Affiliate Tracking Software is used to track the referral, endorsement or recommendation made by one person or company to buy products or services from another person or company. Tracking is necessary to manage and reward or compensate the participants of an affiliate marketing group of participants or affiliate networks. The original concept comes from Affinity marketing. The participants that agree to promote or be promoted are called "affiliates". Those that promote and recommend are called "marketers" and the ones that have the products or services that are promoted are called "advertisers".
The software is the enabler to credit referrers based on performance of clicks, confirmation of page views and impressions of advertising material (banner, links, etc) of the "marketers", while also confirming purchases and transaction of monetary values of the "advertisers".
Several online businesses create affiliate networks to manage affiliates that promote their products and services. Affiliate platforms are companies that intermediate and manage both marketers and advertisers, operating as a broker.
The core of affiliate marketing software is tracking the various aspects of a given action, that are commonly categorised in five types:
- CPC (Cost per click)
- CPA (Cost per acquisition)
- CPM (Cost per impression)
- CPS (Cost per sale)
- CPI (Cost per install)
Tracking refers to user-client IP detection, browser detection, marketer's affiliate referral and advertiser's completed transaction.
The main feature of affiliate marketing software is consolidation of data to provide dashboard for marketers and advertisers so that all activity can be tracked and verified in a consistent manner, demonstrating transaction value, transaction fees, traffic origins and destinations, geography and payment balance.
Although affinity marketing refers to marketing to persons sharing the same interests, the derived affiliate networks is closely related to sales channels and sales campaigns paying sales commissions, the reason why a solid and reliable software is required to prevent fraud and provide security and privacy for the parties involved in the transactions.
Affiliate network software has other features like:
- Generating Tracking Codes: Tracking of all clicks and leads require a special unique URL which contains the affiliate id and perhaps the campaign number, that is parsed to the advertiser's site and then associated with a user cookie to identify landing page, visit date, expire date, user identification and related sales closing information. These tracking URLs are also called as tracking codes. The software can generate a code, token or shortened URL, or can track by affiliate name.
- Tracking Time and Location: Tracking time and location of impression, click, lead and sale, usually gathered from user cookies, sent back from the advertiser's server site to the tracking software server for consolidation.
- Tracking Source: Not just the location source, as previously cited, source also refers to web page originating the URL link (blog article for instance) and source type (banner, keyword, search, chatbot or other), that gives both marketers and advertisers the information to improve context and maximize click-through ratios (how many times are required to show a banner to have someone click on it) and sales conversion (how many clicks are required to have someone buy the referred product/service).
- Tracking Affiliate: Identify volume and effectiveness. Volume in traffic and effectiveness is how successful the affiliate is in selling (or making money for the network).
- Fraud Detection: The need of fraud detection has increased with the expansion of affiliate marketing industry and the availability of IP changing software, chatbots that can simulate clicks and purchases, and even hacking to inject data into the software database to inflate affiliate credits and ratios.
There are hundreds of affiliate tracking software in the market, search the web for more information
Video Affiliate tracking software
References
http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/clarify-marketing-impact-with-attributions-and-marketing-mix-modeling/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/affiliate-marketing-growing-trend-unique-153100893.html
https://www.marketo.com/analyst-and-other-reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-digital-marketing-hubs/
https://www.gartner.com/doc/3645364/market-guide-content-marketing-platforms
Why Affiliate Networks Are So Important to Online Affiliate Marketing https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296475
Examples:
vNative - software for Affiliate/Performance Tracking Realtime https://vnative.com (credit for this page first writer)
Example of Affiliate Program from business advertiser: https://www.shopify.com/encyclopedia/affiliate-marketing
Clickbank Affiliate Platform has an instructional support page: https://support.clickbank.com/hc/en-us
The citation of the above brands is not an endorsement, suggestion or recommendation. Please search the web for more vendors
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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