Succeeding in the affiliate marketing industry requires more than creating content and joining an affiliate program. The right affiliate marketing tools are necessary to help you level up this game and be consistent.
Given the many options available on the market, which affiliate tools should you use then?
In this article, we have collected a series of practical solutions for your affiliate marketing strategies. These amazing automated tools serve various purposes and even work smoothly for newbies.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Definition
Affiliate marketing is a popular model that enables more trustworthy and subtle advertising. Influencer Marketing Hub says more than 80% of online publishers generate a side income from affiliate marketing in 2023.
Instead of running multiple banner ads on your website, you can include affiliate links for products/services in the content. When a visitor clicks on these links and purchases something, the brand will pay you a commission.
You can also run paid ads for your affiliate products besides inserting links in your content. This allows you to concentrate on delivering messages to target customers rather than producing too much content.
Common types of affiliate marketing tools
Take a look at some of the basic tools for affiliate marketing practices:
- Link tracking software: Track the number of clicks on each affiliate link to compare their performances.
- Analytics software: Track how your affiliate campaigns are doing, including conversions, clicks, and overall revenue.
- Email marketing software: Enable your email list management and distributes targeted emails to promote affiliate offers.
- Content creation tools: Produce high-quality content for product advertisements and attract potential customers.
- Social media management tools: Manage all social media accounts, create and schedule posts to advertise your affiliate offers.
Why do you need affiliate marketing tools?
Generate revenue better
Your affiliate marketing strategies will benefit directly from these tools as you can monitor and generate sales from your affiliate websites.
Rather than guessing to find the best-performing strategies, the collected data and numbers will tell you where your conversions come from. If you are still using spreadsheet-based systems, it is time to adapt to more advanced tools within your budget.
Streamline workflow to save time
No need to open numerous tabs in your browser at once anymore. Affiliate marketing tools are developed to help streamline your workflow and optimize each task. Why waste time tracking stuff when a single platform can manage your whole program and activities?
Some tools will be free of charge, but you can check out ones with plans for individuals and teamwork premium plans.
What to look for in an affiliate marketing tool?
So which essential factors you should consider when choosing the best affiliate marketing tools?
- Ease of use: It is best to find user-friendly tools, especially if you are a beginner, that do not require much technical knowledge.
- Pricing: The cost-effective options here benefit online businesses and hustlers, some even including free affiliate marketing tools.
- Support: Your selected tools need to provide user support, whether via a discussion forum, live chat, or resource pages.
What about the must-have features?
- Campaign tracking and management: Monitor and follow active campaigns, track their activities, and notify technical issues and underperformance.
- Real-time analysis: Give detailed, real-time analytics and reports based on data collected from the automatic management, resulting in thorough marketing decisions.
- Streamlined payouts: Make payment schemes and commission visible, or set a payout framework for certain tasks to enhance straightforwardness.
UpPromote – Top-recommended & Comprehensive affiliate marketing tool
Right now, you must think there is no all-in-one tool that covers most affiliate marketing aspects. Sounds impossible, right?
Meet UpPromote – the ultimate solution to all of your affiliate needs. It is the top-recommended app, endorsed by many worldwide users, experts, influencers, and courses.
This platform is widely known as a multi-functional assistant that helps many affiliate marketers fulfill their requirements and reach their goals. Also, brand owners will love this app for enabling influencer, loyalty, referral, and affiliate marketing simultaneously, depending on your needs.
Pricing
- FREE
- Growth: $29.99/month
- Professional: $89.99/month
- Enterprise: $199.99/month
UpPromote Features
Discover UpPromote marketplace
Whether you are an affiliate marketer or a business representative looking for opportunities in the industry, joining the UpPromote marketplace will bring many great offers.
Publishers can find and promote affiliate products for well-known brands worldwide, while brands can post about exciting partnership chances to get more people signing up for their offers. Moreover, affiliates are able to filter available programs in this marketplace based on categories, channels, target audience, industry, etc.
Simple integration and migration
What if you are already using another affiliate solution like GoaffPro, Automizely or Refersion? Piece of cake. UpPromote enables free migration, so all your critical data (like affiliates or referral) can be transferred in a few clicks.
Plus, it integrates powerfully with many other services to help expand your affiliate campaign, including email marketing services (MailChimp, Klaviyo), Shopify functions (Shopify customer sync), subscription order services (Appstle, Recharge, Seal)t, etc.
Real-time tracking
The tracking system in this app is based on real-time, which is constantly updated to record new conversions as soon as they occur. You can choose from multiple tracking methods like emails, products, coupons, and affiliate links.
