While its natural for people to believe that the best affiliate program doesn’t come by easily and would be very costly, things aren’t that way. The best affiliate programs available online are extremely reasonably priced and quite accessible.
Features of Affiliate Marketing Programs
When it comes to buying the best available affiliate tracking software, one must look for the following basic features:
- A customized webpage that allows affiliates to sign up easily for the affiliate marketing program,
- A password-protected section where the affiliates can access HTML codes for text ads and banners,
- A well-protected section that allows the merchants to add ad links, add, change and delete affiliates, send e-mails to affiliates, decide on the commission rates, determine cookie expiration sessions, approve the payment of commissions, list the dues to be paid etc.
How the above stated features are offered to both, merchants and clients, vary from software to software, but nearly all good affiliate marketing software offer these services. Everything has evolved with time, so have the software for affiliate marketing. Only the crème de la crème software has been able to evolve to serve with a lot more than the basic. Some additional and useful features that not all affiliate marketing software provide are:
- Great flexibility in calculating commissions for all such as impressions, leads, clicks, sales or a certain combination that’s required for a particular reason,
- Ability to set commissions differently for varying products, ads and affiliates,
- Exporting payment information to PayPal and other accounting and payment programs,
- Structured e-mailing to groups of affiliates using both, text and HTML,
- Well thought-out tracking of each affiliates’ sales.
Tracking Affiliate Income
When starting off your own affiliate program, you tend to lookout for website owners who have products that are either related to or complement your products and services. Once you manage to find such an affiliate, and they agree to work with you, they will readily place your ads and banners on their own website. When an online visitor clicks on that ad/banner and they are redirected to your website, the result is a qualified lead or sale.
However, things turn trickier when it comes to justly compensating the website owner or your affiliate. It’s wise to decide beforehand as to how you are going to recompense your affiliates. Typically, there are 3 ways of doing so:
- Pay per Click (PPC),
- Pay per Sale (PPS) and
- Pay per Lead (PPL).
This is where affiliate tracking feature comes in handy. This feature is extremely invaluable for your overall affiliate marketing program as it helps you to keep track of how much sales have been made and how much income each affiliate has earned.
Learn how to recruit affiliates at LeadDyno or find out more about our WordPress affiliate plugin.
