Peter Drucker said, "What gets measured gets managed." Out of the 1,000s of little business quotes I've heard over the years, this one sits atop the list as one of the most meaningful.
If we don't know our numbers, we don't know what to do to improve.
Are you doing well and should you double down on what's working? Are you doing poorly and should you do less of what's not working? Do you know?
To get to where we want to go, we need to know where we are currently, and we need to track growth consistently, so we can make any necessary adjustments quickly and efficiently.
Affiliate marketing presents a unique challenge when it comes to tracking our results.
Here's why...
- Most affiliate marketers promote more than one program or product
- Many affiliate programs run on different networks
- Many networks show reports in very different ways
Until now, I've had to make do with what I've had. That's been a combination of a bookkeeping service called Bench.co and virtual assistants manually extracting the data for me and putting it into spreadsheets.
Smaller affiliate programs that only drive a couple of sales per month often don't get checked more than once every couple of months.
Although I'm a huge fan of Bench and will continue using them, they can only report transactions from my connected financial accounts like Chase bank, PayPal, and Stripe or from reports I upload.
For years I've been looking for a better way to do this, but nothing ever came. Until this year when friend Chris Fong introduced me to a new software that promised to help me get all my affiliate programs organized: Afflytics.
What Is Afflytics?
Afflytics is a hub for viewing the revenue of all your affiliate offers. Instead of manually checking each affiliate program's portal, you can see them all in one place.
That is a LOT of saved time and effort (assuming you're doing your affiliate marketing as a real business and actually monitoring your conversions).
Afflytics does this by connecting with the APIs of many of the biggest affiliate networks.
The only major drawbacks currently is that not every platform is supported, and the only things that are pulled in are individual sales.
Other things that 3rd party affiliate dashboards might provide, such as click tracking, conversion rates, and brand assets aren't transported over, so don't go forgetting all those log-ins just yet.
The overview dashboard provides a big picture of what's going on with your connected affiliate networks.
You can click on any of the metrics or choose from the dashboard drop down and get a more detailed view to see trends over time (which is very helpful)
For example, here's what the average daily commission revenue dashboard looks like.
Supported Affiliate Networks (As of Late March 2021)
Now, I absolutely understand the difficulty that Afflytics is facing. They're at the mercy of the layout of the popular affiliate programs.
For example, Refersion is a popular affiliate program that last month set up a CAPTCHA on their log-in page. This made it impossible for Afflytics to connect to them (legally and within the terms of service of course).
- CJ (Commission Junction)
- Rakuten
- LinkShare
- ShareASale
- ClickBank
- PepperJam
- FlexOffers
- LinkConnector
- Awin
- Sovrn Commerce (VigLink)
- Post Affiliate Pro
- AvantLink
- Impact
- JVZoo
- Effiliation
- Ebay Partner Network
- Adtraction
- Commission Factory
- Skimlinks
- Affiliatly
- HasOffers by TUNE
- TradeDoubler
- Admitad
- Adrecord
- BrandReward
- LeadDyno
- Affiliate Future
- AffiliateWP
- WP Affiliate Manager
The beautiful thing is that it's obvious that the folks at Afflytics care about supporting as many networks as possible, so they have an easy "make a request" button.
Unfortunately, a lot of the affiliate programs that I use now weren't yet supported or can't be supported. I only connected 5 of my programs for this demo, and I'm waiting for connections to the following to complete my full set up.
- LinkMink
- PartnerStack
- Cake
- Refersion
- ThriveCart
- PayKickStart
- Amazon Associates (Not possible given their TOS)
Again, they are extremely new, and I'm guessing I'll be updating this article in the next couple of weeks to cross some of these domains off the list.
It seems that they will eventually be able to add most of them if not all of them.
The only one that for sure isn't coming is Amazon associates, which is fine by me. I'm no longer promoting them after their recent slap in the face to their affiliates.
Afflytics Pricing
Afflytics has several pricing tiers. Each tier offers unlimited websites*, daily commission updates, and email reports
- $0/Year Free - 5 affiliate programs, 30 days historical data and under $1,000 in monthly commissions.
- $209/Year Blogger - 15 affiliate programs, 90 days of historical data and under $5,000 in monthly commissions.
- $539/Year Affiliate - 50 affiliate programs, 365 days of historical data and up to $25,000 in monthly commissions.
- $1419/Year Business - 100 affiliate programs, unlimited historical data, and up to $100,000 in monthly commissions.
- $---/Year Agency - Unlimited affiliate programs, unlimited commissions and unlimited historical data. Also includes premium support.
As with most software programs, you'll save a little bit of cash if you go with the annual option, so the prices shown above are for annual memberships. Reporting software like Afflytics is something that is best used consistently and not in monthly spurts, so I recommend always going annual if you can afford it.
If you're looking for monthly options, you'll pay about 9% more per year.
*Websites are not the same as affiliate programs. These are your own sites that you organize different programs under.
Although this might be a little pricey if you're brand new to affiliate marketing, the value is tremendous once you scale.
Oh, and knowing your numbers is a great way to scale faster and more efficiently 🙂
Afflytics Alternatives
When it comes to tracking affiliate conversions, there just isn't anything comparable to afflytics.
Sure you can track conversions with tools like Voluum, but it's far from the same.
overall
This software is new and has a few wrinkles to iron out in terms of updating the supported networks and some minor glitches, but it still left me very impressed and got me to pull out my credit card for an annual license. It will easily replace hours of work I used to have to outsource to a virtual assistant.
Pros
Cons
Once more platforms are added, I anticipate raising this review score much higher.
Quality
Interface
Support
Ease of Use
Cost
Accuracy