Winning in the affiliate marketing landscape can be quite tricky. We at Cloudways have highlighted 30+ best affiliate marketing tools that will help you succeed.
At one point or another in your life, you might have thought about ditching the 9 to 5 routine and becoming your own boss. There would be nothing better than waking up at your own time in the morning and working on your laptop that lies within your easy reach.
Affiliate marketing is one way you can have this life of your dreams. If you are passionate about blogging and want to monetize your website, affiliate marketing is the way to go.
The rise of affiliate marketing as a mainstream digital marketing channel has been quite tremendous. According to a research by Rakuten Marketing, the affiliate marketing industry will be worth more than 7 billion dollars in the next five years. What this means is that there will be massive growth in the field and that you have a great chance of thriving.
Affiliate Marketing Is Not Easy!
The amazing growth of affiliate marketing does not mean that anybody who tries will succeed. It should be mentioned that affiliate marketing requires immense efforts and hard work on your part. You need to be very persistent and strategic in your approach. After all, no good in life comes easy!
We at Cloudways aim to guide you in your affiliate marketing journey and help you succeed.
Affiliate Marketing Tools Can Help
As an affiliate marketer, you have got many responsibilities. From being a content marketer to handling accounts, you wear many hats in your journey.
Affiliate marketing tools are designed to make your life easier and help you become more productive. Here are three reasons why you should use affiliate marketing tools:
- You do not pursue affiliate marketing full-time. If you have another job, you might be cramped up for time. Affiliate marketing tools help you get more productive.
- They also help you discover new possibilities – possibilities that others might not know about.
- Many affiliate marketing tools are free. This means that you do not have to invest anything to implement a good strategy.
Best Affiliate Marketing Tools
After thorough research, our team of affiliate marketing experts have compiled a list of the best affiliate marketing tools for you. What follows is a detailed description of the most popular affiliate marketing tools. Read on to learn more about them and how they can improve your marketing strategy
Content Tools
More often than not, affiliate marketers are constantly creating content in some form or another. Whether it’s a blog, email newsletters, social media posts, so on and so forth, hence, it’s vital to ensure that there’s no compromise on content quality. We have mentioned a few recommended tools that can help make your job easy.
Buzz Sumo
Price:
Pro $99/Month
Plus $179/Month
Large $299/Month
Enterprise $499+/Month
Features:
BuzzSumo, is a content research and planning tool that helps affiliate marketers create content that is relevant.
It helps you search the web for trending content that can help make your posts more viral. From articles and blogs to videos and infographics, it provides you insights about various forms of content. What’s more, it can help you analyze a competitor’s content marketing strategy.
BuzzSumo allows you to identify content that resonates with your audience. For instance, you can find the most shared content in the past year or even the last 24 hours.It also helps you identify common topics and popular content formats in your particular niche.
BuzzSumo reports contain content analysis reports in the form of data and actionable insights. These insights provide data that help target your campaign to your audience better and then improve the likelihood of your content being shared.
Competitive intelligence is very important for affiliate marketers. BuzzSumo helps you discover what kind of content your competitors are publishing and what networks have proven to be most effective for them. You can also compare your content with your competitors and can optimize accordingly.
Grammarly
Price:
For Individuals: Free
For Individuals Premium: $11.66/Month
For Teams: $12.50/Month
Grammarly’s web app is quick and easy to launch. You can sign up through Facebook or Google, which reduces the time to create an account. After logging in, the user sees a dashboard view a template and a blank document that she/he can start working on directly.
Features:
There are numerous features that Grammarly brings to the table which help its users fix common grammar mistakes, use phrases that are better apt to the context, and fit the tone of the content. This tool also helps the content creator with suggestions of the proper terminology to cater to the audience it’s meant for.
Another great feature of Grammarly is its predefined goals criteria that the user can fill to obtain certain goals. This means that you, as a user can set preferences such as the type of audience (general, knowledgeable, and Expert) and whether the tone of the content piece is informal, neutral, or formal. After filling in these parameters, Grammarly will start giving suggestions that are better suited for your content contextually.
For premium users, there are more precise smart goals that are definable. For instance, whether the tone is confident, joyful, optimistic, friendly, urgent, and more. Grammarly’s premium content editor also helps by giving useful suggestions if the content piece is meant for academics, business, technical, or if it’s just a casual write-up.
You as a Grammarly user can gauge your content quality in real-time (as they write) since the web app analyzes the content piece. It gives useful information such as plagiarism and the various metrics (correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery) of the content piece.
