Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly powerful channel for driving growth and revenue, but launching and managing a successful program requires the right tools. The affiliate marketing platform you choose will serve as the backbone of your entire program, making it essential to pick one that aligns with your goals, technical requirements, and future growth.  

This guide is designed for brands, affiliate managers, marketers, CMOs, and growth teams looking to start an affiliate program. By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly how to evaluate and purchase the best affiliate marketing platform for your business, as well as how to prepare your brand for success in the affiliate space. 

Why Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Platform Matters  

Affiliate marketing platforms are designed to streamline the management of partnerships, track campaign performance, prevent fraud, automate processes, and ensure payouts happen with ease. Choosing the right one can mean the difference between a high-performing channel and wasted resources.  

An ideal affiliate platform goes beyond surface-level needs to fit seamlessly into your workflows, connect with your partners, and grow alongside your program. Here’s the step-by-step process to ensure you’re making the smartest decision.  

Step 1: Clearly Define Your Affiliate Program Goals  

Before buying software, take a moment to assess your goals and strategy for the affiliate channel. Without a clear purpose, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overpaying for features you don’t need or underestimating the resources required for success.

Here are four important objectives to define upfront: 

1. What Offer Are You Promoting?
   • Are you focused on driving sales for a specific product, building email signups, or generating leads? Your program’s focus will determine the platform features you prioritize. 
2. Target Partner Types
   • Will you work with influencers, content publishers, coupon sites, or a combination of these? Each partner type has unique requirements. 
3. Recruitment Strategy
   • How will you onboard affiliates? Will you handle recruitment in-house using tools like the TUNE Marketplace, or will you enlist the help of an agency for scale and strategic guidance? 
4. Scalability Goals
   • Consider both your immediate needs and how your program might expand over time. Aim for a platform that can adapt as your business grows. 

Being clear on these objectives will help you evaluate platforms effectively and ensure you’re setting your program up for success.  

Step 2: Start a Discovery Call  

A discovery call with a potential platform isn’t just a sales pitch — it’s an opportunity to validate that the software is a good fit for your needs. Here are two strategies on how to approach it. 

First, ask targeted questions. Clarify whether the platform offers the tools and integrations required to meet your goals. Don’t be afraid to be specific. Example question: “Does the platform support pixel tracking, server-to-server postback tracking, or both?”

Second, focus on pain points. Discuss the challenges your team faces. The right platform should solve these challenges and not create more complexity. 

A discovery call enables you to quickly filter out platforms that won’t meet your needs, saving time in your selection process.  

Step 3: Request a Demo and Include the Right Stakeholders  

A product demo gives you a deep look at the platform’s interface, capabilities, and overall user experience. Ensure the right team members are present to assess its fit across departments: include your affiliate manager to review operational workflows; invite representatives from your tech team to evaluate backend integration requirements; and bring in your finance team, especially if automated payouts and invoicing are important for your program. 

During the demo: 

• Focus on tactical questions that address your pain points. 
• Look for examples of real-world use cases similar to your goals. 
• Ensure the platform provides features like fraud detection, customizable reports, and automation capabilities such as recurring payouts. 
• Ask how the platform will scale.
  • For instance, “What happens when we onboard 100 affiliates? Are there features to help streamline that growth while maintaining performance tracking?”  

Step 4: Prepare Your Tech Team for Integration  

One of the most important aspects of choosing a platform is ensuring it syncs smoothly with your existing technology stack. Every affiliate platform has unique integration requirements, so it’s essential to get your tech team involved at this stage.  

Key Considerations: 

1. Integration Compatibility
   • Does the platform integrate with your CRM, analytics tools, e-commerce platform, or payment providers? 
2. Scalability and Flexibility
   • Is the platform’s API robust enough to support customized workflows? 
3. Support
   • If issues arise with the integration, what support does the platform offer? Ensure they provide technical documentation and direct access to a support team. 

Review these points carefully to avoid roadblocks as you transition to affiliate automation.  

Step 5: Understand Pricing and Growth Costs  

Affiliate platforms often use tiered pricing based on factors like transaction volume or the number of active partnerships. Clarify the pricing structure during your evaluation process.  

• Ask About Hidden Costs
  • Some platforms charge extra for premium support, advanced reporting, or API access. 
• Project Growth Costs
  • If your affiliate program grows rapidly, how will costs change? Look for predictable pricing to avoid future surprises. 

Ensure the value of the platform aligns with your budget and delivers consistent ROI as your program scales.  

Step 6: Plan for Onboarding and Training  

Once you’ve selected a platform, onboarding and training are crucial to successfully getting your affiliate program off the ground. Here’s what to prepare: 

• Onboarding Proposal
  • Collaborate with the platform’s onboarding team to map out key milestones. 
• Training Resources
  • Look for documentation, video tutorials, or live training sessions to help your team get comfortable with the software. 
• Agency Assistance
  • If you’re new to affiliate marketing, consider partnering with an agency. Agencies bring decades of experience to help brands strategize, operationalize, and optimize their programs. 

With proper onboarding and guidance, your brand will be positioned to launch the channel smoothly and achieve results faster.  

Discover Affiliate Marketing Success  

Building a successful affiliate program starts with finding the right platform. By defining your goals, asking the right questions, and leveraging expert guidance, you can confidently choose a solution that not only fits your immediate needs but supports your long-term growth.

