A well-thought-out affiliate partnership can take your online business to the next level, growing your bottom line exponentially in a blink. Indeed, you can only go so far on your own. To draw big numbers, you need reliable affiliate partners.
- Phonexa’s affiliate marketing platform – part of the company’s all-encompassing lead management software suite – will help you track, evaluate, and grow your affiliate marketing campaigns while issuing fair and timely remuneration to your partners.
But not only that. You need to track your affiliates – like you track your leads – to be sure everyone performs as expected and experiences value.
Luckily, you don’t have to take it on trust with your partners. Up-to-date affiliate software can dissect your every affiliate partnership and campaign while issuing due payments on time.
Affiliate tracking software gives you every chance to join the cohort of the 15% most successful affiliates earning up to $50,000 a month or even the 4% making over $150,000 a month.
Read more to learn about affiliate tracking and why you need automation for better results.
How Affiliate Tracking Works and Why You Need It
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is when a publisher (affiliate) promotes an advertiser’s (merchant’s) product or service for a fee, which can be paid for a lead (PPC), click (PPC), sales (PPS), or impression (PPI) depending on the affiliate agreement.
Whether publisher or advertiser, you can search for affiliate partners on your own or join an affiliate network with hundreds and thousands of leads traded at any given time.
- In an affiliate market, publishers and advertisers set their goals – the price per lead, the quality of leads, the number of leads to buy and sell, etc. – and usually get their orders fulfilled immediately, buying or selling leads in an instant.
Whether independently or as a part of an affiliate network, affiliate marketing can grant you an ROI way higher than other marketing channels.
Affiliate Tracking Types: Cookies vs. Cookieless Tracking
The two basic affiliate tracking concepts are cookies and cookieless tracking:
- Cookie tracking. Cookies are the user’s data stored in a web browser, allowing for tracking customers as they browse your website. However, cookie tracking has two significant disadvantages:
- Users can delete cookies, depriving you of customer data.
- Cookies can’t track the same user across multiple devices and browsers, losing track of customers as they switch from computers to mobile phones, from Opera to Google Chrome.
Cookie-related risks can be mitigated to some extent by setting a high cookie expiration time – say, a few years – but this still won’t prevent users from switching devices and browsers.
- Cookieless tracking. Instead of relying on cookies, cookieless tracking collects information using an invisible script that is activated only when a user enters a website. This way, you can collect first-party data that doesn’t require user consent, connecting a specific user to a specific affiliate campaign and getting some behavioral insights.
But then again, cookie or cookieless, your affiliate tracking must be automated.
Affiliate Tracking Software to Grow Your Bottom Line
To elevate your affiliate campaigns, you need to automate your affiliate tracking.
Affiliate marketing software can:
- Improve your payments by enabling tailor-made commission structures and automated payouts.
- Grow your bottom line by providing granular reports on affiliate campaigns and including in-depth analytics on every customer touchpoint.
- Prevent fraud by exposing unreliable affiliates and detecting repeated clicks.
Once set up, affiliate tracking software can process any workload automatically, saving resources you may need for key strategic decisions and work that cannot be automated.
