Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Influencer bonuses, coupon codes, endless affiliate applications — you know the drill. These are just a few of the hundreds of tasks on your plate if you’re a brand with an affiliate program. And on top of the day-to-day operations?
You’ve got clicks, conversions, and engagement to measure, amounting to endless data for you to interpret and leverage in your affiliate marketing strategy.
Luckily, affiliate tracking software adds ease in managing and scaling your affiliate program.
Affise is one of many affiliate tracking softwares on the market.
We’ll dive into the platform’s key features, tracking capabilities, reviews, and pricing. By the end of this article, you’ll know everything you need to know about Affise and whether it’s the right program for you. Plus, we’ll offer a comparison with Tapfiliate as an alternative to level up your affiliate performance.
Affise is an affiliate management software with a wide range of tools to support brands, affiliates, agencies, and even affiliate networks. Brands can pick from three different affiliate management products:
Affise Performance: This product is best for larger brands interested in scaling and informing their strategy with the right campaign insights. You can use it to view real-time performance analytics for affiliate campaigns on customizable dashboards and improve operational efficiency with third-party integrations (more on that later), as well as automated workflows.
Affise Reach: This Affise product is for brands specifically looking to expand their affiliate program to new partners and audiences and track campaign performance. Reach offers targeting capabilities to help you capture audiences by location, spending behavior, hobbies, and demographics.
Affise Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP): If you’re a brand that sells apps, this Affise product is dedicated to improving your ad and conversion efficiency via integrations with iOS and real-time performance tracking. On top of that, this product supports brands with mobile ad efforts across platforms like the Apple Store and Facebook Ads. Keep in mind that Affise’s MMP isn’t for affiliate programs — its tracking features are specific to PPC advertising and marketing.
We’ll focus our review on the first two products since those are the areas that speak to affiliate marketing the most. `
You can automate a wide range of repetitive affiliate marketing tasks via Affise’s automation tools and set adjustable caps on offers and clicks. Here’s a full list of automated functions with Affise:
Affise “Reach” clients can access the platform’s global network of potential partners in the thousands. You can filter your search for affiliates with countries, traffic sources, audience sizes, verticals, labels, and operating systems.
Once you find your partners, Affise offers a wide range of engagement and management features to help you nurture those partner relations, like automatic replies, announcements, and a smart ticket system to organize affiliate inquiries.
Affise has a user-friendly fraud prevention dashboard that flags reasons for declined conversions, like spam clicks, fake traffic, double IP addresses, and VPNs. The dashboard also shows you which affiliates have the highest frequency of flags for fraudulent activity, helping you protect your campaign investments.
However, we recommend you look at Affise’s fraud prevention analytics with a fine-toothed comb. Daniel, a Cyprus-based affiliate program leader, named the platform’s fraud prevention features as his main qualm with Affise:
Some brands prefer to tier commissions based on strong performance, and Affise offers that in its suite of features. Its automation feature also eases the process with one easy payment, while the platform handles separate payments for each of your affiliates.
On top of that, brands can pay out partners in over 60 different currencies across 214 countries.
Affise is well-known for its robust tracking features, helping you keep tabs on clicks and conversions across different campaigns, affiliates, countries, and creative assets. Most reviews highlight Affise’s tracking capabilities as one of its best features.
After tracking the data you need, Affise helps you analyze the data with many different filters. You can even export that data if you want to conduct further analysis on your own.
Affise’s biggest source of customization potential comes through its 250+ integrations made possible through its API function. Additionally, the platform’s automation features are user-friendly and adjustable, offering more customization for brands.
Affise offers in-depth reporting capabilities that help you view a wide range of performance metrics, like conversions and referrals. The dashboard also helps you filter performance by affiliate, country, city, affiliate goals, retention rate, and time to action. Brands can use the “Single Source of Truth” dashboard to analyze customer events and the entire customer journey from top to bottom-funnel.
We also like how Affise’s reporting dashboard uses data to help you assess affiliate performance in laymen’s terms, offering labels like “Amazing” or “Good” to classify affiliate partners.
