We live in a time that every second counts and we don’t want to waste them and we don’t have the patience to see the hours passing through us when things are happening in front of our eyes.

Today we optimize tasks and processes to make the most of our days. This happens with almost everything in our lives, from the fastest way to arrive at our workplace until the presentation that we’re going to have at the end of the day. The tendency is this, get things planned, processes optimized and the results will arrive.

Affiliate Marketing is not an exception when we say that we can have better results when everything is optimized and planned. In this business, you can take advantage when you plan workflows, optimize processes, and predict trends!

Besides optimizing constantly your campaigns, if you plan your work for the week, for example, Monday for creatives, Tuesday for spy tools, Wednesday to make a resume of your campaigns with your(s) Account Manager(s), and so on, you will see that your work will have a better flow.

How can you optimize a process? Sometimes it is as simple as having a second monitor, this can be a huge help when you’re working with many tabs or want to analyze data. Also if you can be the first to have an offer or anticipate a tendency, you can take advantage of it and get good results from that prediction.

In Affiliate Marketing, even if you’re a very organized person, there are some software/tools that can help you. And it’s about one of these tools that we're going to talk about in this article, Tracking Softwares.

What is Tracking Software and how does it work?

Just to make a short introduction to this topic, Tracking Softwares get all the data from your traffic sources/affiliate networks in one place. This all-in-one will help you manage and optimize your campaigns to help you get the best results possible. Let’s get deeper into it!

As the name says, Tracking Software is used to track the activity of your campaigns, for example, clicks, conversions, ROI, and much more. You can also easily make A/B tests, create conversion funnels, and get more data that you could get on the Affiliate Network or the Traffic Source.

The way to track all this is by editing the classic links you will use. First of all, with the Affiliate Network: every time a user clicks on an affiliate link, a number of identification for that click is created and it’s called ClickID. This ClickID will remain unique forever and will reach the Advertiser (if all the technical integrations are well done).

Keep in mind that it may be replaced by another unique ID along the chain. When there is a conversion, the Affiliate Network will send you the ClickID back which means that it brought a conversion. Therefore, every time a user visits an affiliate link and he triggers a conversion (For example a purchase of a drone), the affiliate who is promoting it, will receive a commission. The process of triggering the conversion is automatic and will allow the affiliate to track his sales and payouts almost live.

You have two ways of tracking your data, purchasing a Tracking Software like Voluum or Bemob or you can use the Tracking Software that is provided by the affiliate network that you work with. Remember that some of these are pretty basic so you will have a hard time optimizing your campaigns only with it.

You can also track properly the traffic (if you use display campaigns, for example) by using the ad impression tracking tool. Keep in mind that this tool is not available everywhere.

Purchased Tracking Software - Advantages

The Affiliate Marketing business is growing and becoming more competitive and being in front of your computer waiting for the conversions to happen is not enough. To get the expected results you need to analyze data and where can you do that with detailed information? On Tracking Softwares!

This way of working is more important for media-buying teams because they have a lot of data from their campaigns to analyze, optimize their ROI (Return on Investment) and maintain the eCPC (Effective Cost per Click) and eCPM (Effective cost per 1000 impressions) as low as possible.

Let’s take a look at the advantages that a Purchased Tracking Software like Voluum & Bemob can provide to you:

• You can access all of your campaigns from one dashboard. Normally you can check how much you spent, how many conversions, click and the most important, profits! Working with many platforms at the same time can be a tough challenge in Affiliate Marketing, and here is where the Tracking Softwares get in.
• Complete knowledge about your performance, get to know which parameters are performing better like creatives, carriers, browsers, devices, OS, and of course, the offers. Bad decisions can lead you to lose a lot of money, Tracking Softwares will not take good decisions for you but they will help!
• Doing easy A/B tests and getting all the insights from it. Rotate your landing pages and offers and find where to make the right changes in order to get more profits from your campaigns.
• The possibility to automate some manual processes. When you have many campaigns going on and you’re optimizing them, you do a lot of manual work. Some of the most advanced Tracking Softwares have AI tools that will help you redirect your traffic to the offers and landing pages with the best performances.

It’s like airplane pilots, they put the planes in autopilot and they arrive at their destiny, with the AI tools is the same, you put your campaign in autopilot and you can see your results improving. If your performance has some strange ups or downs, you will receive a notification.

• A better and effective targeting, Tracking Softwares let you get to know your audience as nobody. After some analysis, we can understand what are the best creatives, carriers, devices browsers, and more for your campaign. This will help you get better results.
• Anti-Fraud kits to see which sources are sending suspicious traffic to your offers. You don’t want to be flagged as fraud or suspicious towards the networks you work with, this can lead you to be expelled from it and avoid you to waste money.
• Collaboration tools - unique from Voluum - that allows you to organize the workflow with your team and share the results with your partners.
• The support you need in case of any doubts. The best Tracking Softwares have great support behind these great features, from live chat to blog articles, you’ll find the help you need.
• Be on mobile, these days everyone does almost everything on their smartphones and some Tracking Softwares provide an App to check your performance and optimize your campaigns on the way, easy and convenient!

Common mistakes that can happen if you don’t use a Tracker

• Waste money in unprofitable campaigns - a wrong interpretation and a lack of data can take you right away to an unprofitable campaign that will only make you lose money;
• Take more time to optimize. With all the information that a Tracking Software gives you, you will be able to do faster optimizations;
• Wrong decisions - Less data also means a possibility to destroy a good campaign;
• Getting confused if you start to have too many campaigns - Less organization means more time lost and consequently less time to work on your campaigns and optimize them
• Keep paying for bot traffic - trackers can easily detect bot traffic. This will help you avoid paying for it!
• Need to wait for the platforms to update the metrics as in several cases, the data is not real-time.

Tracking Softwares

Now we will leave you here some of the most important Tracking Softwares in the industry:

Voluum:

• Automizer
• Traffic Distribution AI
• Anti-Fraud Kit
• Mobile Notifications
• Collaboration Tools
• From 69$/Month
• www.voluum.com

Bemob:

• Secure Cloud - Hosted Tracker
• Manual Bot Blacklisting
• Traffic Tracking and Distribution System
• Custom Redirect Domains
• Real-Time Statistics and Data Reporting
• Instant Redirects
• From 49$/Month
• www.bemob.com

Redtrack:

• Impression, click & conversion tracking
• No-redirect tracking
• Automation & optimization
• Listicles and funnels tracking
• Real-time notifications
• Bot detection
• From 49$/Month
• www.redtrack.io

Binom:

• More than 20 analytical reports and advanced data points
• Statistics on paths, rules, rotations
• Report on uniqueness and bots
• Filter system
• Bid grouping
• Smart rotation
• From 69$/Month
• www.binom.org

Adsbrige:

• Conversion tracking
• Split testing
• Fraud-Guard
• Landing page builder
• URL rotator
• Link tracker
• From 29$/Month
• www.adsbridge.com

FunnelFlux:

• Visual Funnel Builder
• Powerful Reporting Engine
• Funnel Heatmaps
• Multi-user support
• Email Opt-in Conversion Tracking
• Multivariate Testing
• From 49$/Month
• www.funnelflux.com

Conclusion

In affiliate marketing, it is very important to analyze your data and it’s even more important to know how to analyze it to get the best results out of it. During your journey in this business, you’ll make good and bad decisions. That you can be sure of. Still if you “read” your data carefully, it will be a thriving and profitable journey.

Tracking Softwares were created to help you read all your data in only one place. Optimizing campaigns is already hard enough to not create the conditions to make it more simple and effective.

Remember these three words, Track, Optimize, and Automate!