Cake Affiliate Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing

Instagram influencers, coupon websites, high-traffic bloggers — your list of affiliate partnerships is sky-high, but how is your revenue? 

Here’s the thing: you can’t really know without solid affiliate management software. Other benefits include streamlined affiliate communication, custom reporting, and efficient workflows via app integrations. 

Cake is a performance marketing software popular amongst a wide range of industries. We’ll take a look at the platform’s offerings, features, pricing, and reviews. Then, we’ll examine Tapfiliate as a worthy alternative. 

CAKE Affiliate Tracking

Cake is a performance marketing software that supports brands with affiliate marketing, lead generation, and multi-channel marketing. The platform’s affiliate marketing management features are used by over 500 advertisers, publishers, and affiliate networks across over 50 countries. You can access real-time affiliate tracking, custom reporting features, fraud prevention alerts, and dedicated customer support teams to support your affiliate program management and growth. 

Cake Features

Smart Insights

Cake affiliate marketing solution offers reporting features to help you view data insights based on different affiliates, offers, or advertiser in real-time. You can customize views based on offer tags, date ranges, verticals, and marketing channels as well. 

But some customers don’t find Cake’s reporting features as customizable as competitors. For example, one Verified User in Marketing found reporting to be a hassle:

Custom Targeting Parameters

Let’s say you have a promotional offer going on that you know will appeal to potential customers in one geographical location. Cake’s custom targeting parameters offer options to determine click locations via IP address tracking, and then allow you to redirect traffic based on geography. 

Additionally, you can target offers based on language, as well as more specific locational parameters like regions and cities. Cake also permits targeting based on the operating system, browser, and ISP carrier type. The biggest value point in these targeting options is the potential to conduct A/B testing, which helps you gain strategic data insights to improve your affiliate marketing program that much more. 

Intelligent Scaling

Cake’s intelligent scaling features speak to its 99.9% uptime, a guarantee that makes it easier for brands to scale without any hiccups. Cake’s near-constant uptime comes from its Amazon-hosted infrastructure.  

24/7 Customer Support

Cake offers all users access to 24/7 customer support via phone and email. Additionally, brands can dig deeper into platform best practices with support from a dedicated client success manager and implementation specialist. Most customer reviews cite satisfaction with Cake’s standard of customer service.

Anti-Fraud

A too-good-to-be-true affiliate conversion speed could be a sign of fraud. Cake’s anti-fraud measures catch those signs early and inform you with custom alerts. Additionally, its pixel whitelisting fraud prevention feature prevents revenue-impacting fraud. 

• Data Security: Ensures data security and privacy, including GDPR compliance and SOC 2 report.
• CAKE Pay: Streamlines partner payments and tax document production

Event Tracking

Cake offers real-time affiliate conversion tracking; however, brands can further customize tracking capabilities to capture other events. This could include only revenue-generating events, or even awareness and customer behavior indicators like interactions and impressions. 

Integrations

Cake offers direct, third-party integrations with: 

• Quickbooks
• Anura
• Unsubcentral
• Optizmo
• Ezepo
• BriteVerify
• Neustar
• Tipalti
• Dialogtech
• …and more. 

Additionally, the platform includes various API features to enable automation and custom integrations for diverse affiliate program needs. 

What Customization Options Are Available With CAKE?

Here’s a quick look at some of Cake’s customization features: 

• White-labeled Interface: Remove Cake’s brand name and replace it with your own, along with your brand’s unique color scheme, logos, and domain. 
• Account Control: Have a large marketing team? No need for every staff member to have access to affiliate commission controls, right? Cake lets you customize user permissions and role access controls.
• Customizable email templates: You can switch up body text, subject lines, and visual elements in Cake’s customizable templates to communicate with affiliates. 
• Language: Brands can customize campaign targeting based on both location and language. 

Cake Pricing Options

Cake does not have any pricing information posted on their website. You’ll have to reach out to their customer support team for more details. 

Who Are Cake’s Customers?

Cake has clients across a wide variety of industries, from gaming and transportation to ad agencies and fintechs. Here’s a quick peek at some examples of Cake’s clients:

• Lyft: A ridesharing app with drivers and passengers across the globe, bringing in an annual $3-5 billion in revenue.
• Rushcard: A prepaid visa and debit card based in Ohio that functions like an online bank account. 
• American Home Shield: A warranty provider for home systems and appliances that brought in over $100 million in annual revenue.  
• Roblox: A virtual online game platform where users can exchange virtual currency and interact with other players. 
• Zoosk: An online dating platform used in 80 different countries with over 40 million users. 

