Affiliate marketing is a model that offers numerous benefits for both businesses and content creators. For businesses, affiliate marketing can be a viable sales channel that enables them to reach out to new audiences, increase site traffic while accessing high-quality traffic, drive conversions and increased revenue, promote brand recognition and awareness, and gain a competitive edge.
For affiliates, aside from having another income stream, affiliate marketing has little to no barrier to entry, making it easily accessible. Plus, it’s a relatively low-risk venture that also gives them the opportunity to grow their following, thereby expanding their reach. In addition to all these benefits, affiliate marketing is performance-based. This means that affiliates can earn as much as they want to, provided that they meet an affiliate program’s requirements.
How can your business make the most out of affiliate marketing? We’ve created a list of the 12 best affiliate marketing tools that will help you leverage affiliate marketing for growth.
Top 12 Affiliate Marketing Tools You Need to Check Out
Refersion
Best for: Affiliate marketing management for ecommerce
Refersion is an affiliate marketing platform designed to drive ecommerce growth. It covers major ecommerce platforms, such as Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. With Refersion, you can:
- Find, discover, and recruit top-tier affiliates
- Build your own network of affiliates
- Drive impactful sales conversions
- Monitor and manage custom campaigns
- Offer tiered commission structures
- Unlock first-party tracking for compliance
- Build custom dashboards
These are only some of the things that you can do with Refersion. Furthermore, the platform offers solutions for the following: ambassador marketing program, influencer marketing program, and affiliate marketing program. With its affiliate marketing program, you can offer and enjoy unparalleled affiliate experiences. Seamlessly recruit affiliates, easily discover new talent, automate payments, and track affiliate and campaign performance. And if you’re looking to tap into the full potential of major ecommerce platforms, aside from Refersion’s 30+ turnkey integrations, you can also access over 2,000 app integrations thanks to Zapier.
Key features:
- Helps streamline tax processes for enhanced compliance
- Lets you work with an unlimited number of campaigns, affiliates, and brand partnerships
- Allows you to offer customized commission rates
- Access to Refersion’s expansive network of 3.6 million affiliates and publishers
- Keyword-based research to find affiliates within a particular industry
- Lets you discover exclusive Amazon affiliates
Pricing:
- Professional: $99 per month
- Enterprise: Price available upon request
- Enterprise Plus: Price available upon request
Refersion offers a 14-day free trial.
AdPlexity
Best for: Ad intelligence
AdPlexity is a versatile tool for ad intelligence that lets you track your competitors’ performance across different ad types (competitive intelligence). It covers almost every ad type and traffic source on the spectrum, from mobile and desktop to native and push notifications.
For instance, if you’re focusing on monitoring ad campaigns on desktop traffic sources, AdPlexity lets you see campaigns that are running in over 75 countries. Plus, it unlocks potentially profitable campaigns, gives you real-time insights, and lets you discover ads that are promoting affiliate offers.
Depending on the type of ad you select, AdPlexity’s features and capabilities will vary accordingly. For example, if you’re focused on ecommerce, then you can use AdPlexity as an ecommerce competitive intelligence tool. With this, you can find successful and profitable products from the platform’s database of over 70 million products, as well as get insights into more than 100,000 ecommerce stores.
Key features:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Lets you filter campaigns by affiliate network and discover the network and tracking tool used for specific landing pages
- Enables users to analyze various components of campaigns, including ad trends, publishers, and targeted devices and browsers
Pricing:
- Prices vary depending on the solution you select. For example, if you’re focused on monitoring mobile campaigns, the services cost $199 per month per user. For native intelligence, it’ll cost you $249 per month per user.
MailChimp
Best for: Email marketing
Email can be a powerful tool for affiliate marketing. With an estimated 4.2 billion email users worldwide in 2022—the number of which is projected to hit 4.6 billion in 2025—email marketing offers a lot of potential for growth.
This is because emails, when used within the context of email marketing, can be used to build brand or product awareness, nurture leads, and drive conversions. Affiliate marketers can also use email marketing to promote specific goods or services, engage audiences, and create personalized campaigns using highly targeted and well-crafted emails.
Aside from driving an average ROI of $36 per dollar spent, email marketing is used by businesses of all scales to reach customers, promote better communication, generate traffic, and collect feedback.
With Mailchimp, you can create emails that generate revenue. Use it to deliver personalized newsletters and emails based on customer data (behavior, interactions, survey responses), nurture long-lasting relationships, and strengthen your social media marketing efforts. Mailchimp also lets you leverage automation to send targeted emails, welcome new subscribers, collect feedback, and more, as well as re-engage your audience to drive more conversions through Retargeting Ads.