DupliChecker
Price:
Free
Features:
DupliChecker is a great free web app that solves the problem pertaining to content quality and plagiarism for most affiliate marketers that write for a blog. Writers can use free features like text analysis, web management, keyword research, IP tools, SEO, Domain Tool and to improve and audit the quality of their content.
This web application is a go-to app for most writers as it’s free and it remains popular among most writers that need to quickly check their content.
Hemingway App
Price:
Online Version: Free
Desktop Version: $19.99
Features:
Hemmingway online editor is another great editing app that doesn’t need a user to register to use the features of this tool. The app has a distraction-free interface and features color-coding highlights on text to help identify types of suggestions in the content.
While the free version of this app doesn’t give users the option to save the document, the paid version not only saves documents but also features the option to directly publish the content on Medium or WordPress. Additionally, you can also export the document in multiple formats (PDF, Microsoft Word, HTML, Markdown, and Text).
Landing pages
Designing landing pages is crucial for affiliate marketers as they play an integral role in the affiliate funnel. Affiliate marketers earn money when webpage visitors complete a verifiable transaction. To do that, you have to create landing pages that attract visitors and convert them to customers. Hence, if the landing page of the product/service lacks aesthetics, functionality, or takes too much time to load, users will likely navigate away from that page. This is a loss to you, as the visitor did not convert to a customer.
This is where affiliate landing pages, created from various best-in-class tools, come in handy as they assist in escalating the conversion rate. Any leakage in this process is a direct loss for the affiliate as she/he pays to run ad campaigns to promote certain products/services with the aim to earn commissions.
Instapage
Pricing:
Business $199/month
Enterprise: Customized Plan
Features:
Sometimes it’s better to not reinvent the wheel, that’s how Instapage wins it’s place on this list of effective affiliate marketing tools. It has a library of pre-built landing pages that you can use to sell products/services that best fit your audience.
One of the main features of Instapage is its quick landing page creation that is customized to the type of audience. Instapage calls this process ‘post-click automation’, where you can create ads on Facebook and Google, and then add landing pages that resonate with the ad.
ClickFunnels
Pricing:
Standard: $97/month
ClickFunnels: $297/month
Features:
Within the category of landing page builders and a whole lineup of page builders, there’s ClickFunnel. It’s a sales funnel builder that aims to improve conversion rates for marketers. The reason this web application falls in the category of affiliate marketing tools is due to its focus on improving conversions.
This web app is particularly good for building effective sales funnels, landing pages, integrating affiliate programs, and automating follow-up funnels. You also have the option to request a demo and use the web app’s standard features for 14 days
Unbounce
Price:
Essential: $79/Month
Premium: $159/Month
Enterprise: $399/Month
Features:
If you’re looking to create landing pages with more variety of themes and customizations then this is the tool for you. This web app helps create landing pages that are a carbon copy of the prototype.
This landing page builder has a library that can fulfill the requirements of SaaS products, agencies, and ecommerce stores sales funnels and landing pages. These available templates already incorporate best user interface, and user experience principles so that’s why you no longer have to reinvent the wheel.
So whether you’re creating landing pages, pop-ups, or sticky bars – it’s all simple and quick with Unbounce.
Leadpages
Price:
Start: $19/Month
Standard: $37/Month
Pro: $79/Month
Advanced: $321/Month
Features:
When it comes to lead generation, you’ve perhaps sometimes wondered how life could have been simpler if there was a tool that could build landing pages that have a high conversion rate.
Not only does this web app have a repository of beautiful themes to choose from, but these themes are optimized for tablets and smartphones. With Leadpages, you can choose from a variety of templates that serve a function i.e contest/giveaway, event, and sales.
Conversion Optimization Tools
So far you’ve read about affiliate marketing tools that can help write content, create landing pages, and even create sales funnels. It’s time to look at some tools that focus entirely on optimizing conversions to increase revenue earnings.
OptinMonster
Price:
Basic: $19/Month
Plus: $39/Month
Pro: $59/Month
Growth: $99/Month
Features:
OptinMonster provides a comprehensive conversion optimization toolkit to help you grow your email lists and grow conversions. It helps you convert your website visitors into subscribers.
This web app is a standalone application that integrates seamlessly into platforms, including WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Shopify and many more. Let’s look at some features of OptinMonster.
OptinMonster helps you create attractive and engaging subscription forms without any graphic design expertise. They also have a library of graphics and designs that you can customize.
OptinMonster’s A/B testing feature allows you to experiment with different headlines, content, and layouts to see which combination brings maximum conversion. Another popular OptinMonster feature is Page-Level Targeting which allows you to show targeted messages on specific posts, pages, and categories. Targeted messages have a greater likelihood of garnering conversions as they cater to the audience better.