If you want a flexible, scalable, and customizable affiliate platform backed by an experienced team, explore what TUNE has to offer. From native postback tracking to automation and fraud prevention tools, we’re here to help you build the affiliate program your brand deserves. Learn more or request a demo here.

Already have your ideal platform in place? Then download our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing to learn everything else that goes into building and growing a profitable program.

At TUNE, we know there’s nothing more fundamental to affiliate marketing than paying your partners.  Paying partners is something that should be seamless. Instead, the process is often plagued by additional costs, risk, and disagreements.  Partners are located all over the world with payment needs that are not easily met by most affiliate technology solutions.  Paying everyone on time with the correct amount per your own tracking and reconciliation can be an exercise in frustration not just for you, but also for your accounts payable team and your partners.  And that’s all before you see how much you’re getting charged by your bank and payment providers to make it all happen.

That’s why we introduced the affiliate world to TUNE Pay.  With TUNE Pay, you pay your partners via the same great technology platform you’re already using to track and manage your relationships.  And when you use TUNE Pay, you’re paying your partners through the most secure, flexible, and cost-effective payment processors on the market. You can optimize for process simplicity or customization — your choice. We encourage you to pay your way.     

Many of the largest advertiser programs and networks are already using TUNE Pay to manage the balances, invoices, and payments for their partnerships. We’re confident it will work seamlessly in your world, too.  

“TUNE Pay was a deciding factor in choosing TUNE as our affiliate technology partner. TUNE Pay makes generating invoices and paying partners simple, and on time! It streamlined payments from a manual, tedious process to an easy approval process with automatic payments. We also love the ability to customize payment amounts if needed.”

— Shari Mirkin, CFO, Trade Ideas

How will TUNE Pay make your life easier?

• Pay using the best and latest technology.  TUNE Pay supports payments through both TransferWise and PayPal — best-in-class systems that reflect how partners expect to get paid in today’s market.
• Pay anywhere in the world.  TUNE Pay supports payments to 50 different countries across 46 different currencies.
• Pay cheaply.  TUNE Pay’s integrations offer the lowest payment fees on the market.  Save thousands of dollars each month that can go back into your program.
• Pay your influencers.  Generate pre-payments and flat-rate payments for your influencers that still reconcile with your tracking data.
• Reconcile in real time.  TUNE Pay syncs with your TUNE account to ensure that changes in tracking data are automatically reflected in invoices, saving your accounts payable team from hours of reconciling conversions.
• Empower your partners.  Partners can check their balances, update their payment method, and pull new campaign data right within the same experience within TUNE.
• Manage tax documents. Allow TUNE Pay to house and manage partner tax documents, including approval of W-9’s and 1099 distribution.
• Control your payment experience.  TUNE Pay gives you full control over your invoices, including payout terms, custom templates, invoicing strategies, custom legal entities, and everything else you need to pay exactly the way you want.

If you’re running a network, TUNE Pay can also automatically generate your invoices to your advertising partners. It can even measure your cash flow to ensure that what you’re paying out to your partners is already covered by revenue you’ve received from your customers.

“With TUNE Pay, our customers can focus their efforts on maximizing their program potential, rather than reconciling conversion data and managing invoicing processes,” says Cynthia Sener, President of TUNE. “Using TUNE Pay provides our customers and their partners with confidence that payments will be accurate and on time. And we’re able to do it at a fraction of the cost of other systems.”

Whether you are an advertiser who is looking for a hands-off process, or a network that requires flexibility and customization, you can select the TUNE Pay plan that best works for you. 

Ready to get started? Reach out to your customer success manager for more information or email support@tune.com to learn more.

This blog post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated with new information and links.

Photo by Nesa by Makers

When it comes to performance marketing, one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself (or your advertiser) is what kind of conversion tracking protocol you want to use: pixel tracking (client-side) or postback tracking (server-side). There are benefits and disadvantages to each, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you wish to be successful. So, let’s break it down.

First — definitions:

Pixel Tracking

Also called client-side, cookie-based, in-browser tracking. This method relies on the user’s browser to track conversions by placing a cookie on the click that is called again on conversion to authenticate the session and attribute the conversion to the correct affiliate. Pixel-based offers use cookies to track because they can store the session values in the cookie, and with the way pixels are designed to track, can extract this information from the browser easily. As a result, setting up an offer to track using pixels is very simple and only involves placing the HTML offer pixel on the conversion page.

Use pixel tracking when:

TUNE’s general recommendation is to use pixel tracking as little as possible, as pixel tracking only works for non-mobile web traffic where cookies can be stored. Additionally, major browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are moving away from allowing tracking-related cookies even for first parties.

As the last resort, use pixel tracking if the following are true:

The offer’s advertiser is unable to send server-side conversion notifications.
The offer does not involve mobile app installs.
The offer’s desired end users are on browsers that support tracking-related cookies.

For more information, check out this TUNE support article explaining implementation of pixel tracking.

Postback Tracking

Also known as server-side, server call, server 2 server (or server-to-server), s2s and, mistakenly, server pixel tracking, relies on the advertiser’s servers to track sessions generated on clicks to attribute conversions.  The servers record and then pass the transaction ID back to TUNE. This method is independent of the user’s browser. Postback tracking can be thought of as two separate processes: what happens when a user clicks on an offer and what happens upon conversion.