What are Cake Reviews Like?

Cake has generally positive reviews on popular review sites, with an average 4.5 stars on G2 and 4.3 on Capterra. But those positive reviews are from 4+ years ago. Unfortunately, some of the recent reviews cite dissatisfaction with Cake’s expensive pricing, customization options, outdated user interface, app, additional costs for features, and limited after-hours support, despite the platform’s 24/7 support access. 

Iain Stratton, a media specialist, shares some feedback on review site TrustRadius: 

On a more positive note, customers cite satisfaction with Cake’s helpful and adaptable customer support team, wide range of features, easy integrations, and accurate tracking functionalities. 

A Guide to Choosing Affiliate Tracking Software for Your Affiliate Program

Can’t decide between a bunch of affiliate software options? We can help. Follow these steps to feel confident in your affiliate software choice. 

Evaluate Your Needs

Every brand and affiliate program is different in terms of industry, business stage, and marketing goals. Why did you start your affiliate program to begin with, and where do you want to see it progress? Perhaps you want to tap into a more niche influencer audience on Instagram, but don’t have the right contacts to score those partnerships. In that case, you’d need software with a partner recruitment and discovery section. 

Or, you could have a steady yet stagnant affiliate program that just won’t scale. In this case, you might need software with robust analytics features to give you the strategic insights you need to improve your program. 

Pro tip? Look at an affiliate software’s testimonials and reviews to see if businesses similar to yours met similar business needs. 

Google it!

A great way to start your search? “Affiliate software for X brands.” For example, if you typed in something like: 

Affiliate software for ecommerce brands

…for dropshipping brands;

…for SaaS brands; 

Tapfiliate would certainly come up, as we specialize in serving brands in those niches, among many others. You might also check Google for performance marketing associations and organizations with roundups and guides on the year’s top affiliate marketing software. 

Look at Integrations

Affiliate software should help you complete your marketing to-do list faster than before. And it can’t do that without the right integrations. Say you rely on Mailchimp for an updated email list of customers. The right software would offer a Mailchimp integration to help you merge, say, an automated referral program based on those contacts. 

Look for software that integrates with software tools that you use regularly in your business. And if you don’t see a direct integration? Some affiliate tools might offer a REST API or other methods of enabling a custom integration. 

Assess Your Budget

Affiliate marketing software isn’t always cheap, but it should still align with your business stage and marketing budget. Can’t afford a $2,000 enterprise plan with extended tracking capabilities and endless add-ons? Don’t worry; you have other options in a price range more suited to your business capacity. 

The best software offers a wide range of pricing tiers to meet your business where it’s at, and scale with it when you’re ready. 

Try it Out Free

“Try before you buy” is our golden rule for affiliate software. Most decent platforms offer a free trial for at least one week. The sweet spot? A free two-week trial where you can enjoy ample time to test out each feature and liaise with customer support. See how it feels before you make that commitment. 

Look For Ease of Use

If reporting features are your main motivation to invest in affiliate software, they better feel intuitive when you test out a candidate. Meaning? It shouldn’t take you long to navigate from one reporting view to another, or to adjust metadata to populate the insights important to your brand. Furthermore, anything where payouts and revenue are involved should feel user-friendly. The last thing you need is a hiccup in affiliate payouts or incorrect commission amounts. 

Security is Essential

Affiliate fraud isn’t just a risk to your confidential customer and business data; it’s also a risk to your revenue. That’s why the best affiliate management software will always have security and fraud prevention measures like: 

• Suspicious conversion or click alerts
• Double IP referral flags
• GDPR compliance 
• Two-factor authentication 

Talk to Customer Support

The customer support team can sometimes be the difference between significant revenue and total conversion slumps. Why? Because they’re the people you rely on to solve glitches and issues with the software. 

Reach out to each software’s support team and consider how confident they come across in their advice, and, consequently, how well they support you in solving the issue. Additionally, consider the variety of communication channels offered to access customer support.

A Reliable Alternative to Cake: Tapfiliate Affiliate Software

Sure, Cake might tick off many boxes for security, custom integrations, and a long list of affiliate tracking features. But do you really need all those bells and whistles at an expensive price point? Tapfiliate offers all the affiliate tracking, reporting, and customization features you need to improve your affiliate program.