Key features:
- 300+ app integrations for more targeted campaigns, including Shopify, Stripe, LiveChat, Facebook, and Coupon Carrier
- Access to scalable segmentation tools
- Robust customer support
Pricing:
- Free
- Essentials: starts at $11 per month based on 500 contacts
- Standard: starts at $17 per month based on 500 contacts
- Premium: starts at $299 per month based on 10,000 contacts
Google Analytics
Best for: Web analytics
Right off the bat, we want you to know that Google Analytics isn’t an affiliate tracking tool. However, it’s an invaluable tool for optimization. It helps you find your target audience and understand their behavior, monitor the number of visitors your affiliate site gets, understand how your customers engage with your brand, and uncover primary sources of traffic (organic, social, referral, direct, email, paid search, display, and others).
By getting a better understanding of your visitors, their behaviors, and how they interact with your website, you can take the necessary steps to improve your affiliate site.
Perhaps one of Google’s best features is its ability to integrate with other Google solutions, as well as other partner products. For instance, it integrates with Google Ads, Google Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration, Google Ad Manager, and Google Play.
Key features:
- Machine learning capabilities
- Analytics intelligence functionalities, including automated insights, custom insights, and predictive capabilities
- Generates a variety of reports, including real-time reports, user engagement reports, demographics reports, and monetization reports for ecommerce
Pricing:
Google Analytics is free to use
Unbounce
Best for: Building compelling landing pages optimized for conversion
Landing pages are vital elements in marketing campaigns. It’s a tool that encourages visitors to interact with a featured offer or product and uses compelling calls-to-action to, well, drive visitors to take action. For affiliate marketers, an affiliate landing page serves as a tool to attract prospective partners and affiliates to sign up for your affiliate program. On average, a landing page can drive conversion rates up to 9.7%.
With Unbounce, you can start creating campaign-specific landing pages designed to bolster conversions. It leverages the power of AI to help you build landing pages faster (no coding know-how required), craft engaging copy (Smart Copy), and optimize traffic. Furthermore, it offers a Conversion Intelligence platform, which gives you insight into the effectiveness of your copy, monitors conversions, and uncovers visitor attributes.
Key features:
- Easy-to-use landing page builders with smart features
- Access to two types of builders: classic builder and smart builder
- Integrates with popular apps, including Typeform, Stripe, Shopify, and Calendly
Pricing:
- Launch: $90/month
- Optimize: $135/month
- Accelerate: $225/month
- Concierge: $575/month
Unbounce offers a 14-day free trial
Ahrefs
Best for: Search engine optimization
Incorporating SEO into your affiliate marketing strategies helps make your affiliate pages more discoverable online. SEO isn’t just about finding the right keywords and using them to boost traffic. It’s also about optimizing your affiliate pages, conducting market research, coming up with high-quality and relevant content, gaining insights into your site’s backlink profile, and monitoring your progress.
While Ahrefs is not an affiliate marketing tool per se, it still proves to be a valuable addition to your affiliate marketing arsenal. Use Ahrefs to monitor your backlink profile, as well as that of your competitors, find information on links that lead to broken pages, and monitor your page’s or site’s ranking progress. Plus, you can use it to carry out an exhaustive site audit, so you can uncover and address SEO issues that may prevent your site (and business) from growing.
Key features:
- Access to free SEO tools, such as backlink checker, keyword generator, and Amazon keyword tool
- Access to its Academy, which offers free resources to help improve your digital marketing efforts
Pricing:
- Lite: starts at $99 per month
- Standard: starts at $199 per month
- Advanced: starts at $399 a month
- Enterprise: starts at $999 per month
Surfer SEO
Best for: Content optimization
Using SEO strategies can help you craft high-quality and value-adding content that can do wonders for your affiliate marketing efforts. Furthermore, before visitors flock to your affiliate site to check out what you have to offer, your site and offerings should be easily discoverable online. By using the right keywords, offering personalized and valuable content, and understanding your visitors’ search intent, you’re making your affiliate content easily discoverable.
Surfer SEO can help you boost your organic traffic, improve online rankings, and make your affiliate site more visible online. It analyzes every detail of your competitors’ content and gives recommendations on how you can improve your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). With Surfer SEO, you get access to features such as a content editor that suggests keywords you can use for your content.
Key features:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Content Planner for simplifying your content strategy
- Access to free tools, particularly the Keyword Surfer Extension and the AI Outline Generator
Pricing:
- Free
- Basic: $49/month
- Pro: $99 per month
- Business: $199/month
CJ
Best for: Tapping into a large and established affiliate marketing ecosystem
What’s a rundown of affiliate marketing tools if we won’t include an affiliate marketing network on our list? An affiliate marketing network, such as CJ, enables businesses (advertisers) to find and connect with high-quality global affiliates, drive increased revenue, and expand their reach. It also empowers affiliates to leverage their expertise, engage with global brands for growth, and monetize their influence.
CJ is a well-known and established affiliate marketing network that was founded in 1998. Today, it works with over 3,800 global brands across industries such as travel, finance, and retail.
