Best Affiliate Marketing Tools for Affiliate Managers – Comprehensive List

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing competitive industry, and it’s no longer enough just to join an affiliate program and occasionally post some excellent content. Many affiliate marketers want to increase their revenue, get better leads, and have more control over the process. 

As an Affiliate Manager, are you implementing an affiliate marketing strategy? Do you know the best affiliate marketing tools to get things done?

Affiliate marketing tools are an essential part of the business, and the best affiliate marketing tools can help affiliate marketers reach their goals more easily and quickly. A Statista report stated businesses in the U.S. spent $8.2 billion on affiliate marketing campaigns in 2022. 

In this article we discuss the top 10 affiliate marketing tools for affiliate managers to strengthen their approach to partnerships and generate more revenue for their programs.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which a third party (the affiliate) promotes a business or a service in a more subtle, trustworthy way. Instead of running large banner ads all over your website, you include special product affiliate links. When a reader clicks on your affiliate link and purchases, you receive a commission from the brand.

Image Source – DreamHost

To Succeed in affiliate marketing in 2024 requires a strategic approach, including choosing the right niche, creating high-quality content, and leveraging SEO techniques. Building trust with your audience, using data to drive decisions, and staying updated with industry trends is crucial for long-term success in affiliate marketing.

Continuously learning and adapting, utilizing tools for automation, and diversifying income streams are critical strategies for thriving in the evolving affiliate marketing landscape.

Importance of Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Tool

Choosing the right affiliate marketing tool is critical to the success of any business. Research has shown that companies that use affiliate marketing software do see an increase in sales and revenue. With so many options available, deciding which suits your needs might take time and effort, but choosing the right software could save time and resources with little return on investment.

Let’s discuss some key factors you must consider while choosing an affiliate marketing tool.

Ease of Use

Your chosen tools should have easy navigation and accessibility features to work efficiently in your marketing efforts. It should be user-friendly for affiliates and merchants and have clear instructions for setting up accounts, creating links, and monitoring performance metrics. 

Affiliate Network Integrations

Integration of the tool is vital  with the specific networks you plan to use, as this streamlines the process of managing your affiliate links, tracking performance, or assisting with keyword research.

Tracking and Analytics

Look for affiliate marketing tools with tracking capabilities to monitor clicks and conversions. The ability to accurately track clicks, conversions, and commissions will ensure that affiliates and merchants are compensated fairly for their efforts; it also allows for better analysis of data and optimization of campaigns.

Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness 

As an affiliate marketing manager, cost-effectiveness should be considered when selecting a platform, as it directly impacts ROI (return on investment). So, it is essential to consider what features are necessary versus those that would be nice to have but not worth paying extra for.

Let’s look at some of the tools you can use for affiliate marketing.

Best Affiliate Marketing Tools For Affiliate Managers in 2024

Affiliate Marketplace Tool

1. Affiliate Network Performance Tool #2. AffJetCJ (Commission Junction)

Image Source – CJ

CJ (Commission Junction) is one of the oldest and largest affiliate marketplaces, with thousands of legitimate, high-quality advertisers, and you can sign up for CJ for free. You must set up an account, apply for an affiliate marketing program, and promote the products. Your affiliate income will depend on the selected merchants since commission rates vary on each affiliate program.

It helps you to filter the searches accordingly to select brands with a higher commission rate. CJ’s affiliate program works on a cost-per-sale model. It boasts competitive commission rates depending on customer status, product category, and location. Use CJ’s benchmarking tools to determine where customers most connect with your business.

 Features

• Real-time progress monitoring across affiliate networks
• Partnered with over 3,000 brands
• User-friendly interface suitable for beginners

Pricing

Accessible upon contact

Affiliate Network Performance Tool

2. AffJet

Image Source – AffJet 

Affjet makes it easy to manage your affiliate marketing campaigns and earnings in one place as it combines all the affiliate networks you need into one platform. It also provides tools to help create landing pages and to track conversions. 

The platform’s dashboard lets you assess the effectiveness of your campaigns by analyzing the highest-performing campaigns. It also combines data from over 100 affiliate networks. 