Seamless User Interface

Tons of our customers rave about our user-friendly dashboards, easily navigable reporting views, and intuitive interface that makes affiliate program management that much easier. Our platform is accessible to all users regardless of marketing or tech background, and most features are easily enabled with a few clicks. 

Integrations

Tapfiliate offers 34 direct integrations to software tools that are sure to be on your tech roster. Whether it’s email marketing software like Mailchimp, ecommerce tools like WooCommerce, or payment platforms like PayPal, chances are we have a direct integration for it. The best part? You can enable our direct integrations in as quick as a few clicks. 

Plus, our REST API and JavaScript functions help you develop custom integrations for any tools that you don’t see on our direct integration list. 

Pricing

Tapfiliate offers three pricing tiers to meet brands where they’re at in their business. All subscriptions come with a minimum of 2,000 tracked conversions, 20,000 tracked clicks, unlimited affiliate programs, integration access, and real-time tracking and reporting. 

• Essential: $89/month. This affordable, beginner plan caters to startups and brands with new affiliate programs. You can access coupon codes, affiliate links, data exporting (i.e., CSV files), and flexible commission structures as well. 
• Pro: $149/month. This plan is better suited for brands that want to scale their affiliate program with up to 10,000 tracked conversions, 100,000 tracked clicks, product-specific commissions, performance bonuses, and private creative assets. 
• Enterprise: Custom. Tailor your affiliate program with custom verbiage, advanced MLM sales goals, white labeling, premium support, and unlimited tracking requests. 

Multi-currency

Dreaming of a global affiliate program? Then, your currency needs to match that international standard. You won’t get far with forcing affiliates through hefty conversion and transaction fees. That’s why we offer multi-currency payments to help you engage a global affiliate audience. 

Whether it’s pesos, dollars, or euros, brands can feel at ease with diverse currency options that meet their affiliates’ needs. 

Works for Affiliate, Referral, and Influencer Programs

Tapfiliate caters to brands who want to manage and scale their affiliate programs. Still, we also accommodate a wide range of partnership programs like referral and influencer-specific marketing. 

Our automated customer referral program works with your existing software stack for customer contacts, automating customizable email invitations to recruit your customers to your program. Similarly, our branded creatives help you engage influencer affiliates across a wide range of social media channels. 

Flexible Commissions

SaaS businesses, to the front! Your affiliates know the value they bring when they lead you to a return-subscribing customer. So why not show your appreciation with a recurring commission that gives them a payment every time your customer pays for their monthly subscription? That’s what we call engagement. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Tapfiliate’s flexible commissions. 

Lifetime commissions give brands the flexibility to reward affiliates for every purchase a customer makes in their lifetime, not just that one original lead. You can also enable automated commission increases and bonuses based on performance milestones for various affiliate groups. 

And if you sign up for our affordable Pro plan? Try out product-specific commissions, which can help you unload overstocked products, or maintain a higher profit margin for certain products. 

Automation

Tired of sending the same onboarding emails? Or adjusting the same commission increase for a certain milestone? Automation saves you hours of time in tedious affiliate marketing tasks. Tapfiliate makes automation smooth and easy via our Zapier integration, which links to endless other software tools to automate your workflows, communications, and even your affiliate approval process. 

White Labeling

Customization can only go so far when a software brand name is all over your affiliate management platform. Don’t you want your affiliates to have a completely on-brand experience? That’s where our white labeling comes in, where brands can adjust the platform’s interface with brand color schemes and logos, as well as custom verbiage in place of Tapfiliate’s branding. 

Cake Affiliate Management vs Tapfiliate Affiliate Management

Cake offers a robust affiliate software with powerful customization and integration features, but most customers cite a high price point. 

Looking for an affordable affiliate tracking software that can scale with your business? Tapfiliate’s real-time reporting and accurate tracking might be the solution your affiliate program needs. 

Pricing

Cake might offer a wider range of marketing management functions (intelligent lead routing and wide API access for affiliate marketing programs); however, all that comes with a much higher price tag. 

While Cake doesn’t cite pricing on its website, customer reviews mention expensive bills and one even mentions a five-figure total after a lengthy integration process. 

Sure, some enterprise businesses might benefit from all these capabilities; but your average startup or mid-scale ecommerce business can still scale their revenue with Tapfiliate’s much more affordable pricing plans. Plus, Tapfiliate keeps pricing updated and transparent on its website. 

Affiliate Program Management

While Cake’s custom features and advanced integrations might offer a completely tailored solution for certain businesses, customers cite difficulties getting on board. The technical knowledge required to implement all of Cake’s functionalities could be costly, as well as time-consuming. 

