How to Aggregate Data from Multiple Affiliate Programs
It’s a sad and familiar tale for the affiliate marketing industry. You want to see how much revenue you brought in yesterday so, you open 20 different bookmarks and wait for CJ, ShareASale, Impact, AWIN, and a dozen other affiliate networks or individual affiliate programs to load up and hopefully not crash Chrome.
Once they’re all loaded up, you use a password manager or an Excel spreadsheet to log in to each site. Once the sites have loaded up, you go through them one at a time and start investigating what happened yesterday and, if you’re organized, transferring it in to another Excel spreadsheet.
But quick question, how is this month going compared to last month? What about last year? Are your clicks up this week over last week or down? Is there anything important you are missing?
The Problem with a Fragmented Affiliate Marketing Industry
According to the 2016 AffStat Report, over 50% of affiliates promote over 10 different programs with nearly 15% promoting over a whopping 100 programs. Opening up systems one at a time and transcribing data is time-consuming and inefficient, but even more importantly, it doesn’t really give you any sort of proper analytics data.
Think about how easy it is to go in to your Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, or any other system and deep-dive in to your performance. Somehow, with the world of performance marketing, that same sort of emphasis on data does not exist. That being said, any serious marketer knows this information is the pulse of their business.
Difficulties in Tracking
Some networks and programs make it possible to access their data with technical expertise. For instance, networks like ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, Impact and affiliate software like Cake or Tune have APIs (code that allows software programs to connect to each other) that you can use to pull data on transactions, clicks, payments and more. However, connecting to APIs requires technical expertise and, in addition, APIs change often change which requires updating your software. Smaller networks and companies don’t have APIs which makes tracking yet more difficult.
Affluent Tracks Your Affiliate Programs
Aggregated data from multiple affiliate programs is possible and beyond that, it is critical. At Affluent, our mission is to modernize the affiliate industry with the help of technology and we want to start we enabling access to data. With over 80% of brands using affiliate marketing and over 14% of all eCommerce sales affected by it, there’s no more need for the affiliate industry to be living in the 90’s.
Affluent allows you to connect all of your affiliate programs, just once, via API or login and then your work is done! Affluent allows you to view clicks, commissions (gross, net, disputed, pending, recurring, etc), impressions and metrics like EPC’s and conversion rates over time. You can compare any time period to any other time period, export your data, and view all of your transactions in one place. You can get e-mail alerts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis showing an overview of your performance.
In short, we have built Affluent to make access to data what it is supposed to be. Want to see more? Create a free account and stop wasting time loading reports so you can spend that time making money.