Finally, another positive reporting feature is Affise’s AI predictions, which use performance data to help you predict conversions and revenue in future months.
But Carlos, an account manager in Poland, laments one reporting limitation:
Affise offers over 250 integrations to other marketing and billing platforms via its CPAPI solution. Reviews tend to applaud Affise’s wide range of integrations, which help improve operational efficiency and meet the unique needs of many different clients and respective business processes.
But beginner marketers might find the API tricky to implement without a developer.
If you’re already using another affiliate marketing software and want to switch to Affise, the platform helps you integrate existing campaigns into their platform via automation.
Affilise’s performance package has three pricing options, ideal for networks and agencies looking to manage existing affiliate programs:
The platform also offers a payout-based pricing plan called Affise Reach, designed for smaller businesses looking for new affiliate partners to build their affiliate program.
Your subscription price depends on how much you pay affiliates each month. Businesses must pay out a minimum of $1,150 per month to affiliates to be eligible for the package, and the minimum pricing starts at $500 per month. This includes affiliate discovery, budget and user management, conversion attribution, coupons, and impression tracking.
While Affise advertises the entry package as ideal for small businesses, $500 is still a high price for a basic plan.
Affise serves brands worldwide, from the US to India, and everywhere in between. Clients range a wide range of niches, from ecommerce to SaaS.
Here are some of those niches, along with example clients of Affise:
It’s worth noting that many of Affise’s clients are big businesses with massive revenue. For example, Wargaming.net brings in over a billion dollars of revenue each year, while Croms brings in revenue in the hundreds of millions.
Affise has generally positive reviews across software rating sites. Capterra shows a 4.6/5-star average rating across 84 reviews. Most positive comments center around Affise’s reliability in uptime, robust tracking capabilities, user-friendliness, and responsive customer support. Points of criticism included lengthy integration processes with Affise’s API, bugs and glitches, and limited customization in reporting filters.
G2 shows a similar majority of positive reviews with an average 4.5/5-star rating. Users echo Capterra reviews applauding Affise’s excellent customer service team and tracking capabilities. However, some users noticed slow load times, especially when the platform experienced an update. Other points of contention include the sentiment of being overpriced compared to alternatives. Some reviews also lament the platform’s inability to display comprehensive visualizations for multiple campaign data and results.
Think about what works best in your affiliate program. Are there any opportunities to streamline your processes? Improve your onboarding? Beef up your conversion goals and reporting? Assess what your brand needs to improve or scale your affiliate program, and use those goals and insights to guide your search.
On top of that, consider more operational needs, too. Maybe your marketing team is new to affiliate marketing, and you need a platform to take you from the complete beginning all the way to scaling. This might require a more user-friendly platform or software with highly rated support teams.
The affiliate marketing industry is brimming with different software to meet every brand’s needs. Who’s been in the game the longest? You might start by looking at software in affiliate industry publications or roundups.
Or, you could start with business specialization. If you’re a B2B SaaS business, specialized software like Tapfiliate and PartnerStack might come to the top of your list because their customer base shares similarities with your brand. Similarly, you might research affiliate tracking software specializing in specific types of affiliate partnerships, such as Tapfiliate’s influence marketing capabilities or Ambassador’s focus on ambassadorship programs.
Another important research component is reputation. Check each software’s online presence, including testimonials and pages on review sites like Capterra, G2, and Intercom.
Think back to your brand’s needs for an affiliate platform and cross-reference those needs with features for each software.
Maybe you’d like to recruit more affiliates. In this case, you might want to check out programs with a partner network like Tapfiliate’s access to the Admitad Partner Network. Or, you might crave a referral program to recruit existing customers.
Similarly, you might want a platform to help you dive as deep as possible into conversion tracking and analytics. Look for filtering and segmentation features and real-time tracking features.
Then, check out reviews to get an idea about how each feature translates in the real world.