Crave an easier learning curve from your affiliate management tool? Tapfiliate’s user-friendly interface, plus our extensive knowledge base and customer support, gives you an affiliate management solution that gets on the ground running with your affiliate program immediately. 

Tracking and Reporting Analytics

Both Tapfiliate and Cake offer real-time tracking for a wide range of customer actions (events) and conversion types. Tapfiliate’s reporting dashboard is unified yet customizable, offering custom reporting views with segmented data insights by affiliate, campaign, product, offer, time range, and more. It can be as basic or in-depth as you need it to be. This rings more true if you leverage Tapfiliate’s REST API, though you’d need a developer to access this type of customization. 

Cake offers similar custom views, though some customers feel the interface isn’t as user-friendly and customizable as they’d like it. 

Iain Stratton shares this sentiment on TrustRadius: 

Customization

Customers applaud both Cake and Tapfiliate for their comprehensive customization features. The two platforms offer interface customization with colors, logos, and brand names for complete white-labeling, as well as adjustable commission schedules and payment timeframes, to tailor each affiliate experience. 

Cake also offers custom user controls and permissions and customizable reporting alerts. But Tapfiliate has more satisfied customers (according to some reviews) than Cake when it comes to reporting customization. Our real-time analytics and powerful filtration capabilities give you insights by affiliate, channel, product, campaign, and a wide variety of other metadata for you to get tailored insights. 

Finally, both platforms offer customizable email templates and promotional materials to support affiliates in their campaigns. 

Automation

Cake’s automation features are covered through its powerful two-way APIs, which give both brand marketers and affiliates the ability to automate custom workflows and campaign details. But Tapfiliate’s automation features stand out a little more with our Zapier integration. This connects your affiliate program and our software to every other marketing software in your tech stack to streamline your affiliate program within your grander workflow. 

We also offer an automated referral program where you can automatically invite customers to join your affiliate program. Similarly, our multi-level marketing function is automated so that you can invite new affiliates through your existing affiliates’ networks. 

Finally, Tapfiliate extends automation to the recruitment process, where you can automatically approve affiliates based on criteria you set yourself. Of course, you can also opt for manual approvals as well. 

Support

Both Cake and Tapfiliate offer 24/7 support via live chat customer representatives on their websites. However, Cake has received negative reviews about limited after-hours availability for their customer response team. Still, it should be noted that most reviews cite satisfaction with the support team’s competence and level of service. 

While both platforms have a resource library with helpful articles, Tapfiliate’s is more comprehensive and well-liked by customers. Cake’s resource base (articles, whitepapers, etc.) received a few points of criticism online, namely about accessible writing and full topic coverage. 

FAQs about Cake

What is Cake?

Cake is a performance marketing management software that supports brands in managing their affiliate programs, generating new leads, and multi-channel marketing initiatives. It’s well-known for its flexible integrations, accurate affiliate tracking, and, unfortunately, expensive pricing. 

What are the limitations of Cake?

Cake is a robust affiliate software but leaves more to be desired from some customers in terms of its complexity, high learning curve, and expensive pricing. Customers cite dissatisfaction with additional costs for certain features on already expensive subscriptions, as well as a lack of intensiveness in their resource base to solve common issues. 

Who are Cake’s competitors?

Cake caters to a wide range of industries, often for brands bringing in at least $1 million in revenue each year. Here’s a quick look at some of Cake’s competitors in the performance marketing software industry:

• Tapfiliate: An affordable yet scalable affiliate tracking software for ecommerce, SaaS, and dropshipping brands at any business stage, complete with real-time affiliate tracking, customizable reports, an automated customer referral program, Zapier-powered automation, branded creatives, and easy integrations with popular marketing and payment platforms. 
• Post Affiliate Pro: An affiliate marketing platform with a wide range of real-time tracking capabilities (pixel, impression tracking, IP referrals, etc.), trend reports, promotional materials, and over 200 integrations. 
• Affise: This affiliate marketing tool offers extensive automation potential for payouts, invoices, tracking, and offer scheduling, as well as partner discovery functions and fraud prevention. 
• PartnerStack: A pricier affiliate management tool for ecommerce businesses with lead tracking, various promotional materials, and reseller features. 
• Social Snowball: An affiliate marketing software for Shopify businesses with product seeding, affiliate segmentation, revenue attribution, and a wide variety of payout options.  

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.