How to Choose the Right Affiliate Marketing Platform: A Complete Guide for 2025

Affiliate marketing is living through its best era yet.

The more people become disenchanted with traditional advertising, the more they turn to strangers online for recommendations on products, services, travel destinations, and anything in between, and businesses take notice. According to Forbes, 83% of marketing teams are using affiliate programs to raise brand awareness and boost their conversion rates.

With affiliate programs comes a question – how do you onboard new affiliates, keep up with existing ones, track conversions, payout commissions, and run reports for your managers, all without going crazy?

Smart affiliate marketing platform is the answer. With technology, you can automate and streamline most of the workflow, so there is no need to babysit every small detail, and you have enough time and energy to plan cool campaigns, and come up with and execute creative strategies.

How do you find the best affiliate marketing tracking platform? We’re glad you asked!

What does the Affiliate Marketing Platform do?

An affiliate marketing tracking platform is a solution for the automation and optimization of your affiliate partner program.

The software provides timely monitoring of all affiliate activities and generates the reports where you can see the campaigns’ overall performance. One of the key aspects of such platforms is that they automate conversion attribution and payout, relieving the marketing team from having to manually go through each conversion, assign it to the right affiliate, and issue payouts. It also enables users to choose different commission and bonus types to motivate their partners to promote their products more actively.

Depending on the vendor you go with, affiliate software will offer you customization options, in-platform communication with partners, and different security measures to keep your affiliates safe from data leaks, and to protect you against fraud.

Key Features in the Affiliate Marketing Platform to Look out for

Affiliate software comes in many shapes and forms, and the functionality set you’ll find in them differs a lot too.

As an affiliate marketing manager, you need to make the most of the solution. To do that, the software you work with must have a list of key features that will cover the majority of your tasks and commitments.

Affiliate Tracking and Attribution

Affiliate tracking is the key process in affiliate marketing. You need to know exactly who did what and the outcomes of their activities. Your software needs to track anything that’s been purchased via your partners automatically and in real time – an item, a batch order, or one-off sale.

Tip: Look for tools that support coupons so your non-cookie-based conversions are also attributed correctly and without your manual labor.

Commissions and Bonuses

You’ll be surprised, but there are affiliate solutions that don’t support commissions or bonuses. This means a lot of manual calculations, which nobody has the time for.

There must be several commission and bonus types available in the software so that marketing can assign different types to different campaigns or affiliate groups. Flexibility is key here, as well as providing fair compensation to affiliates who generate conversions for you.

Real-time Reporting

Built-in real-time reports are an absolute must. Affiliate programs are very data-intensive. A lot is going on at all times, and you need a fireproof way of staying on top of all latest developments.

Most affiliate trackers offer some kind of reporting, but make sure to look into the following:

• What data do reports collect?
• Can you see what channels or affiliates generate the most revenue?
• Can you access historical data to track progress?
• Are the reports customizable to align them with your goals?
• Can you export data if required?

Tip: Besides reports, check that there are dashboards available that present all the data nicely for a high-level overview with an option to dive deeper. Sometimes you need to have a quick peek to see that everything’s working, and you wouldn’t want to waste your time looking into the complex data in reports.

Communication

The key to a successful affiliate program is strong relationships with your affiliates. In-platform communication ensures you’re always in touch, important updates are shared, and partners can reach out with any questions or concerns. Sure, they can email you as well, but the fewer obstacles they have in getting in touch with you, the higher the chances of them actually telling you about something that’s bothering them and not simply walking away.

What Else Should You Pay Attention to When Choosing the Affiliate Marketing Platform

Besides the most crucial functionality, there are four more points you need to consider in your decision-making process.

Automation

We know what you’re thinking – isn’t the software automated by its nature? It’s not that simple. Many of the little tasks often still need to be done manually. Pay attention to automation options, such as the ability to automate triggers for commissions and the commission allocation, affiliate approvals and payouts, refunds, dispute handling, etc, all of which is available in affiliate marketing platforms.

Integrations

Marketing workflow is a complex creature. Even a small company with the tiniest team typically uses a combination of solutions to reach the best results. Your future affiliate marketing platform is no exception. It needs to work in a seamless tandem with the rest of the tools you’re using to ace your marketing game.