Leading up to the conversion:

1. User sees an offer.
2. User clicks on the offer.
3. Click goes to a TUNE server. The server records the click, then generates and records the ID for that session (in most cases the transaction ID).
4. TUNE immediately directs the user to the offer’s landing page, including ID for that session in the offer URL.
5. User sees offer’s page on advertiser’s site. Advertiser’s site handles recording that session’s ID however it deems fit, such as storing it as a variable in an e-commerce site or SDK in a mobile app.

When the user converts on that offer:

1. The advertiser’s server sends a signal to TUNE (a.k.a. fires a postback) that includes the ID TUNE initially supplied. The user is not directed back to TUNE in any way.
2. TUNE records the conversion for that session.

TUNE has another great support article explaining postback tracking.

Use postback tracking when:

You have the technical resources available to implement the server-side calls (see below for details on implementation).

Pros and Cons of Pixel Tracking

Pros:

• Pixel tracking is extremely easy to implement. Because it’s just copying and pasting code into the HTML of your website, you don’t need to be a developer to set up tracking. Along the same lines, the learning curve for implementation is not as steep.

Cons:

• Pixel tracking doesn’t work if the conversion occurs on a mobile device. That means conversions on mobile web, in the app stores, and in apps will not register. (Mobile devices and smartphones usually have cookies blocked as a default setting, so a cookie will never be placed on mobile in the first place.)
• Pixel tracking is much more prone to fraud. As you can imagine, because the tracking is done in the browser, it would be fairly easy for a tech-savvy affiliate to fire pixels without an actual conversion occurring.  
• Sometimes, pixels just don’t fire and you won’t know why. A possible reason for this could be that the user cleared their cache between click and conversion, but occasionally the reason is unknown. Reporting will be of little help for troubleshooting, because you won’t have server logs to utilize.
• For all of these reasons (and others), pixel tracking is highly inaccurate.

Pros and Cons of Postback Tracking

Pros:

• Much more reliable because all tracking is done server-side, so you’re leaving a lot less up to chance.
• Much easier to troubleshoot, using TUNE’s server logs.
• Less prone to fraud, and many more options available to mitigate fraud, like adding an offer whitelist, advertiser security token, or hashing the postback URL. Read more about preventing postback fraud.
• You have the option to set up a global postback (on a per advertiser basis), where a single postback implementation can register a conversion for all offers for that advertiser. Pixels don’t have that option.
• In general, postback tracking will allow more options for conversion firing beyond when the user is on the webpage. Instead of being limited to a simple page load, you can have your advertiser send back the conversion URL whenever they please. This will become helpful if your advertiser doesn’t want to register conversions until after an order has shipped, or a lead has been qualified, for example.
• Postback tracking works on mobile devices! Remember, pixel tracking will not work on a smartphone or mobile device.

Cons:

• Postback tracking is harder to implement. It requires direct communication between the network and the advertiser to make sure that the ID is passed into the correct parameter, and then it requires technical implementation on behalf of the advertiser to store and pass back the value. The advertiser will need to have someone with server-side HTTP experience in order to code the requests.
• Implementation time varies widely. Postback tracking could be set up in a matter of minutes, but for some advertisers, it could take an entire day to code the database to store the IDs.

Want more information? Check out our blog series on digital tracking methods, or download the full e-book: How to Become a Track Star: Your Guide to Tracking for Performance Marketing Campaigns.

This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated with new links and information.

There’s no denying it: artificial intelligence is here to stay. And it’s disrupting almost every area of marketing you could think of, including the world of influencer marketing. As social media platforms and trends shift, the content creation process shifts with them. This change is nudging digital marketers to investigate AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney to expedite and optimize their daily tasks. We’ve been investigating ourselves, with mixed results — so if you’re determined to add AI to your influencer marketing strategy, just know it’s not a plug-and-play solution. It takes time, testing, and a clear idea of the relevant tactics and desired outcomes to succeed.

Sound good? Great! Let’s dive in.

How to Use ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude for Influencer Marketing

AI is on the rise across the board. Influencer marketing is no exception:

• According to a recent report by Influencer Marketing Hub, 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget in the next year, with AI tools being a key area of investment.
• In the same report, respondents identified three main uses for AI in influencer marketing: influencer identification (64%), content discovery and distribution (13.3%), and fraud identification (5.6%).

Here are a few ways that you use AI tools in your influencer marketing today.

Use ChatGPT to Identify Influencers

Identifying the right influencers to partner with is a critical component of any successful influencer marketing campaign. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist in various aspects of partner discovery and recruitment for influencer marketing. Because it has access to the internet (unlike some AI models), ChatGPT can search relevant sites and social media platforms for you, saving hours in your search for the right partners.

Try using ChatGPT and similar AI-powered tools to search the internet for influencers who fit your ideal profile. Provide your marketing guidelines or website, then ask to identify the influencers that align with your brand’s values, target audience, and marketing objectives. You can also ask ChatGPT analyze large datasets of social media activity, content performance, and audience demographics. Or ask it how best to ask it to find influencers; starting with the right prompt is key, so why not prompt it to provide the right prompt? The options are only as limited as your creativity!

Keep in mind that any data you give to ChatGPT could be shared with OpenAI or others. If you routinely work with sensitive data, consider using the paid version or a different model.

Use Midjourney to Generate Content and Ideas

Influencer marketing is not just about finding the right partners; it’s also about creating engaging, high-quality content that resonates with their followers. AI tools like Midjourney, an image generator, can be used to generate and iterate stunning visuals, while ChatGPT and Claude can help craft captions, scripts, and even entire content strategies.

