocation and tracking by untrusted browsers are essential.
Pixels, URLs, and other such sophisticated choices are your responsibility. Maintain a dashboard to manage and monitor affiliate performance, commissions, and top referrals in addition to standard leak monitoring.
2. Adaptability
The ability to adapt to new circumstances should be built into every tracking system. You won't be able to utilize the program otherwise. Marketers want software modifications since they must first locate an appropriate match for your affiliate program. You may also make adjustments to your host site as your network grows in size and popularity.
3. Fraud detection mechanism
Every company should be aware of the ambiguities that exist in the affiliate marketing sector. Yet many businesses fall victim to fraud because they blindly depend on software without verifying that it has the most recent upgrades and fraud-detecting versions.
Software updates are necessary because of technological advancements. Up-to-date fraud detection tools are a must for every affiliate marketing monitoring platform. In the alternative, you risk losing money on unprofitable clicks and views.
4. Customer service
Affiliate monitoring software is an investment that should be backed by first-rate customer service. Even if it's simple to set up or use, you may still require assistance from the company's customer service department.
Since this is one of the most important tools for your company, it's important to research customer support's responsiveness and availability before making a purchase.
3 Best affiliate commission tracking software
1. CrewFire
CrewFire is an all-inclusive platform for brand advocates. It combines features from influencer and marketing programs with those of affiliate networks to facilitate the recruitment of advocates for brands. It enables DTC e-commerce stores to transform their consumers into an army of advocates, leading to more recommendations, user-generated content, and social media activity.
With CrewFire's affiliate program, you can incentivize brand advocates to produce content for you by paying them a commission on sales they bring in. CrewFire provides assistance in developing a rewarding ambassador affiliate program for your business and its partners.
With CrewFire, you can monitor affiliates and sales to find out which brand advocates are most effective at attracting new customers.
2. PartnerStack
You can always find new ways to improve your affiliate marketing strategy by making use of PartnerStack's market of over 65,000 B2B SaaS partners. It distinguishes out because it can accommodate a wide variety of cooperation initiatives all at once. PartnerStack provides you with unique links that keep tabs on each click and transaction automatically.
3. Impact.com
Impact.com is a relationship management platform that centralizes tools essential to the administration of the complete partner lifetime. Brands and partners alike may benefit from the use of technology to streamline processes, analyze data, and improve results.
Shopify, Walmart, Lenovo, and Uber, to name a few, credit it with significantly increasing their sales and expanding their customer bases.
To properly attribute revenue to each affiliate, Impact.com employs sophisticated monitoring technologies. Affiliates' contributions to conversions are properly recognized across all devices thanks to a combination of cookie-based and non-cookie-based tracking technologies.
Voluum
Voluum is the fastest and most reliable affiliate tracking software available. It provides up-to-the-minute campaign data in an easy-to-read dashboard format. Voluum is the tracking software for you if you want straightforward navigation and the highlighting of actionable data for efficient affiliate marketing.
Voluum works with more than 50 affiliate networks, making campaign management more simpler. It logs ad impressions and organic visitors, as well as examines your landing page for probable issues, so you can fix them and increase conversions.
Voluum is able to accurately disclose the results of your affiliate program since it is integrated with traffic sources like Google Ads and Facebook.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is the most cutting-edge and effective method of monetizing a website. It's adaptable, so it works well for every size and kind of internet company.
However, hiring an affiliate marketer is just half the battle; closely monitoring their progress is equally essential. Accurate monitoring rapport is essential for advertisers to gain proficiency and discover new avenues for growth in affiliate marketing.
With the use of affiliate marketing software, advertisers may monitor results using various forms of monitoring data.
This affiliate marketing manual will introduce you to the fundamentals of tracking that every good program should have, as well as more complex and trendy tracking techniques, their justifications for popularity, and the benefits of using such a tool in your business.