Powerful management
Regarding the convenient communication options that UpPromote offers, you can easily keep in touch with your team. With the help of customized email templates and white-labeled affiliate pages, the entire affiliate campaign is under your control.
Ease of Use
Worrying that you will have difficulty setting up UpPromote? Most of its users praise this app for its ease of use, which is why many new affiliate marketers choose it among various affiliate marketing tools for beginners. See it for yourself.
Effortless setup
The onboarding process only takes a few minutes, providing you with a Setup checklist and Quickstart guide to understand how things work.
Automized process
You can save much time by using UpPromote’s automated features, such as automatically generating affiliate links and coupons.
Dedicated support
Get ready for 24/7 the most supportive assistance with live chat, video instructions, and detailed documents.
Tracking Affiliate Program Tools
Tracking your performance in one affiliate program is easy, but what if you join multiple programs or run several campaigns at the same time?
You will need automatic tools that do all the hard work and give back reliable results; then, your job is to identify and improve underperforming factors.
| Tracking Tools | AffJet | ThirstyAffiliates | Voluum | Google Analytics |
| Tracking type | Affiliate network | Affiliate links | Ad metrics | Website metrics |
| Best feature | Monitors various affiliate program performances at once | Enables link management and cloaking | Tracks ads metrics and supports diverse ads formats | Tracks visitor behaviors and website performance |
| Most significant drawback | Lacks customer service | Only supports WordPress websites | Lacks customer support | Interface is rather hard to navigate |
| Pricing | FREEStandard: £5/monthMedium: £15/monthLarge: £30/monthCustom: On quote | FREEBasic: $159/yearPlus: $259/yearAdvanced: $399/year | Startup: $499/monthAgency: $999/monthEnterprise: $1999/month | Standard version: FreePremium version (Google Analytics 360): Tier-based, starts at $150,000/year |
AffJet – Affiliate Network Performance Tool
Affiliate marketers who collaborate simultaneously with multiple affiliate programs may have a hard time monitoring each performance. AffJet allows you to manage all this from a single dashboard, making it easier to see how each program is doing and get reports for its earnings.
After adding your current programs into the system, it automatically combines these data to provide detailed figures. In addition to this feature, AffJet can recognize trends and notify you of poor-performing links to optimize your campaigns.
AffJet Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Collects data from hundreds of affiliate programs
- Provides comprehensive performance reports
- Detects low-efficient affiliate links
Cons:
- No customer service
Pricing
- FREE
- Standard: £5/month
- Medium: £15/month
- Large: £30/month
- Custom: On quote
ThirstyAffiliates: Affiliate Tracking Tool
It is tough to manage all your affiliate links across multiple campaigns or networks. Luckily, you can rely on a link management tool like Thirsty Affiliates to monitor and cloak these links.
The software provides an advanced feature of in-depth link analytics so you will know which ones are working, even in a specific country. Other useful functions are automatic link keywords and imports, event notifications, reports, etc.
Despite having paid versions, Thirsty Affiliates is still considered a fantastic option among free affiliate marketing tools that work well for beginners and low-budget affiliates.
ThirstyAffiliates Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Enables link management and cloaking
- Offers analytics and reports
Cons:
- Only supports WordPress websites
Pricing
- FREE
- Basic: $159/year
- Plus: $259/year
- Advanced: $399/year
Voluum: Affiliate Ad Tracking Tool
Voluum is a helpful and easy-to-navigate software to track your affiliate ads by monitoring their metrics, such as clicks, visits, and revenue, on one dashboard.
It relies on trustworthy traffic sources like Facebook and Google Ads to measure your ad performance. The wide range of ad formats this tool supports tracking includes social media ads, search ads, native ads, push notifications, and display banners.
Suspicious traffic from bots can be easily detected with Voluum and eliminated from your site immediately.
Voluum Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Tracks various ads metrics
- Supports multiple types of ads
- Identifies and blocks suspicious traffic
Cons:
- No customer support
- A bit high priced
Pricing
- Startup: $499/month
- Agency: $999/month
- Enterprise: $1999/month
Google Analytics – Web Analytics Tool
Features
You simply cannot spell the most reliable and best tool for affiliate marketing without Google Analytics. It provides detailed insights into your web performance to optimize affiliate sites and increase lead generation.