A few examples of how AI can help in the content process:

• Design Inspiration: Prompt Midjourney with the subject, tone, look, and feel you’re going for in a campaign and let it brainstorm visual directions for you.
• Asset Creation: Generate graphics, banners, and other assets that influencers can use in their content. (Watch out, though: AI tools are still getting the hang of letters, and they often can’t spell worth a lick. Check your images for any text that’s generated, or create images without text and add it in post. There’s nothing worse than an AI-generated ad that spells words wrong or includes letters that don’t exist.)
• Scriptwriting: Use ChatGPT or Claude to generate scripts or script ideas for influencer videos and podcasts that resonate with a specified target audience.
• Social Media Posts: Create on-brand captions and posts that influencers can use across their platforms.

By automating these creative tasks, you can free up your influencers to focus on what they do best: building authentic connections with their audience.

Use Claude to Analyze and Optimize Campaigns

Measuring the success of your influencer marketing efforts is crucial for making informed decisions and optimizing future campaigns. AI-powered analytics tools can provide in-depth insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as reach, engagement, conversions, and return on investment (ROI).

Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, is designed to assist in complex decision-making processes. Unlike ChatGPT, though, Claude is designed to be self-contained, which means it won’t access the internet when forming a response. You’ll have to provide it with any relevant data you want to analyze. Luckily, this is as easy as uploading documents or images directly in your chat.

If you have large datasets you want to analyze, Claude is your go-to tool. Here are a few ideas on how to get started:

• Influencer Selection: Analyze engagement metrics, audience demographics, and content relevance to select the most effective influencers.
• Performance Tracking: Monitor influencer content performance over time, identifying which messages, formats, or topics are driving the most engagement and conversions.
• Sentiment Analysis: Claude can analyze audience sentiment towards influencer content, helping you refine your strategy for better results.

By leveraging these advanced data analysis capabilities, you can gain a deeper understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and how to fine-tune your approach for maximum impact.

How to Navigate the Ethics of AI in Influencer Marketing

Ensure Transparency and Authenticity

The rise of AI in influencer marketing has raised important questions about transparency and authenticity. As you explore these tools, it’s crucial to maintain clear communication with your influencer partners and their audiences about the use of AI in content creation or campaign management. Not everyone is on the AI train, and that’s OK. Transparency will help build trust and preserve the integrity of your influencer marketing efforts.

Address Bias and Fairness in AI-Driven Decisions

AI algorithms can sometimes perpetuate or amplify existing biases, which can have significant implications for your influencer selection and campaign management. It’s essential to actively monitor your AI-driven processes for potential biases, and to take steps to ensure that your influencer marketing strategies are fair, inclusive, and representative of your target audience.

Stay Informed About Evolving Regulations and Best Practices

The use of AI in influencer marketing — and digital marketing as a whole — is a rapidly evolving landscape. New regulations and best practices emerging regularly. As you incorporate AI into your strategies, stay informed about industry guidelines, legal requirements, and emerging ethical standards to maintain compliance and build trust with your stakeholders.

Your AI-Powered Future Is Waiting

In influencer marketing and so many other areas, AI can help you unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and performance. From identifying the right influencers to automating collaboration workflows and optimizing campaign strategies, the integration of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude can help you deliver exceptional results. Just remember to prioritize transparency, fairness, and ethical best practices to maintain the trust and loyalty of your influencer partners and their audiences.

Successful influencer marketing is all about building genuine, long-lasting relationships. AI can assist in this process, but it can’t totally replace the human component. Focus on how you can use AI to enhance your relationships with influencers, not automate them, and you’ll go far.

Want more info on making the most out of your influencer marketing efforts? Download the Influencer-Affiliate Blueprint e-book, our in-depth guide on how to build high-ROI creator communities.

As third-party cookies continue to disappear and session tracking windows tighten, the risk to marketers of overpaying for cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns grows. If your CPC offer relies on cookies, then you could be paying for multiple clicks in a single session. With TUNE’s enhanced session tracking capabilities, customers can rest assured that their CPC offers will pay out only on the first click, saving both budget and time spent manually reconciling clicks at the end of the month.

How TUNE Tracks First Click and Subsequent Clicks in a Session

TUNE now offers a future-proof method to track first and subsequent clicks within a session without depending on third-party cookies.

For CPC offers with postback tracking enabled, TUNE determines the first click by creating a server-side user session that is checked against on every click. When subsequent clicks occur, TUNE forwards them directly to the destination URL and attributes potential conversions only using first clicks.

This method ensures that customers running CPC offers will pay out only on the first click, and all subsequent clicks will be demonetized.

How to Pay Out on First Clicks Only for CPC Offers

This setting is automatically enabled platform-wide for customers running CPC offers. Customers can then apply this behavior to individual CPC offers with postback tracking from the Offer Tracking Settings page (Offer Page -> Tracking Panel).

By enabling this setting, you can easily ensure that you only pay for unique clicks, and demonetize all subsequent clicks in a user session.

We’re always looking for ways to help our customers make the most out of their partnerships. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you! Reach out to your dedicated Customer Success Manager or email TUNE Support at support@tune.com.