OptinMonster provides all the relevant statistics to guide your decision-making with its analytics and reporting.
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
Price:
Experience Optimization Essentials: $467/Month
Conversion Optimization Essentials: $368/Month
VWO Testing: $199/Month
VWO Insights: $169/Month
VWO Fullstack: $1999/Month
VWO Engage: $99/Month
Features:
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), is a comprehensive A/B testing platform to non-technical users. It’s a great affiliate marketing tool to test campaigns that you can optimize according to your unique needs.
Here are some VWO tests that make it an incredible affiliate marketing tool:
With VWO, you can run website A/B testing and easily add different versions of headlines, buttons, images or any other elements to create multiple variations of your website. It will then track the website and measure revenue, signups, clicks and similar conversion goals. In the multivariate testing mode, VWO combines all the changes you made and creates different designs automatically. This mode allows you to test thousands of website versions at the same time.
Split URL testing helps you create two different URLs of the same landing page. It then sends traffic to the two URLs and provides you with the data to pick out the domain that works the best.
Additional VWO’s features include:
- Visual Editor
- Analytics
- Heatmaps and Click Maps Integration
- Behavioral targeting
- Geo-targeting
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is such a successful tactic that affiliate marketers dedicate a lot of effort and thought to creating attractive email drips. Emails are effective at conveying a lot of offers in a simple and attractive package. To help you with the automated management of your email campaigns, I will now mention some of the most popular email focused affiliate marketing tools.
Mailchimp
Pricing:
Basic: Free
Essentials: $9.99
Standard: $14.99
Premium: $299
Features:
Mailchimp is a popular and comprehensive email marketing automation tool that takes car of all aspects of email marketing and greatly simplifies the entire process.
You can create single or multi-stage email marketing campaigns and add links to third-party websites in your emails. Using preset customized templates, you can get an email campaign ready for action in just minutes.
MailChimp’s campaign builder helps you customize content and design elements to the preferences of your intended audience. Whether you are selling t-shirts or part of a web hosting affiliate program, the tool allows you to craft a message that impresses and converts. .
The web app also takes care of automated transactional emails and removes the pressure of customary tasks such as welcoming the user, re-engaging them and setting up follow up emails.
Once the campaign goes live, MailChimp provides reports on the progress and performance, giving you essential insights on audience engagement and ROI.
Kyleads
Pricing:
Monthly: $50
Yearly: $500
Features:
Lead generation plays a vital role in landing potential customers into the affiliate funnel. This web app does just that by providing an end to end solution for SMEs and agencies.
Kyleads offers a dashboard that displays conversions and engagements by the target audience. Additionally, you can also create quizzes, pop-ups, surveys, and customer feedback forms to generate quality leads.
Additional features of this web app include:
- Multivariate Testing
- Customer Engagement
- Landing Page Forms
- Feedback Management
Active Campaign
Pricing:
Lite: $9
Plus: $49
Professional: $129
Enterprise: $229
Features:
When it comes to sending out emails, Active Campaign is a great affiliate marketing tool. The tool is popular because of the advanced automation feature that schedules and sends out emails the designated time.
A CRM helps you manage your pipelines, update deals, and always follow up at the perfect moment. The email and sales automation components keep all your customer data organized in one platform.
Active Campaign has additional features such as:
- Contact Management
- Segmentation
GetResponse
Pricing:
Basic: $15/Month
Plus: $49/Month
Professional: $99/Month
Enterprise: $1,199/Month
Features:
Here’s another affiliate marketing tool that improves the effectiveness of sending out email newsletters. There are plenty of pro features and the web app has an enthusiastic customer base spread all over the world.
You can now create responsive emails based on beautiful templates through an intuitive user interface. As a result, you would see the engagement rates going up and more leads on your money pages.
If you need, you can add dynamic content (aka smart HTML) and display CTA, images, and related ideas to impress the recipients and take your email marketing to the next level.
Additional features include:
- AutoFunnel
- Landing Pages
- Marketing Automation
- Webinars
- Autoresponders
- Enterprise
ConvertKit
Pricing:
Up to 1000 Subscribers: $29/Month
Up to 3000 Subscribers: $49/Month
Up to 5000 Subscribers: $79/Month
Features:
This is the perfect tool to add to the list of affiliate marketing tools because of its growth focus feature set. With ConvertKit, you now have access to easy-to-customize opt-ins that help convert visitors into subscribers.
ConvertKit offers detailed audience intelligence, thanks to detailed information highlighted by tags and segmentation. Segmentation is particularly useful and helps you see your audience in discrete chunks based on readers’ interests, activities, and the most viewed topics. As you can imagine, this information makes ConvertKit the perfect email newsletter tool to be in your affiliate marketing toolkit.