The affiliate tracker solution needs to have a set of ready integrations for the top market players so you can connect them in a few clicks. For the rest, there must be a clear path to integrating them, such as through REST API.

Technical and Customer Support

It’s possible that you get an affiliate marketing platform, use it for several years, and never end up needing any kind of support. It’s also possible that you’ll have to reach out to the customer support team regularly to check how something works, get tips on performance optimization, or report an issue.

In either case, you need to have advanced and knowledgeable customer support that can help you sort your query asap and to your highest satisfaction. That’s why you need to evaluate the support options before you go ahead with any business software.

Check:

• Support formats (email, live chat, ticket system, phone)
• Self-help materials (manuals, how-to guides, customer portal, blog)
• Hours of operation
• Dedicated account manager’s availability

Customer Reviews

We want people to trust online feedback and reviews and buy our product via affiliates, so why not give it a go ourselves?

There are many online review portals for technology, – Capterra, G2, and SoftwareSuggest, only to name a few. All of them feature a rating system and detailed by-category reviews of solutions written by real users.

Bear in mind that it’s human nature to talk about what is not working more than praising something. Any solution will have negative reviews, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad right away. Use online feedback as only one element of your evaluation process. If you notice that some particular feature or setup gets more compliments or hate than others, mark that for your testing phase and ask your vendor representative about it, too.

Company Website and Socials

Have a quick look at the company’s website and social media accounts.

• Does the website look modern? Does it have all the information about the product?
• Can you find case studies of client testimonials?
• Do they post contact information or something about themselves?
• Are social media accounts updated regularly? What kind of content do they post?

The way a company manages their website and social media tells a lot about how they do business. Complex, outdated websites may signal you that their solution is also outdated and cumbersome. If there’s no contact or client information, this can also indicate that they’re not doing very well.

Selecting Finalists

Now that you know the key functionality that is an absolute must-have for affiliate programs, fine-tune the list to include unique requirements and preferences that you want to have in your solution.

The next step is to research what’s available on the market and narrow down the options. There are countless affiliate management solutions out there, so make sure you cross-check them against your main requirements, good-to-haves, and your gut feeling.

Try not to have too many vendors as your finalists, as it will only delay your project. You won’t miss anything by being vigorous with your selection criteria. Quite the opposite – you’ll save yourself the trouble of looking through the tools that are obviously not a good match for you.

This is Not a Drill: Do Not Skip Testing

Once you’ve looked at key features, browsed marketing materials, and selected the few final companies to look further into, comes the time to trial the software.

At this point, you might be thinking – I know so much about all these products, surely I can skip testing, right?

Wrong.

Signing up and evaluating the solutions yourself is a critical step that must not be missed under any circumstances.

It’s not that the companies are lying to you, but you can’t really know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve personally clicked through all the main features. Also, the same functionality can be performed in many different ways across vendors.

If you don’t have time for an elaborate evaluation, make sure you dedicate at least a couple of hours to every solution on your list. Once you subscribe to the software and launch affiliate partner management there, it will be ten times more difficult to move to something else.

Bonus Tip: Questions to Ask Yourself Before Looking for an Affiliate Marketing Platform

There are a few things you can do before diving into the evaluation of the affiliate trackers.

While the solution is by all means a must, as manual affiliate program management is inefficient and tedious, you need to understand what goals you’re trying to achieve with it. Simply getting a trendy tool because everyone else is doing it will get you nowhere.

So, before you even begin your research, sit down and think through these questions:

1. What are the main goals of my affiliate program?
2. How will I evaluate the success, the failure, and the progress towards my goals?
3. How fast do I want to grow and scale?

Having answers to these is more important than you may think. A company that is after brand awareness will have very different requirements and expectations from the software compared to a company that wants to revive one of the product lines and needs a 20% increase in sales by the end of the quarter.

It also makes sense to look into what is happening in your industry in terms of affiliate programs.

1. What bonus and commission structures are my competitors offering?
2. Where do they find and recruit partners for their programs?
3. How do they retain an active partner base?
4. Why did their affiliate program fail?

The answers you get will help you choose the right affiliate program tracker for your business.

For example, if you gravitate towards software that doesn’t offer bonuses, but everyone in your industry is doing them, you may lose potential affiliates to competition. Similarly, if everyone is offering a fixed commission, you can stand out by adding recurring or even lifetime commissions to attract talented and successful partners.