In the performance marketing industry, real-time data can mean the difference between a successful partnership and a lost opportunity. Yet too many brands still pair business intelligence tools with delayed or incomplete data, hindering their optimization efforts at best — and completely derailing them at worst.  

In this post, we’ll explain why real-time data is a must-have for performance marketers, how TUNE Firehose addresses this need, and how customers use our solution to combine streaming data with business tools to make truly intelligent decisions. 

Business Intelligence Is Booming 

The emergence of business intelligence (BI) tools, big data, and data scientists in modern business have allowed brands to bring various departments together to see and understand their data. Just in the last 10 years, amazing strides have been made to better collect, clean, store, and display various data sets. Delegating these tasks to specialized tools and services has allowed brands to remain agile, where previously this was not possible. 

Marketers especially stand to benefit from BI tools that enable them to make data-driven decisions in high-stakes situations — for example, when optimizing and scaling million-dollar campaigns. Previously, this data was stuck in silos and distributed into multiple interfaces for consumption. This left too many marketers with gaps in their data, and no choice but to make ill-informed decisions (or their best guess) with only data assumptions to guide them. 

A Unique Opportunity in Partner Marketing 

Throughout the past few years, traditional media buys have become saturated and increasingly competitive. Facebook is full of fake posts and AI-generated images, Google SERPs are increasingly based on content created for AI, and Twitter (or X, as it’s now known) is shedding advertisers. As a result, more businesses are discovering partner marketing as an efficient, cost-effective channel for growth.  

Unfortunately, brands looking to add data-driven methodologies to their partner programs have seen limited innovation from the traditional affiliate network model.

In this model, each network dictates its own data sharing and collection policies. These policies often limit the level of granularity provided to customers and make real-time access to data difficult. And since they have the final say on who actually “owns” the data, it’s not uncommon to see networks hide or aggregate data from brands and use it for their own gain.  

While most marketing channels have data sharing and analysis tools built in (think Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.), the partner marketing channel has lagged. Marketing dashboards usually have limited data integrity for this channel. Brands now expect real-time data across their marketing mix; lacking it here is a limiting factor in true optimization of this profitable channel. 

TUNE’s Real-time Data Solution 

Today, all the traditional affiliate networks in the industry simply provide an API call for pulling data out of their platforms. Brands that want to access this data have had to use costly development resources to build and run extract, transform, load (ETL) scripts, which pull data out of one system and convert it for analysis and storage in another.  

The problem with this one-way approach is that it can only provide a historical view, as you are basically running a script that pulls data at a set cadence (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.). Pinging a network’s API more frequently can quickly increase server costs, which is why many brands settle for once-a-day API calls in exchange for lower server bills. This process requires constant monitoring and makes it nearly impossible to get real-time data access. 

In 2016, we took a look at how TUNE customers were using our industry-known two-way API. What we found was hundreds of customers running ETL scripts non-stop, 365 days a year. We knew there had to be a more efficient approach, so we did what we normally do when confronted with a challenge: We innovated. 

Enter TUNE Firehose, our proprietary data streaming platform, where customers can enable TUNE to automatically push every impression, click, conversion, and adjustment directly to a customer-owned database, in real time. Firehose makes it possible for TUNE to essentially create a carbon copy of every data field and event collected for this channel and deliver it to your business intelligence solution as it occurs. No waiting for results, no incomplete datasets from your growing partner marketing channel. 

TUNE Firehose Use Cases 

Firehose has been a pivotal feature for TUNE customers over the last five years. In that time, we’ve seen them employ this data streaming technology for a variety of use cases. 

After moving to Firehose, brands on TUNE can receive every data field from every impression, click, and conversion in real time. This results in more accurate insights into the channel, and no lag between digital activities and reporting reflection. 

While some brands may use Firehose for simple data warehousing and dashboarding, other customers are using this data stream to enable real-time optimization and automation. These use cases include deploying artificial intelligence to look for anomalies and automatically making changes to campaigns in real-time. 

Because the TUNE platform provides more than 90 data fields on every impression, click, and conversion, other customers choose to use this data to monitor each partner and sub-partner to power automated fraud detection and dig further into this channel than ever before. 

In Conclusion 

Traditionally, brands in the partner marketing space have had to piece together limited data and access to their network’s reporting API, resulting in delayed results in internal reporting and incomplete data models. But modern marketers don’t want their data to be held hostage; they want to quickly and easily access more datapoints than ever.   

To do that, they need a partner marketing platform that complements their BI strategy just like TUNE does. Every TUNE customer owns 100% of their data on our platform, and we don’t hide, limit, use, or aggregate this data for our own gain. Instead, we provide solutions like Firehose to empower marketers to access their data in real time and use it to the fullest of their capabilities in business intelligence tools, custom integrated solutions, and their owned and operated databases.   

If you’re a TUNE customer and would like to add Firehose to your account, reach out to your dedicated success manager or email support@tune.com.

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

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 real-time access and visibility into inventory. Publishers need to be able to show inventory as it becomes available, and provide insightful and accurate reporting. Without the right affiliate marketing platform to track, manage, and report on campaigns, the process becomes cumbersome at best — and can jeopardize thousands or millions of dollars at worst.

In this blog post, we recommend a few things to look for when searching for the right affiliate marketing platform for your business.

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 affiliate marketing platform. At TUNE, our platform is white label ready and fully customizable. Whether you want to use our platform’s features and tools out of the box, or leverage our API to build your own on top of it, you can create the perfect platform for your business.