Key features:
- Cookie-less tracking
- Access to best-in-class tech
- Allows advertisers to offer flexible compensation structures
- On-demand insights and analytics for advertisers and publishers
Pricing:
- Free to join for publishers
Voluum
Best for: Ad tracking
Voluum is a cloud-based ad tracking software that enables businesses to optimize their campaigns through features such as custom conversion tracking, real-time reporting, A/B split testing, and automation capabilities. Use this affiliate marketing tool to monitor key campaign metrics such as visits and clicks.
With Voluum, you get more than just an ad tracking tool. It also gives you insight into the latest trends with its trend analysis tools, as well as a Workspaces feature, which is designed to help you create manageable groups and control access levels. Its new feature, Automizer, enables users to connect the platform with traffic sources using API integration. Furthermore, you can perform a variety of actions to customize and optimize your campaigns, which include pausing or activating your campaigns, creating auto-rules, and changing bids.
Key features:
- One platform for affiliate conversion tracking (affiliate marketing dashboard)
- Mobile app for on-the-go access and monitoring
- Redirect and direct tracking modes
- Landing page protection
- API access (REST-type API with JSON)
Pricing:
- Individual
- Discover: $89/month
- Profit: $149/month
- Scale: $299/month
- Business
- Start-up: $499/month
- Agency: $999/month
- Enterprise: $1,999/month
AAWP
Best for: Affiliate marketers using Amazon
The Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP) is a key affiliate marketing tool for Amazon affiliates. It lets you up the value of your affiliate page by creating simplified workflows through the automatic updating of affiliate links. Some of its core functions include dynamic text links for issuing specific product names, product boxes (single or multiple) for displaying specific Amazon products, and lists (bestseller and new releases), among other features.
Despite having powerful features, AAWP does have one main drawback: its lack of search capabilities. You can’t use it to search for Amazon products directly. You still need to manually comb through Amazon to find products and use ASINs.
Key features:
- Data fields for adding individual product information
- Customizable design using custom styles and templates
- Flexible and easy configuration—no coding know-how required
Pricing:
- Personal: €49
- Plus: €129
- Pro: €249
- Ultimate: €399
AAWP offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, with all plans having a validity of 1 year.
Pretty Links
Best for: Shortening URLs
Pretty Links is a nifty URL shortening tool that lets you maximize your affiliate link usage. It saves you time by doing all the heavy lifting for you when it comes to link management. It transforms unwieldy affiliate links into short, memorable, and easily shareable links. Aside from being a link shortening tool, it also doubles as a link cloaker, QR code generator, and branded link creator.
Use Pretty Links to enjoy full control over where your links redirect and how they look, get timely updates and, track your links. Through Pretty Links, you can group, search, and track clicks for all your affiliate links, allowing you to better optimize your link strategy.
Despite being a powerful tool, you can only use Pretty Links for WordPress sites (WordPress.com or WordPress.org).
Key features:
- Create shareable, branded links for various channels, including email, podcasts, and social media
- Access to a central hub where you can manage all your affiliate links and URL redirects
Pricing:
- Beginner: $199 annually
- Marketer: $299 per year
- Super Affiliate: $399 annually
WordPress
Best for: Building affiliate websites
One of the most essential tools that every affiliate marketer should have is a website. WordPress, one of the world’s most popular CMS software, is used by 43% of the world’s websites, garnering a market share of 64.1%, as of writing.
Content creators, for example, need to have a self-hosted blog under WordPress.org before they can monetize their content. This is because influencer networks require content creators or influencers to self-host, which means they themselves own the content they’re producing, and not some other entity. Unlike its .com counterpart, WordPress.org offers a more diverse array of monetization options. If you have a self-hosted account, you can tap into virtually any ad network for monetization, including Google AdSense and AdThrive.
Key features:
- Extensive customization options and plugins
- Open-source and easy to use
- Real-time preview of how your affiliate website will look like
- Access to over 50,000 free and premium plugins
Pricing:
WordPress is free to download and install. However, you will still need to use a separate web hosting service.
Why Use Affiliate Marketing Tools?
Affiliate marketing tools can help you bolster your affiliate marketing strategy, increase your affiliate revenue, generate high-quality leads, have better control over how you manage and track your affiliates, and create personalized, engaging, and on-brand campaigns. Instead of guessing which solutions or affiliate marketing strategies are working or not, you have the advantage of using data to make informed business decisions.
Furthermore, they do a great job of streamlining and managing your affiliate marketing-related data, allowing you to efficiently track leads. They also enable you to provide accurate and reliable compensation to affiliates, as well as monitor their individual performance. Lastly, they can help you save time and money by automating repetitive tasks.
In the market to find the right affiliate marketing tool? Make sure that it’s easy to use, integrates with your current tech stack, and offers robust customer support. Consider your budget as well. There are several affiliate marketing tools that offer free or freemium plans. Lastly, make use of free trial periods. This way, you can try out a solution to see if it’s capable of meeting your needs.