The Google Event feature lets you follow on-site engagement to know who clicks on your affiliate links. Its dashboard also displays how long a visitor stays on your site and recognizes pages with the most or least traffic generation.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Analyzes web performance in detail
- Tracks visitor engagement and behaviors
Cons:
- Rather complicated user interface
- Few alerts when content is underperforming
Pricing
- Standard version: Free
- Premium version (Google Analytics 360): Tier-based, starts at $150,000/year
Market Research Affiliate Tools
Market research is never something you should do manually. These 2 tools allow you to conduct relevant research based on ads and keyword performance on affiliate websites and even analyze your top competitors’ campaigns.
| Market Research Affiliate Tools | WordStream | iSpionage |
| Analytics base | Pay per click (PPC) marketing | Pay per click (PPC) marketing |
| Analytics type | Ads performance, keywords | Ads performance, keywords |
| Best feature | Grades web performance and suggests steps for improvement | Analyzes competitors’ overall ad performances |
| Most significant drawback | Lacks SEO features | Provided analytics are sometimes confusing |
| Pricing | N/A | FREEStarter: $59/monthProfessional: $99/monthAdvanced: $299/month |
WordStream Google Ads Performance Grader – Website Ad Performance Tool
Some of the free tools WordStream has is the Google Ads Performance Grader. It analyzes your ads based on pay per click (PPC) marketing practices, producing reports that grade your overall performance and other scores for account activity, spending, impression shares, and quality score.
What is good is that with performance marketing tools like this, you will find practical guides to improve your current score and strengthen ad performance. If you run mobile ads, this tool also evaluates your efforts to ensure these ads are fully optimized on mobile devices.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Evaluates and grades web performance
- Provides tips to improve performance
- Ensures optimized ads for mobile devices
Cons:
- No SEO features
- Complex pricing structure related to ad spend
Pricing
N/A
iSpionage – Competitor Ad Insights
When it comes to affiliate marketing resources, your data and performance are not the only factors that matter. iSpionage is a specialized tool that analyzes ad campaigns from your competitors, including the number of their current PPC ads and keywords they are optimizing.
To understand the best practices possible, the campaign watch function produces weekly reports highlighting changes in your competitors’ campaigns, such as search engine marketing performance, landing page strategies, and A/B test results.
At the same time, iSpionage offers an index that assesses ad effectiveness to find your competitors’ profitable ads. Analyzing these will benefit your ad copywriting to generate more clicks.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Analyzes competitors’ ad campaigns
- Reports changes in their performances
- Examines profitable ads to improve own effectiveness
Cons:
- Provided analytics are sometimes confusing
- Not for organic search strategies
Pricing
- FREE
- Starter: $59/month
- Professional: $99/month
- Advanced: $299/month
Affiliate Networks Tools
Whether you are a publisher looking for collaboration opportunities or advertisers wanting to promote affiliate offers, these affiliate networks will help you build sustainable relationships with trusted partners.
| CJ | ShareASale | Awin | |
| Market volume | More than 1,009,099 contacts | More than 155,386 contacts | More than 42,605 contacts |
| Best feature | An extensive network with reputable partners | Diverse tools for affiliates, agencies, and merchants | Automatic plugin turns product links into affiliate links |
| Most significant drawback | High initial and ongoing fees | Outdated web interface | Growing affiliate programs is complicated |
| Pricing | One-time fee: $3000Deposit: $3000Renewal: $500 | One-time fee: $625Deposit: $125 | Access: £75 + VAT/monthAccelerate: £199 + VAT/monthAdvanced: £399 + VAT/month |
CJ
Need help between too many affiliate program options? New beginners should join large affiliate marketplaces like UpPromote and CJ with thousands of merchants in various sizes and niches, such as GoPro and Grammarly.
Available affiliate programs will be listed based on their earning potential, including 7-day earnings per click (EPC), 3-month EPC, and network earnings. You can filter the criteria according to your requirements to find the most suitable affiliate marketing programs.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Giant network with many popular merchants
- Programs are listed based on specific criteria
Cons:
- High initial and ongoing fees
Pricing
- One-time fee: $3000
- Deposit: $3000
- Renewal: $500
ShareASale
ShareASale is a platform that brings affiliates, agencies, and merchants into one place and enables partnerships that help all stakeholders grow. Most users are fond of this network for its transparent affiliate payment system.
Agencies and merchants can manage their affiliate programs with helpful features like custom commissions or advanced tracking methods. On the other hand, affiliates will benefit from its user-friendly tools of a custom link generator and real-time reports.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Straightforward, clear payment system
- Diverse tools for affiliates, agencies, and merchants
Cons:
- Outdated web interface
Pricing
- One-time fee: $625
- Deposit: $125
Awin
Another well-known affiliate marketing network to consider is Awin, connecting thousands of publishers and advertisers worldwide. Its impressive tools are the determining factor in many successful affiliate campaigns.