Look at each software’s video and photo gallery to assess the platform’s look and feel. Do things feel intuitive? Or are you intimidated already? Here’s the thing: a solid affiliate management platform can’t perform its abilities well if it takes you months to figure out how to use it.
Even if one platform boasts a lower price than another, prioritize solutions with a modern, easily navigated, intuitive interface.
Let’s say your team couldn’t live without Zapier automation. In that case, you want an affiliate software that integrates seamlessly with Zapier (like Tapfiliate).
Look for platforms that boast the most integrations with your tech stack. Of course, you might find a couple missing. A solid affiliate management software should offer APIs for custom integrations to fill those gaps.
It’s easy to get lost in a platform’s endless features, but don’t fall into the rosy-eyed trap of overpaying for features you don’t need. Review each software’s subscription tiers and figure out which ones best fit your feature needs at the lowest price, with the highest relevant reviews online.
No free trial? That’s a red flag. All the knowledge articles, video tutorials, and gallery photos don’t mean much if you can’t visualize yourself using the software.
Look for affiliate solutions with free trials — this shows the company is confident in their product and gives you a sneak peek into how to implement it into your program.
Fraud is a big concern for modern-day brands with affiliates. The right software offers secure measures to protect your revenue from fake clicks, data breaches, and shady partners.
If you don’t see any security features listed on a software’s website, inquire with their team.
One wrong commission structure or missed affiliate auto-approval criterion could cost you thousands in potential issues.
That’s why the best affiliate software has reliable customer support, seen in multiple pathways for customer assistance and positive reviews about responsiveness.
Tapfiliate offers both click and clickless tracking, helping brands visualize every profitable link, affiliate, or offline sale via coupon code tracking. Find out details about every single purchase, whether we’re talking batch orders or one-time sales. We attribute affiliate sales and conversions via clicks, coupon codes, and customizable cookie tracking.
And once you have all that data? Visualize insights and dive deeper in real-time via our powerful filters and segmentation, which help you assess conversions and other performance metrics across affiliates, locations, product, and time periods.
Do you offer online courses via programs like Teachable? Or maybe you process payments with PayPal or Stripe. Either way, you can streamline your affiliate tracking tasks through easy integrations to these and a total of 35 integrations within a few clicks.
You’ll also find some popular industry tools in the ecommerce, email marketing, and content publishing niches. And if you don’t see your favorite SaaS marketing tools or software on our integration list? Create your own integration with our Generic JavaScript Integration Guide or REST API Integration guide.
Think about your most loyal customers — the ones that regularly spend money each month on your products. Chances are, they understand your offerings and the benefits you provide inside out. These are prime candidates for affiliates, and Tapfiliate helps you recruit them via our automated Referral Program.
All Tapfiliate users can connect their affiliate programs to the Admitad Partner Network, regardless of their subscription plan. Put your brand on the radar of over 100,000 potential affiliates across different publisher types, from review websites and influencers to niche bloggers. The best part? These partners are active, and the ones you jive with most can start promoting your brand to their audiences immediately.
Your affiliates work hard to promote your brand in front of their audiences — and we think you should be able to reward them for it. After all, they’re leading you to direct sales and new leads. Our favorite way to help brands engage and reward affiliates is through flexible commissions, ala recurring, lifetime, or percentage-based commissions, complete with bonuses (if you want to reward your affiliates with a little extra).
Let’s say your affiliates surpass $2,000 in monthly sales — instead of offering them their regular rate, you can toggle a percentage increase for any sales on top of that threshold. Of course, you can customize that threshold to any amount that fits your sales goals. Plus, our lifetime commissions help you reward affiliates with commissions on every purchase one of their leads makes.
Finally, our SKU-specific commission rates help you incentivize affiliates to sell overstock or other unique products.
✅ Lifetime commissions
✅ Recurring commissions
✅ Fixed or percentage-based commissions
✅ SKU-specific commission rates
Tapfiliate’s Zapier integration makes every single workflow or brand process implementable in your affiliate tracking goals. Our custom triggers help you eliminate the repetitive task of notifications and announcements for specific events.