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. That’s why 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 our onboarding team always gets high marks from new customers. We’re also continually looking for ways to get even better, asking our customers for feedback at every opportunity possible.

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.

Unlike our competitors, TUNE offers real 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. (Go ahead — ask any platform how they define “in real time,” and get specific numbers. You’ll see their “real-time” reporting is closer to “delayed by a few hours or a day” reporting.)

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 14,100 vendors in 2024. (That’s an increase of over 3,000 vendors from the year prior!) 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 affiliate marketing platform that allows you to manage everything from mobile 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 or see their success stories.

Questions? Reach out to partnermarketing@tune.com to ask our experts, or download The Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing to jump right in.

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is an essential platform for online advertising and marketing. With its massive reach, sophisticated targeting options, and flexible budgeting, it’s important that TUNE makes it easy to work seamlessly with Google Ads. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our enhanced integration with Google, designed to streamline your experience in the TUNE platform and unlock the full potential of Google Ads.

Google Ads Certification

At TUNE, we make sure to stay on top of important changes in the industry. Following new requirements for transparent redirection, TUNE has earned certification as an official Google click tracking partner.

The Google Certification Program helps protect users from click tracker abuse by enabling click tracker transparency.

To make it easier for TUNE customers to take advantage of this certification, we developed additional user interface features that streamline the link creation process.

Ensuring Compliance and Transparency

We’ve worked diligently to ensure that our integration with Google Ads meets and exceeds industry standards.

Our new feature set, developed specifically for Google, simplifies the link creation process by automating the necessary configurations. With just a single checkbox, TUNE takes care of all the technical details, appending the required transparency parameter (redirect_url) with correctly formatted values to any link you choose.

This new setting can be found on the individual Offer page, located in the Generate Tracking panel.

No more manual configuration or guesswork required. Simply copy and paste the generated tracking link into Google’s Tracking Template field, and you’re good to go.

Get Started with TUNE’s Google Ads Integration

This feature set is now available to all TUNE customers.

If you would like to take advantage of this integration, navigate to Company –> Customize Application –> Domain and select “Enabled” in the Google Ads dropdown menu. You have the flexibility to turn this feature on and off as needed.

You can find more information in our Integrating with Google Ads help article.

Questions? Feedback? Reach out to your dedicated Customer Success Manager or email TUNE Support at support@tune.com.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital analytics, staying ahead of the curve is essential. The advent of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has brought about significant changes, particularly affecting the harmony between your TUNE account and Google account. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key modifications in GA4 and how they might influence your affiliate program.

Understanding GA4 Attribution Changes

The transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 marks a paradigm shift. GA4 introduces a new property that departs from the conventional approach of tracking pageviews and sessions. Instead, it focuses on collecting events and user properties, offering greater flexibility in tracking and attribution. Behavioral and conversion modeling have also been integrated into GA4, setting the stage for a more dynamic analytical experience.

Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) Challenges

One of GA4’s standout features is data-driven attribution (DDA), designed to provide a more comprehensive performance overview. While this offers valuable insights, it introduces challenges when it comes to measuring and comparing affiliate activity.

Historically, last click attribution in Google Analytics aligned with TUNE setups. With the introduction of DDA, expect to observe more significant discrepancies in reporting between the two platforms.

Aligning Reports for Consistency

For those who prefer a more aligned reporting experience between TUNE and Google, there’s a solution within GA4. By adjusting the attribution settings, you can revert to the familiarity of last click attribution. This not only streamlines the reporting process but also ensures a smoother transition for those accustomed to the previous setup.

To adjust these settings, navigate to Admin → Attribution Settings in your GA4 account, and then select “Last click” in the first dropdown menu.

Benefits of GA4 in Multi-Channel Analysis

While navigating the discrepancies, it’s crucial to recognize the benefits GA4 brings to the table. GA4’s capabilities extend beyond just tracking; it provides a valuable tool for analyzing performance across various channels. Leveraging GA4’s features can enhance your understanding of user behavior and optimize your affiliate program accordingly.

Conclusion

As Google Analytics continues to evolve, understanding the developments becomes imperative for staying on top of your analytics game. By aligning reporting experiences and leveraging TUNE’s tracking capabilities, marketers can elevate their affiliate programs. In the ever-changing realm of digital analytics, TUNE remains the trusted companion, ensuring that all campaigns are tuned to perfection.

In an evolving digital landscape, affiliate marketers need to stay ahead of the game to maximize reach and drive conversions in a crowded field. One tool that can help is artificial intelligence (AI). AI offers immense potential to optimize and automate aspects of affiliate marketing, from streamlining workflows to creating content.  

Among the many AI-powered solutions available to the public today is ChatGPT, an advanced language model developed by OpenAI. In January 2023, it set a record as the fastest growing consumer application in history, gaining more than 100 million users in just two months. If you’re wondering how you can join the movement, keep reading — we’re exploring a few of the ways marketers can leverage the power of ChatGPT in their affiliate marketing strategies.  

How to Use ChatGPT in Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Get Help with Content Creation and Optimization 

Nobody reads a blog post or watches a video on TikTok because they want to be served an ad or have a product pushed on them. They’re looking to be informed, entertained, inspired. Which is why compelling content lies at the heart of successful affiliate marketing campaigns.  