Tracking
Traffic is the lifeblood of the affiliate business. Every time an online user buys a product or service through an affiliate’s link, the affiliate receives a commission. This is why everyone in the affiliate is obsessed with traffic – where are the visitors coming from and what was their “journey” on an affiliate website.
In my opinion, affiliate marketing tools that track traffic and visitor journey are the most useful and the most complex to use.
Google Analytics
Pricing:
Google Analytics: Free
Analytics 360: Custom
Features:
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool that gathers and analyzes visitor data for presentation in the form of detailed reports.
With Google Analytics, affiliate marketers can better understand their audiences and get insights to finetune marketing strategies for better results. While the tool can get very complex, the reports are simple and easy to understand, thanks to on screen help and the host of tutorials available online.
Through Google Analytics, you can track and extract information such as the demographics of the visitors, where they are landing from, and the devices they are using to access your websites.
With the premium analytics, you’ll get access to some amazing features.
- Salesforce Integration
- Ad Network Integration
- Video Views and Clicks Data
- Custom Funnels
- Advances Analysis
ThirstyAffiliates
Pricing:
Basic: Free
One Site License: $49
Five Site License: $79
Unlimited Site License: $149
Features:
If you have a WordPress website, ThirstyAffilaites is a great plugin to keep all the affiliate links organized. Managing affiliate ID and links and making sure that all the links are current and operational is a common challenge for affiliate marketers.
The plugin is simple and offers features such as link cloaking that hides the long affiliate tracking URL from the visitors. On a related note, the plugin simplifies the task of inserting affiliate links into the content, thus saving a lot of time and effort.
Voluum
Pricing:
Discover: $69/Month
Profit: $169/Month
Grow: $449/Month
Agency: $999/Month
Features:
If you’re looking for an innovative, real-time analytics platform for tracking online campaigns, this is a great web app to add to the list of affiliate marketing tools. Voluum is a powerful option for performance marketers and advertisers who wish to monitor their efforts, campaign progress and profitability.
With Voluum, your data is safe because the platform is protected by hardened encryption and authentication processes similar to those employed by leading financial institutions.
This affiliate marketing tool is accessible from the cloud and helps advertisers get a near-real time pulse of their activities.
Ad Spy Tools
To stay on top of the competition you’ll need to keep an eye out on how your competitors’ ads are performing. You’ll want to see what makes their ads work and how you can integrate the approach into your campaigns. This approach is what makes Ad Spy Tools an important category in this list of affiliate marketing tools.
AdPlexity
Pricing:
AdPlexity Mobile / Desktop: $199/user
AdPlexity Native: $249
Features:
One of the reasons why experts recommend affiliate marketing tools is to minimize the process of trial and error by developing an in-depth understanding of your niche. AdPlexity is the perfect tool for understanding the traffic on your digital properties. Additionally, you can access data regarding ad traffic sources, the publisher of the offers, and more importantly, similar campaigns that use the same offers.
Additional features include:
- Faster search results
- Wider search filters for mobile, native, and desktop ads
- Directly download ad offer landing pages
- Target Mac, iPhones, iPad, and Android devices
- Live support
WhatRunsWhere
Pricing:
Basic: $299/Month
Full Coverage: $399/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Features:
This is a great intelligence service for affiliate marketers who are interested in online media buying. It adds a competitive edge to building campaigns through intelligent media buying, keeping an eye on the competition, and discovery of new traffic sources for maximum ROI and smarter advertising strategies.
Popular features include:
- Global coverage
- Extensive native ad network coverage
- Fresh and Historic Data
- Actionable Insights
- Content discovery within feed
Anstrex
Pricing:
Push: $79.99/Monthly per user
Native: $59.99/Monthly per user
Features:
This web application takes care of the three main pillars of affiliate marketing – Analyze, Strategize and Execute, hence the name Anstrex. It’s a great addition to this list of affiliate marketing tools as it creates a single unified place for push and native ad affiliates to manage their campaigns.
The app comes with a navigation bar that presents useful information such as Ad Network, Country, Platform, Language, Category (Native only), Affiliate Network, and a Tracker.
When you’re looking at a specific creative, you’ll be able to see the following information items:
- Synopsis
- Statistics
- Bid History
- Creatives
- Landing Pages
- Ad Networks
- Devices
- Geo Location
PowerAdSpy
Pricing:
Free Version
Basic: $49/Month
Standard: $99/Month
Premium: $149
Platinum: $249
Titanium: $299/Month
Palladium: $349/Month
Features:
This is one of the big guns out there in the world of ad spy software today. As an affiliate marketer, there are plenty of reasons you would add this to your affiliate marketing tools lineup.