 Features

• Easy report sharing
• Data filtering options
• Trend tracking ( such as clicks, conversions, and impressions to spot fresh trends and opportunities)
• Mobile-friendly
• Campaign performance monitoring across multiple networks

Pricing

• Standard: $5/month per 500 transactions
• Medium: $15/month per 1,600 transactions
• Large: $30/month per 4,500 transactions
• Custom: Contact the sales team

Domain and website buying tool

3. Flippa

Image Source – Flippa

Flippa is an affiliate marketing software for buying a website and building upon it. Flippa enables affiliate marketers to purchase affiliate-based websites with a strong backlink profile for SEO growth.

Before buying a website, you may need to perform a full backlink audit to ensure the domain is free of black-hat SEO techniques, so many affiliate marketers have to buy a high-ranking webpage only to be penalized by a Google algorithm update due to the previous owner’s black hat practices.  

Features

• Multiple methods to check the website performance 
• It can be used to buy and sell websites on this platform, which acts as a bidding marketplace (eBay for websites).
• Financial metrics from sources like Stripe, Shopify, Admob, Google Analytics

Pricing

Start from USD$39

Affiliate Ad Tracking Tool

4. Voluum

Image Source – Voluum

Voluum is an advanced affiliate marketing tool for monitoring, enhancing, and streamlining advertising campaigns. It is a reliable and easy-to-navigate affiliate tracking software.

You can track your ads quickly, and the platform provides insights into the performance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages through an extensive array of reporting and analytical tools. It enables you to conveniently monitor ad campaign metrics such as visits, clicks, and profit from one dashboard, and it relies on its powerful tracking abilities to monitor clicks and conversions.

You can create an up-to-date digital marketing campaign strategy using Voluum’s trend analysis tool, which provides data on market trends. 

 Features

• User-friendly interface and customizable dashboards
• Integrates with Google Ads, Facebook Ads
• Works with third-party tools like WordPress and Zapier
• Real-time reporting
• Supports multiple currencies
• Ad impression tracking

Pricing

• Start-up: $599/month
• Agency: $999/month
• Enterprise: $1,999/month
• Corporate: $4,999/month
• Executive: $9,999/month

Reporting and analytics tools

5. Google Analytics 

Image Source – Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the top affiliate marketing tools, which provides web performance insights for increasing lead generation and optimizing affiliate sites. You can further leverage the platform to improve your website’s search engine performance.

By employing the Google Analytics event tracking helps,

• You can see who interacts with your affiliate links, which lets you track on-site engagement and see who clicks on affiliate links. 
• How much time do visitors spend on your website.
• You pinpoint the posts that generate the highest traffic. 
• Use the data to craft better content strategies and increase your revenue. 

This results in more organic traffic to your website as Google Analytics provides insights into the keywords visitors use to find your site, which helps you identify opportunities to enhance your SEO efforts. Creating new custom audiences from existing segments is also possible, helping to improve audience retargeting and experimenting with different campaign strategies.

Features

• Goals tracking
• Built-in automation
• Advanced real-time reporting 
• Integrates with other Google solutions (Google Ads and Google Cloud)
• Custom data analysis with pre-defined reports

Pricing

• Free

SEO Content Optimization Tool

6. Surfer SEO

Image Source – Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO helps the affiliate marketing manager create SEO-optimized written content, like blog posts and articles. It allows you to analyze and compare your own pages against what currently ranks on the SERPs and analyze the content of a page against “500+ on-page” signals. It also has a built-in keyword research tool.

• Surfer’s Keyword Research tool: Use it to find numerous topic clusters related to your primary keyword. 
• Content Editor: With the help of this, you can access keywords that help you rank better on the SERP. 
• Surfer’s Audit: This enables you to manage, monitor, and enhance your content workflow. It’s ideal for assessing your website’s performance, examining competitors, keeping old content up-to-date, and locating SEO errors.