ChatGPT can be a powerful ally in creating high-quality, engaging content. Its ability to generate human-like text makes it an invaluable tool for producing both long- and short-form copy — product walkthroughs, comparison articles, informative blog posts, creative ad copy, you name it. With some detailed prompting and a bit of human editing, affiliate marketers can use ChatGPT to save time and effort creating written and visual content.

A quick note on the visual content process: ChatGPT’s visual AI is DALL·E 3, which is technically separate from ChatGPT even though they can be used in conjunction. There are numerous other visual AIs available for free or as a paid subscription, based on your needs and the amount of images you’ll be generating. We’ve been most impressed with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

ChatGPT can also be a valuable addition to your current content optimization process. Provide the language model with a set of keywords, and it can generate optimized titles, meta descriptions, and relevant subheadings. You can also reverse-engineer old, unoptimized blog posts by feeding them into ChatGPT and asking for the top keywords and suggested updates. These practices can all help improve SEO and boost organic traffic to brand and affiliate websites. 

Make More Personalized Recommendations 

Understanding and engaging with customers on a personal level is crucial for affiliates — it’s why they’re so good at what they do. ChatGPT can help in offering personalized recommendations based on user preferences, browsing behavior, and previous interactions. Prompt the AI model to analyze purchase and engagement data and look for patterns; it may be able to suggest tailored product options that resonate with individual customers. This level of personalization can significantly enhance your users’ experience, upping the chance they eventually engage and convert. 

Enable Always-On Customer Support 

Thanks to its conversational, human-like language model, ChatGPT can be integrated into chatbots or virtual assistants to offer support services. These could include answering common questions, providing product information, or completing purchases. This automation frees up human resources for more complex interactions and tasks that can’t be replaced by artificial intelligence. 

Get Granular in Analysis and Reporting 

Accurate data analysis is vital for optimizing affiliate marketing campaigns. ChatGPT can analyze vast amounts of data and provide valuable insights for marketers in a fraction of the time it would take a human.  

For example, some agencies have started using ChatGPT and other AI models to transcribe, digest, and summarize the key points and next steps on calls with clients. Other affiliate marketers leverage ChatGPT to perform sentiment analysis on social media platforms and forums, gauge public opinion, and identify potential influencers for collaboration. 

One important note: ChatGPT’s knowledge base used to be limited to information shared on the internet before September 2021. This limitation was one of the biggest headaches for its users. However, it can now search for and provide real-time information thanks to an update in fall 2023.  

Master Management and Workflow Automation 

Managing affiliate partnerships and networks can be time-consuming and challenging. ChatGPT can automate several aspects of network and program management for the individuals who are working within them every day. For example, it can help to identify potential new affiliates, evaluate applications, write introduction emails, or proofread terms and conditions. This can all streamline the affiliate recruitment process. (We should note, however, that this aspect of affiliate marketing will always require constant attention and a human touch.)

Get Started with ChatGPT and Affiliate Marketing

Artificial intelligence, even in its early stages, has the industry abuzz with its potential to change the game. However, AI models like ChatGPT are only as good as the prompts that drive them. You’ll need the right marketing-focused prompts to effectively use any of the strategies above. More than likely, you’ll need to experiment and iterate to figure out what those are.

If you’re not sure how to get started, google the AI model you’re using plus “prompt for [the task you want to accomplish]” — you should find plenty of examples to choose from. You can also check out AI prompt-based communities on Reddit, Twitter, and most other social media platforms.

And, in case you’re looking for guidance on your overall strategy, head over to our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing to learn more.

Seems like there’s always an affiliate marketing conference or trade show just around the corner, doesn’t it? So, if you’re an advertiser looking for new affiliates, influencers, and other partners to work with, here are my top seven tools and tips for finding the right partnerships for your business.

Favorite Affiliate Marketing Tools for Finding Publishers 

1). The TUNE Marketplace 

We’ve been a reliable bridge between advertisers and publishers since our early beginning as HasOffers. Now, the TUNE Marketplace makes it easy for both sides to engage in direct conversations with the click of a button.  

2). Publisher Discovery 

Publisher Discovery is a reliable, cost-effective third-party resource with unlimited publisher reach and automation tools to bolster affiliate recruitment and diversify traffic channels.  

3). Agency Services 

Time is money, especially if you’re building your affiliate program from scratch. Agencies offer management and partner recruitment under the same umbrella, and help advertisers take the guesswork out of matching their programs with the best publishers.  

4). Performance Networks 

Proprietary affiliate networks and sub-affiliate networks allow both sides to locate and communicate within a single environment. Data is also easily shared between all parties through dashboard login, customized reports, and campaign management tools.  

5). Industry Shows 

Nothing beats old-fashioned, in-person networking opportunities at conferences such as Affiliate Summit East and Affiliate Summit West, Affiliate World, FinCon, PI Live, and MAU. Of course, there are others to be considered, and all are worth attending. 

6). Social Networks 

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms have really evolved over the past few years, particularly with the popularity of influencers and brand ambassadors. Built-in messaging features can also assist with direct outreach communication and responses from both sides.  

7). Word of Mouth 

People do business with people they like, know, and trust. The affiliate industry is small enough for word to get around, particularly if business is bad. A good name and reputation go a long way, and you’re always known by the last company you worked for or the last deal you negotiated. In short: use your personal network, and be careful not to burn any bridges. 

Tools of the Trade 

All of the above resources can help advertisers and publishers create mutually-beneficial partnerships. Try any one of them singularly, or take a more strategic approach of mixing them up for optimal results. 