Affiliates will have diverse niches to choose from, for example, retail and shopping, finance and insurance, or travel affiliate programs. Awin also offers a smart Convert-a-Link plugin to automatically turn your product links into unique, trackable affiliate links.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Various advertisers with different niches
- Plugin turns product links into affiliate links
Cons:
- Unclear page level reports
- Rather difficult to grow affiliate program
Pricing
- Access: £75 + VAT/month
- Accelerate: £199 + VAT/month
- Advanced: £399 + VAT/month
Affiliate Marketing Tools – Content Generator & Optimization
Besides monitoring the entire campaign performance, you also need to work on more in-depth aspects of affiliate marketing, such as web content and landing pages. Consider combining all these tools at once to optimize your workflow.
| PageFly | Grammarly | Hootsuite | CoSchedule | |
| Optimization aspect | Page builder | Content | Social media activities | Content |
| Best feature | Drag-and-drop technology enables page builder | Reviews various document types on multiple platforms | Enables complete social media management | Monitors content creation, publishing, and scheduling |
| Most significant drawback | Might be complicated for newbies | Potential risks of data leakage | No customer support | Rather complicated panel |
| Pricing | FREEPay as you go: $24/monthEnterprise: $199/month | FREEPremium: $12/member/monthBusiness: $15/member/month | Professional: $99/monthTeam: $249/monthBusiness: Starts at $739/monthEnterprise: Contact | FREEPro: $29/user/monthMarketing Suite: Contact |
PageFly: Landing Page Builder
Instead of wasting time learning how to build a landing page, PageFly is an optimal solution with a simple drag-and-drop editor to let you create custom product pages, homepages, landing pages, and web pages effortlessly.
Using this tool means you have a lot of freedom to customize your pages, especially when there are more than 100 free templates. Besides the advanced analytics the software can offer, it is also possible to build sales funnel landing pages with PageFly.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Drag-and-drop technology enables page builder
- Allows freedom in customization
Cons:
- Might be complicated for newbies
- Not for tight budgets
Pricing
- FREE
- Pay as you go: $24/month
- Enterprise: $199/month
Grammarly – Spelling and Grammar Checker Tool
Without a doubt, Grammarly is one of the go-to affiliate marketing tools for beginners that assist you in perfecting your content. Whether you need to review a blog post, social media copy, or email campaign, the app can highlight errors and offer helpful suggestions.
You can find Grammarly literally everywhere since it is easily accessible on different devices, from the mobile app to a browser extension. Most people agree that its free version already covers what they need for high-quality content review.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Reviews various document types
- Available on different devices and platforms
- Free version is highly functional
Cons:
- May lead to over-reliance
- Potential risks of data leakage
Pricing
- FREE
- Premium: $12/member/month
- Business: $15/member/month
Hootsuite – Social Media Affiliate Marketing Tool
Managing social media within your affiliate campaigns will no longer be a hassle with Hootsuite. Numerous brands have been relying on this software for social media management, thus, implementing successful campaigns for affiliate marketing.
From scheduling posts across multiple channels, managing organic and paid content, and following customer conversations, Hootsuite collects all relevant data into one dashboard. Publishers will love such an innovative and automated assistant.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Enables complete social media management
- Controls all activities in one place
Cons:
- No transparent account deletion
- No customer support
Pricing
- Professional: $99/month
- Team: $249/month
- Business: Starts at $739/month
- Enterprise: Contact
CoSchedule – Calendar Tool
Skip the manual reminder of which time to post something. CoSchedule works to streamline your content creation, publishing, and scheduling. Every step of the affiliate marketing campaign, such as project updates or content ideas, can be tracked to ensure you do not miss any deadlines.
If you use WordPress for website content, this app has a plugin to sync with the calendar tool, making editing and publishing posts from this calendar easier. CoSchedule is also an excellent option for teamwork in adding feedback and assigning tasks to others.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Monitors content creation, publishing, and scheduling
- Convenient WordPress plugin
- Optimal for team collaboration
Cons:
- Rather complicated panel
Pricing
- FREE
- Pro: $29/user/month
- Marketing Suite: Contact
FAQ
Conclusion
With the most effective affiliate marketing tools, publishers and businesses can streamline their workflow and succeed from smart affiliate efforts.
Consider your goals, knowledge, and budget as you choose a tool. Keep in mind that most software includes a free version to take advantage of, so you can determine whether to pay for their upgraded plans with more advanced features.
