Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to drive sales and brand awareness. Check out the top affiliate marketing software options for 2022.
Affiliate marketing has been experiencing explosive growth in recent years, so it’s essential now more than ever for brands to run affiliate programs of their own.
It involves brands hiring affiliates to promote their products and services and rewarding them with a commission from every sale.
Affiliate Marketing And SEO
Affiliate marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) both share a common goal of attracting relevant and high-quality traffic to a site with the goal of increasing sales.
As such, both of these marketing activities shouldn’t be perceived as two separate, competing entities.
Instead, you should look at them as one and the same that work together in perfect harmony to increase website traffic and generate more revenue.
The most successful publishers in the affiliate marketing space combine the two to get the best of both worlds.
Top 10 Affiliate marketing software
1. Refersion
With over seven years in the affiliate marketing industry and over 20,000 clients, Refersion is one of the leading affiliate marketing software platforms on the market.
Its robust and highly personalized dashboard allows brands to manage all aspects of their affiliate program, such as monitoring all aspects of their affiliate activity with extensive real-time reporting capability.
Refersion offers brands all the tools they need to scale and promote their affiliate programs, such as managing commissions, payouts, and providing simplified tax automation.
Refersion integrates with all the major ecommerce SaaS platforms and features one of the largest marketplaces full of affiliates for brands to discover.
It provides brands with peace of mind by offering some of the best fraud detection and security features available.
Finding any significant cons to such an established affiliate platform is more complicated than it looks.
2. Impact
Impact is one of the biggest affiliate marketing software platforms for cloud automation.
Its signature Impact Partnership Cloud allows brands to develop automated affiliate or influencer marketing campaigns.
It offers a decent marketplace, marketing tools, and analytics for brands to track and manage their affiliate programs.
However, pricing is not readily available and requires a custom quote.
3. Tapfiliate
For businesses primarily operating and generating their revenue on ecommerce SaaS platforms, Tapfiliate may be a great choice.
It features an autopilot mode that can automate things such as onboarding new affiliates, sharing via social media, or even drip campaigns.
Tapfiliate offers advanced tracking and reporting capabilities, but most of the features are accessible only through the Pro plan, which starts at $149 a month (not the cheapest on the list).
The Essential plan starts at $69 a month.
4. Affise
Affise features an intuitive and highly customizable dashboard and is a great choice for agencies that manage multiple affiliate networks on an Enterprise level.
It can be accessed via web, cloud, or SaaS, and offers good third-party SaaS integration.
One standout feature of Affise is its smart targeting function that allows audience targeting via criteria such as geolocation, device, language, or device connection speed.
Affise also offers robust tracking and reporting capabilities.
Still, its monthly starting price of $499 doesn’t make it so readily accessible for most brands running affiliate programs.
It is better suited for Enterprise-level agencies and brands.
5. Awin
Awin, previously known as Zanox, merged with Affilinet in 2017 to become one of the largest affiliate marketing platforms with more than 200,000 marketers and over 15,000 advertisers.
It features a handful of marketing and reporting features you’d expect from such an extensive network.
Though, it doesn’t feature some essential affiliate features you’d expect, such as affiliate tracking or fraud detection security.
Registration is free on Awin, but its performance-based pricing model means that there isn’t a fixed monthly cost to join the platform.
Instead, brands pay a predetermined cost-per-acquisition.
6. Cake
Cake is another affiliate marketing platform available via web, cloud, or SaaS.
Cake partners with over a dozen partners to offer a variety of streamlined and automated features, most notably its live reporting and tracking capabilities that allow brands to optimize their affiliate campaigns in real-time.
Cake doesn’t provide pricing on its website and requires a custom quote.
It also doesn’t feature any pre-made promotional tools for marketers, which doesn’t make it quite suitable for novice users just starting out with their affiliate programs.
7. ClickBank
ClickBank was one of the first affiliate platforms, launching all the way back in 1998. Since then, it’s grown to one of the largest affiliate marketplaces with over 200 million customers.
ClickBank offers native support for brands that offer ongoing subscription services.
It makes it easy for brands to create one-click repeatable purchases, allowing them to provide monthly products without requiring manual monthly payments.
It also offers some of the standard affiliate features commonly found on most affiliate platforms, such as affiliate reporting, payments, commissions management, and third-party integrations.
However, compared to most of the other affiliate platforms on this list, it doesn’t offer a demo, free trial, or monthly pricing.
Instead, ClickBank charges a one-time activation cost and a non-negotiable fee of 7.5% + $1 per sale.
8. Cj Affiliate
CJ Affiliate offers access to hundreds of markets and brands on one platform. It provides a customizable dashboard and a variety of reports and specialized tools.
Most notably, CJ Affiliates offers specialized tools, such as Deep Link Automation and Product Widgets, that enable brands to improve their affiliate program ROI.
CJ Affiliate also allows brands to boost lead generation by maximizing their partner’s content.
However, it also doesn’t provide a demo or free trial, and pricing is only available via a custom quote.
9. TUNE
TUNE allows brands to build, manage, and grow their affiliate partner networks through its proprietary marketing technology.
TUNE offers customizable tools, reporting, commissions, payments, and real-time affiliate tracking and reporting like most other platforms on this list.
However, it doesn’t provide affiliate promotional tools like most other platforms, and pricing is on the steeper side at $279 a month for the Professional plan and $799 a month for the Enterprise plan.
10. LeadDyno
LeadDyno specializes in affiliate program promotion and perhaps offers the most amount of promotional tools available in an affiliate marketing software platform.
LeadDyno allows brands to create various promotional campaigns like email and newsletter campaigns and share them on social media.
It offers extensive tracking and reporting features that allow brands to monitor and optimize their promotional campaigns.
Because LeadDyno specializes in affiliate promotional tools, it lacks some of the more robust affiliate tools that enable brands to manage and optimize their affiliate campaigns in real-time, like most of the other platforms on this list.
Wrapping UP
Great affiliate software solutions enable brands to easily launch affiliate programs and track referrals and sales made by their affiliate partners.
Excellent affiliate marketing software should provide brands with all the tools needed to launch, promote, and grow their affiliate program.