Best Practices When Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Platform

Whether you’re a digital media buyer (i.e., advertiser) or seller (i.e., publisher), both depend on each other for a successful affiliate marketing program. Advertisers need access and visibility into inventory — fast — and publishers need to be able to show inventory as it becomes available, and provide insightful and accurate reporting. Without the right affiliate marketing platform, the process becomes cumbersome at best, and can jeopardize thousands or millions of dollars.

In this blog post, we recommend a few things to look for when searching for the right affiliate marketing platform, and how TUNE stacks up.

5 Things to Look for in an Affiliate Marketing Platform

1. Fully Customizable, White Label Technology

Every company has a different need, brand, industry, and process. As such, it’s important that you choose an affiliate marketing platform that you can customize to fit your company, instead of forcing your company to fit a certain platform. At TUNE, our platform is white label ready and fully customizable, whether you want to use our platform, or leverage our API to build your own on top of it.

2. Best-In-Class Support

No matter which affiliate marketing platform you choose, there are some things you will need help with from time to time. As such, it’s important to choose a platform with stellar customer support. The last thing you want to do is spend valuable time waiting on an answer while you could be optimizing your campaigns.

One of the best ways to identify an affiliate marketing platform that prioritizes customer service is whether customer satisfaction is a metric they track. TUNE has a 98% customer service satisfaction rating, and we’re continually looking for ways to get even better.

3. Real-Time Reporting and Campaign Optimization

New inventory becomes available every second of the day. For buyers, success depends on making more timely buys, and sellers need to be able to expose inventory quickly and easily. A top priority should be choosing an affiliate marketing platform that provides real-time data and optimization opportunities so you can make instantaneous decisions. The faster you’re able to optimize, the faster your revenue can scale.

At TUNE, we offer actual real-time reporting and management capabilities, including A/B testing and landing space splits, so you can discover what performs best and make instant (or incremental) changes that add up to massive results.

4. System Reliability

When assessing an affiliate marketing platform, ask for statistics about uptime. It’s critical as a seller to be able to provide timely and accurate data and analysis. In the fast-paced world of affiliate marketing, nothing can be more frustrating (or result in more lost revenue) than dealing with unnecessary downtime.

We’re proud to say TUNE can report 99.9% system uptime, having built our technical infrastructure to the highest standards in security and redundancy, so your platform will be ready for any situation.

5. All-In-One Functionality

It’s no secret the marketing technology landscape is only getting more complex, with more than 8,000 vendors in 2020. The last thing you want to do is sign up for a point solution and have to integrate with 10 more. That’s why we strongly advise looking for an all-in-one platform that allows you to manage everything from digital marketing campaigns to publisher relationships, conversion tracking, payouts, creative assets, lead generation, transactions, automation, and more.

Your Choice, Your Affiliate Marketing Platform

We’re proud of what we’ve created at TUNE, but don’t just take it from us. Read more about what our customers say, from growing revenue by 500% to eliminating data integrity issues (and saving countless hours in the process).

Questions? Reach out to [email protected] to start a conversation today. 

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This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.