Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for any length of time, chances are you’re enrolled in at least half a dozen affiliate networks.
Maybe more.
I’m enrolled in probably twice that.
There are some I’ve even forgotten about.
It’s difficult to keep track of all of them. Much less monitor your performance. Because so many of these affiliate networks have lousy ~2005 era reporting tools.
They make you dig through confusing reporting interfaces just to access an unintuitive report you can’t make heads nor tails of.
Ideally, what you’d want is a consolidated snapshot of your daily, weekly, monthly affiliate network performance across a range of different reporting variables.
Like, Conversion Rate, Gross Commissions, Clicks, and Earnings Per Click (EPC).
All of it plotted on a clean line graph and delivered to your email on a daily basis.
I stumbled across a tool recently that lets you do all of that. For FREE.
It’s Affluent.io. (I’m an affiliate).
Here’s my dashboard report from today:
In the line graph, Orange is clicks and Blue is commissions. The Blue big spikes are from big-ticket Wayfair purchases.
I hooked Affluent up with Clickbank, Rakuten Linkshare, Impact, ShareASale, Commission Junction and AvantLink and it instantly began generating slick, entirely customizable, reporting dashboards.
My big earnings come from Amazon and Mediavine, which aren’t included in this dashboard snapshot. I’d have to upgrade to a paid account to handle Amazon reporting.
But, for my purposes, Affluent.io provides excellent and detailed affiliate reporting data for my smaller affiliate networks.
Affluent.io also provides reporting tools for Agencies and Advertisers, not just Affiliates.
What I Like
Free Tier
Affluent.io provides free reporting for up to $5,000 in commissions. And, if you need more reporting bandwidth, pricing is pretty reasonable:
Customizable Email Reports
I get daily emails from Affluent.io that summarizes yesterday’s performance. I also get weekly overview reports.
These are really awesome and are probably the emails I enjoy reading the most every morning. That is, if I don’t log into Affluent.io and manually check up on yesterday’s performance.
Desktop Push Notifications
Normally, I hate websites asking me to allow push notifications. With Affluent, though, it’s awesome. For example, a couple days ago they sent a push notification that Commission Junction was experiencing a click tracking issue. They explained the problem and how it was going to be resolved.
Data Deep Dives
It’s not just a pretty dashboard.
You can get reporting data for the networks as a whole (ShareASale), programs inside of the network (Wayfair), performance by Country, and much, much more.
This is really valuable data that can help you optimize your affiliate promotions.
I realize I’ve been flying in the dark. Getting a consolidated EPC and Conversion % across all of my affiliate networks is amazingly illuminating.
Opportunities & Alerts
There’s also a section called Opportunities & Alerts inside Affluent.io that alerts you to potential problems.
For example, they’re reporting that “5 programs received no clicks on dates as recent as 2020-09-09.”
This could be nothing, or it could be cause for alarm. I know that one affiliate program I’m in recently experienced a 3-day downtime. At this time, I’m still enjoying the free plan, so I’d have to upgrade to see more information.
Like you, I’m loathe to add another recurring payment atop all of my existing software subscriptions. Especially when this one works so well on the free plan.
But, I might upgrade in the future.
Lots Of Integrations
They integrate with over 500 different affiliate networks:
What I Don’t Like
There’s not much to dislike. There are some premium features you understandably can’t access if you’re on a free tier.
As well, there are a bunch of niche affiliate programs I’m part of, like FatJoe’s link building service, that seem to run on some custom built solution.
Affluent understandably can’t connect to that. However, you can request new integrations. I just requested they connect to LinkMink so I can track my Convertkit affiliate earnings.
Summing Up
Affiliate marketing can definitely get a little bit messy. You join up with multiple affiliate networks and begin promoting different programs.
But unless you are actively tracking their performance, you might fail to spot underperforming offers, programs that have shut down, or even high-converting affiliate programs that you should promote harder.
This is especially true if you have a large website. I have a couple big websites and I will often join up with an affiliate program, insert a few links with ThirstyAffiliates, and completely forget about it.
Affluent effortlessly keeps tabs on everything, so it’s easy to drill down into a particular network and evaluate the performance of individual affiliate programs or even the network as a whole.
After Amazon dramatically reduced affiliate commissions in the Spring of 2020, many affiliate marketers were compelled to experiment with alternative affiliate programs and networks.
This makes a tool like Affluent even more important because it automatically tracks your affiliate performance, making it easy to compare, for example, EPCs between Amazon and Wayfair.
Because of its generous freemium pricing, there’s no reason not to signup and trial the service. The data insights are truly addictive.
Last Updated on August 18, 2021 by Ryan Nelson