What other tools would you recommend for finding publishers? Leave a comment and let me know!

If you’d like to learn more about affiliate marketing tools or the TUNE platform, we’d love to help you out — email us at partnermarketing@tune.com or request a demo here.

Speaking of finding partners …

Our Partner Groups Cheat Sheet is a quick reference guide to five types of popular affiliates and how to work with them. This info sheet includes advice about working with each group, including what kind of campaigns to run, effective commission models, and driving factors that make programs stand out from the crowd.

Download the Partner Groups Cheat Sheet here.

Once the tracking software is in place, your affiliate marketing program has launched, and partner recruitment is steady, you may find yourself wondering: “OK, I’m up and running. Now, what else needs to happen to make my program successful over the long haul?” The answer: Plenty. And the right affiliate software will help you do it. 

Below, we’ve pulled together a list of high-level tactics to help you get the most of out your affiliate software. These are broken down into the most important tasks to complete on a regular basis, organized by our recommended cadence: weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. In addition, we’ve included TUNE features and tools that will help you master each one. With a little discipline and some elbow grease, we’re confident these tactics will help you ensure your program has its most successful year yet. 

The Affiliate Software Features You Should Be Using 

Weekly: Your Affiliate Software Bread and Butter 

1. Reporting 

• It is important to monitor reporting throughout the week to gain insights into program performance, top partners, and review any data spikes. Within TUNE there are multiple reports available to access data that can be exported for further data analysis. 
  • You can view more about TUNE’s reporting suite here:  https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500007742262-Reporting-Overview
    • If you have multiple goals within an offer it is recommended to view the Goals Report to see downstream conversion rates and identify publishers driving high-performing traffic to your offers.  

2. Reviewing Applications 

• As your team continues with ongoing recruitment efforts, it is recommended to process applications daily, if not weekly, to keep up with pending partners who have applied to your program. By quickly approving affiliate applications, you are allowing partners access to their tracking links so they can begin promoting your brand. 
  • You can view more on the process for reviewing applications in TUNE, here: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500007724341-Partner-Sign-Up-Page 

Monthly: Tried-and-True Affiliate Software Tasks 

1. Processing Returns and Modifications 

• To capture order cancellations, returns, or partial returns within the program, you can implement a process to upload a reconciliation file monthly or automate the process via TUNE’s API. Additionally, you can update your TUNE Pay Full Serve account to delay the invoice generation to allow your team time to review orders generated at the end of the month. 
  • Conversion Upload (Manually Uploading a File: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500007725601-Importing-Conversions 
  • API Portal: https://developers.tune.com/advertiser-api/ 

2. TUNE Pay – Affiliate Invoice Review 

• With TUNE Pay Full Serve, invoices generate on the first day of every month (unless there is an update to the invoice generation delay setting). Once the invoices are generated in draft status, your team has until 8 am PST on the 15th of each month to review and approve the invoices so that TUNE can provide a consolidated invoice for partner payment. 

3. Partner Communication and Recruitment  

• Maintain active conversations with partners to keep them engaged and to monitor the health of your program. Communication should take place within your affiliate software as well as externally.
• Recruitment efforts should be continuous to find new partner verticals and promotional opportunities. When communicating with different types of affiliate partners you are actively looking to recruit into the program, follow-ups will be necessary, along with timely responses. To help jump-start your partner recruitment efforts, you can utilize TUNE Connect. 

Quarterly: Checkups and Check-ins  

1. Billing Portal 

• Ensure that the contacts and billing information are up to date within the billing portal. This will help get ahead of any potential expirations for corporate credit cards or allow the opportunity to add a new team member who should have access to billing insights. 
  • You can access your billing portal by navigating to Company > Billing 

2. Reviewing the Competitive Landscape 

• Monitoring your competitive landscape can provide your team with a pulse on the health of your program as it relates to partner payout and perks. 

3. Professional Services 

• If you have a feature request or want to explore a custom request that you feel would help your program better scale on TUNE, contact your customer success manager about Professional Services.   

Yearly: Less Frequent, But No Less Important 

1. Revisiting Content 

• Reviewing and updating (as needed) program terms and conditions. You can access your partner terms and conditions by navigating to Company>Customize Application> Partner Terms and Conditions. 
  • Documentation: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500008229402-Customizing-Network-Terms-and-Conditions 
• Review standard email templates. This can include promotional emails, along with the standard email templates for pending, approved, and rejected statuses.   
  • Documentation: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500008229662-Customizing-Email-Templates 

2. Account Customizations 

• Revisit any branding changes that may have occurred, and update settings as needed including the logo, favicon, custom scripts, etc. 
  • Documentation: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500004851701-Branding-Your-Network 

3. Automation Rules 

• Save your team time by automating management actions based on custom rules. If not yet set up, you can explore the various time-to-action rules available. If already created, it is recommended to review the rules to ensure they are still applicable and make updates as needed. 
  • Documentation: https://tune.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005263642-Performance-Automation-Tools 

Maximize Your ROI with the Right Affiliate Software

If you have questions about using your affiliate software to its full potential, reach out to onboarding@tune.com.

Download our Key Program Tasks Checklist and see exactly what tasks to complete and how often to complete them to run a healthy, long-term affiliate program. We’ve also included suggested TUNE features to use and links to helpful documentation!