Impact is a well-known affiliate network with three main streams: partnership management, creator, and advocate. The first manages the partnership lifecycle from recruitment and contracts to operations, tracking, and reporting. The network helps you find niche affiliates based on filtration in its marketplace and enables you to customize your contracts to meet your business needs best.

The Creator stream speaks more specifically to influencer marketing and partnerships. Finally, the Advocate stream is a section for customer referrals and recruitment, including referral program creation, incentives, and automated workflows.

3. ShareASale

ShareASale is an affiliate network that services merchants, affiliates, and agencies. It currently has over 30,000 merchants on its platform and over 1 million publishers (affiliates).

The company has tweaked its offerings over the last 20 years with personalized program diagnostics, real-time performance data, and automated recruitment tools where you can send customized invitations to niche affiliates to join your program. Features include a user-friendly dashboard, customizable reporting, custom commissions, advanced tracking, and revenue attribution.

Pricing starts at $35 monthly, along with an initial $625 sign-up fee.

5 Things to Consider When Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Platform

Your marketing budget isn’t endless — that’s why you need to filter out wasted expenses by deciding on the best possible affiliate platform for your business.

The goal is to have an affiliate platform that helps you generate more income with the growth it offers your program.

Here are some things to consider before you invest in an affiliate platform:

1. User-friendliness

Marketing tasks can eat up hours in your schedule. Your affiliate network or software should help you gain back some of those hours with an efficient operation. And step one to being more productive is to have a user-friendly platform. You and your staff should be able to move seamlessly from feature to feature within a network or program and easily access and analyze performance data to improve your strategy.

Pro tip: Always opt to try an affiliate software’s free trial before you invest in a subscription.

2. Customization

No affiliate program is exactly the same. Meaning? You can’t expect a one-size-fits-all software to bring you the same revenue as it might for another kind of business. Here are some green flags for customization in affiliate networks and software:

• Affiliate marketplace: An affiliate network should give you a wide roster of potential affiliates to choose from. But how are they displayed? Is it a neverending sequence of pages? Or can you filter results by niche, following, experience, channel, and other criteria to help you find the best match? Go for affiliate networks that let you customize search results to find the best affiliates for your program.
• Commissions: Look for affiliate software that offers diverse commission options to better engage your affiliates. Performance bonuses and increases are good signs in software, as well as multiple structures like lifetime, recurring, product-specific, flat-fee, and percentage-based commissions.
• Integrations: You should be able to connect your affiliate software and network to other essential tools in your stack. But if they don’t offer a direct integration, look for custom integration options via developer code.

3. Price

Affiliate software and networks often come with wide-ranging price tags because of the vastness of features, tracking needs, and business types.

You might find software with an affordable, first-tier subscription plan — but make sure the features and offerings make sense for your business. If you can’t have unlimited affiliates without paying for an enterprise plan, that’s a red flag.

4. Customer support

Customer support is a vital component of an affiliate network and software. Online platforms can have glitches and high learning curves, and you should feel confident in the platform’s company that their support team can successfully and quickly get you through any snags.

Look for platforms with multiple customer support channels, like live chat, email, social media, and phone support. You can also check review sites like G2 and Capterra to assess a platform’s customer support.

Scalability

Your affiliate program might grow from one affiliate to one thousand with the right strategy. However, your affiliate software should accommodate and propel that scaling through its features. Our advice? Prioritize scale-friendly platforms with perks like unlimited affiliates, high tracking capacity for conversions, white-labeling for brand consistency, and multiple tiers to speak to different stages of your affiliate program.

Boost Your Affiliate Program with Tapfiliate’s Affiliate Software!

Bottom line? There’s no shortage of affiliate tools and platforms to help you see more sales, growth, and revenue from your affiliate program.

Affiliate networks are great resources to help recruit niche-specific, secure affiliates. On the other hand, affiliate software platforms give you more features to manage, improve, and scale your affiliate program with performance insights and better affiliate engagement.