PowerAdSpy provides insights and data from multiple platforms and gathers performance data on the competitors’ ads as well. In particular, PowerAdSpy uses the following channels and sources:
- Google Ads
- Google Display
- YouTube
- Quora
- Native Ads
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Social Ad Scout
Pricing:
Premium: $147/month
Features:
Social Ad Scout is a lightweight platform that provides detailed social media advertisement information. In fact, this was among the first tools to cover Facebook Desktop and Mobile as well as Instagram.
With each ad, you’ll now be able to see the number of likes, shares, comments, and even see the data regarding the days this ad has been running. This detail indicates how fast or slow that particular ad got impressions.
Social Media
As an affiliate marketer, you already know the vital role social media platforms play in promoting your campaigns. The challenge here is keeping track of the platforms built for a certain purpose and cater to a particular target audience. Keeping tabs on relevant social media feeds can be taxing, hence, it’s a good idea to use affiliate marketing tools that integrate social media platform feeds into easy-to-use dashboards.
Hootsuite
Price:
Professional: $19/Month
Team: $99/Month
Business: $599/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Features:
Affiliates marketers (both individuals and businesses) now maintain active presence at multiple social networking sites. Hootsuite is a great one-stop platform for managing multiple social media profiles without much time investment.
Buffer
Price:
Pro: $15/Month
Premium: $99/Month
Business: $65/Month
Features:
Buffer is a social media management platform for planning and scheduling your content, analyzing results, and increasing engaging with your audience. Buffer helps affiliate marketers and social media marketers collaborate and publish posts more effectively.
Buffer features in-depth analysis, post scheduling, automated publishing, content management, and multiple account management. Using Buffer, you can schedule posts for multiple accounts and then view the performance at a single location.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines are the main source of traffic for affiliate websites. This is why affiliate marketers need more than just the working knowledge of optimizing their websites for higher search engine rankings. Since SEO has gone highly technical, SEO focused tools are now considered essential affiliate marketing tools.
SEM Rush
Pricing:
Pro: $99/Month
Guru: $100/Month
Business: $399/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Features:
SEMRush is a great tool for improving website’s visibility. You also have the option to check the “questions” checkbox which will give you all the who, what, why, when, where, and how relates to specific keyword.
SEMrush delivers a wide array of functionality across keyword research, ongoing search crawling, and position monitoring. The platform offers a lot of useful information such as long-tail keywords, the average monthly volume of searches, keyword difficulty, cost per click, and similar information for the keyword.
Ahrefs
Pricing:
Lite: $99/Month
Standard: $179/Month
Advanced: $399/Month
Agency: $999/Month
Features:
If you’re looking for more detailed keyword insights, Ahrefs is a great affiliate marketing tool to have on your belt.
You’ve probably already noticed how the interface appears to be intuitive and offers all the details that marketers and SEO specialists are interested in when optimizing search websites for higher SERP.
With the help of Ahrefs, you’ll be able to perform keyword research from Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Daum & Naver, and Seznam – all at the same time. You’ll also get the power to go beyond search volume and look at data relevant to clicks and impressions. However, the best part is the ability to run a gap analysis at a page level so your website can rank better than your competitors.
LongTailPro
Pricing:
Starter: $37/Month
Pro: $67/Month
Agency: $147/Month
Features:
If you are looking for a keyword research tool that helps you in ranking for long tail keywords, LongTailPro is a great marketing tool to have. It has a simple and straightforward interface which makes it quick and easy to familiarize with.
The web app is packed with great features that can help a beginner find relevant keywords and check competition levels. You, as an affiliate marketer, can benefit greatly from this tool.
- Keyword suggestions in bulk
- Keyword competitive score
- Deep competitor analysis
- Search engine rank tracker
Moz
Pricing:
Standard: $99/Month
Medium: $179/Month
Large: $249/Month
Premium: $599/Month
Features:
Moz is an affiliate marketing tool that’s become an easy pick for the editor’s choice of SEO tools. It’s set the standard for SEO tools and has reviews as part of this roundup and its metrics have become an industry standard.
If you need insights that have industry-standard metrics and suggestions on-page optimization, this is a great tool to work with. The free version of this tool can appear to be less intuitive than others, but Moz manages to set the bar with its keyword research, data, and analytics.
That’s our roundup of some of the best affiliate marketing tools to opt for in 2020. Our extensive list has been hand-picked from reviews from industry experts and users like yourself. If you think we missed out any tool that’s worth a mention, do give us your two cents in the comments section below and we’ll add that to the list!