Features

• Real-time writing feedback 
• Surfer AI to write traffic-boosting content
• Audit add-on for content optimization

Pricing

• Essential: $69/month
• Advanced: $149/month
• Max: $249/month
• Enterprise: Contact the sales team

Performance Marketing Data Tool

7. Pathmatics

Image Source – Pathmatics by SensorTower

Pathmatics is a marketing intelligence platform for affiliate managers to improve their marketing strategies and operations and micro-analyze their competition, customers, and market. The application assists in answering digital questions on popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube in its quest for old and current trends. 

To plan effective marketing strategies, you can quickly gain valuable insights into top global brands, including your competitors. Expand your reach in well-performing segments by analyzing successful promotional offers, positioning tactics, market attributes, and affiliate marketing strategies. 

Using the Pathmatics Explorer, you can effectively pinpoint marketing prospects, prioritize leads,  customize new business pitches, and enhance customer relationships thus, this approach can result in securing more deals, growing existing accounts, and improving overall affiliate marketer performance.

Features

• Digital channel insights
• Evaluation of competitor marketing campaigns
• Ad investment trend analysis
• Predictive Pragmatics Explorer

Pricing

Available upon contact

URL shortening tool

8. Pretty Links

Image Source – Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a fantastic WordPress plugin for affiliate marketers that makes their links more readable and more accessible to share. When you promote affiliate offers, you must ensure that the links you share look professional and match your brand while promoting affiliate offers.

With Pretty Links, you can create customized links that are easy to remember, read, say, and type. You can also manage all your links in one place from your WordPress dashboard, making it easy to track all your promotions.

Pretty Links can help you automate your affiliate marketing efforts, and you can set up rules for when and where your links should appear, and the plugin will do the rest. 

Pretty Links also has several redirection options. Moreover, If a link you’ve shared changes, you can quickly redirect it to a new link without breaking the connection. It is an excellent affiliate marketing tool that can help you streamline your affiliate marketing efforts.

Features

• Hyperlinking keywords
• Statistics tracking:
• Clean and straightforward URLs
• Link Redirection

Pricing

Starts at $99.50/year

Competitor Ad Insights Tool

9. iSpionage

Image Source – iSpionage

iSpionage is a competitor analysis tool that helps affiliate marketers analyze the competitors’ ad campaigns, including how many PPC ads they run and which keywords they bid on. Its campaign watch feature provides a detailed weekly report highlighting the changes in the competitor’s campaigns. 

iSpionage helps users find profitable keywords that can perform well based on the keyword’s potential to generate traffic by giving a keyword effectiveness score. Users can monitor their search engine marketing (SEM) performance,  A/B test results, and landing page strategies to understand their best practices.

Features

• Benchmarking.
• Campaign Analytics.
• Competitive Analysis.
• Dashboard.
• Data Import/Export.
• Keyword Rank Tracking.

Pricing

• The free version offers 10 competitive reports/day and three competitor alerts. 
• Opt for premium plans for unlimited research and more data exports, starting at $59/month.

Social Media Scheduler

10. Buffer

Image Source – Buffer

Buffer is a simple affiliate marketing tool for affiliate managers to manage social media accounts and automate social media posts. It has a dashboard for social media posts that lets you plan and publish in one spot, which helps you grow a social media audience to share your affiliate links.

Editing planned posts is also possible using Buffer’s drag-and-drop interface, and its queueing feature enables users to schedule content on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It can track social media performance metrics and engagement data such as shares, clicks, followers,  mentions, and retweets. From Buffer’s simple dashboard, users can monitor social media RSS feeds and add comments to boost engagement. 

Features

• Schedule social posts to several networks.
• Create slots and add content.
• The calendar view (shows the posts you published and the scheduled posts queue)
• Pablo for image creation
• In-depth analytics and reports

Pricing

• Buffer has a generous free plan.
• Paid plans that start at $6/month for 1 channel, additional channels, and users cost more.

Final Thought

Affiliate marketing tools are an incredible way to improve efficiency, increase conversions, and drive higher income. All the tools mentioned above cater to different needs, and depending on your level in your affiliate marketing task, you can choose the right ones. If you’re a new or experienced affiliate manager, utilizing the right tools can put your marketing goals on the right path. So, enhance your marketing strategy with the best affiliate marketing tools.