You can even automate commission rate increases, performance bonuses, affiliate application approvals, and emails through webhooks and adjustable triggers.
✅ Auto-approved affiliates
✅ Custom triggers
✅ Automated refund and dispute handling
✅ Zapier integration
Try Tapfiliate out for yourself with a 👉 free 14-day trial.
Tapfiliate’s performance marketing software is plug-and-play, making it super user-friendly — but we still offer multiple customer support pathways to ensure you’re getting the most out of our tracking software.
While we offer a rich knowledge base of helpful guides for frequent inquiries, we believe in adding a human element to the marketing tech world. Meaning? You can access our customer support team of skilled experts 24/7 via our live chat function online.
Reviews on Captera (average 4.5-star rating) highlight our commitment to customer service excellence. Plus, we’re proud of our 92% user rating score on Intercom.
Pricing
Tapfiliate is one of the more affordable affiliate tracking platforms in the industry, with basic plans starting as low as $89 per month. Affise starts subscription packages at $500+, making it inaccessible for newer businesses.
Tracking:
Tapfiliate and Affise both shine with real-time link and revenue tracking for affiliate performance. Both platforms help brands keep tabs on conversions across different affiliates, campaigns, and asset types, and garner positive feedback on review types specific to tracking capabilities.
Tapfiliate offers more insight when it comes to analyzing the data. Plus, we help you envision progress with conversion goals. Some Affise reviews cite issues with viewing unified and comparable data in the platform, with Tapfiliate offering more combination metrics to inform your strategy.
Affiliate program management
Affise and Tapfiliate generally offer excellent program management features, especially for affiliate communication and engagement. Affise offers automatic replies, announcements, and a ticket system to sort out queries from your partners.
Tapfiliate takes things to the next level with custom event triggers and an easy, plug-and-play Zapier integration to automate workflows.
Support
Tapfiliate and Affise both have positive ratings about customer support and responsiveness.
However, Affise users sometimes have trouble sorting out issues independently with the platform’s extensive yet intimidating knowledge base of articles. Tapfiliate also has a knowledge base, but offers users 24/7 support via live chat and social media channels.
Reviews
Both Tapfiliate and Affise have majority-positive reviews on popular software rating sites like Capterra and Intercom.
While both platforms have high ratings and accolades for responsive customer support and revenue tracking, Tapfiliate has a few extra positive notes about report filtering capabilities, flexible affiliate commission structures, and affordability for smaller businesses.
Affise is a partnership management platform and ecosystem for both brands and affiliates. They offer three product types to support affiliate performance, partner discovery and scaling, and advertising optimization.
Affise charges about $500 per month minimum, and charges extra fees for specific features that other platforms might include in an even lower monthly subscription price. Furthermore, some reviews cite issues with slow load times and limited report customization.
Affise is one of the affiliate industry’s many affiliate tracking and management platforms. Here are some of Affise’s competitors offering similar services:
Tapfiliate: This competitively priced affiliate management software is catered to dropshipping, subscription-based, ecommerce and SaaS businesses of all sizes, complete with tools like real-time tracking, efficient integrations, flexible commission structures, creative assets and branding, a referral program, and access to the Admitad Partner Network.
Everflow: This partnership management platform includes conversion tracking, traffic optimization, revenue attribution, and partnership management in its pricing packages.
PartnerStack: Ideal for B2B SaaS clients, PartnerStack offers performance tracking, lead routing, and flexible commissions. They also offer affiliate recruitment capabilities via their PartnerStack Marketplace.
Impact: This affiliate management solution offers cross-device link tracking, performance tracking and reporting, and a recruitment platform for scaling your program.
Refersion: This affiliate marketing platform helps you manage ambassador, influencer, and affiliate marketing programs with in-depth reporting, revenue tracking, affiliate recruitment, and automation.
Ambassador: Brands can scale their affiliate programs via Ambassador’s end-to-end customer loyalty platform, link tracking, and flexible payment 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.