Recruiting affiliates with experience and a track record of success is one of the best ways to scale your affiliate marketing conversions and revenue. But with so many potential partners out there, how do you find the right ones and convince them to join your program?

In this post, we’ll share actionable strategies for recruiting affiliates who deliver value and align with your brand and business goals. We’ll also show how tools like TUNE’s affiliate marketing platform can make recruitment more efficient and effective, while offering additional ideas to build your pipeline and attract quality partners. By the end, you’ll have a roadmap for identifying, engaging, and onboarding affiliates who can help grow your business.

Why High-Performing Affiliates Matter

Not all affiliates are created equal. High-performing affiliates bring your business more than just traffic — they bring engaged audiences, stronger conversion rates, and long-term growth. These affiliates require deliberate recruitment strategies, not a “set it and forget it” approach. Instead, you need a proactive strategy and the right tools to find partners who are serious about success.

With dedicated resources, a clear strategy, and a platform like TUNE, you can streamline the recruitment and management process for your partners and your own team, empowering both sides to focus on what they do best.

Strategies for Recruiting High-Performing Affiliates

1. Provide Specific, Clear Details in Every Offer  

Transparency is one of the best ways to attract serious affiliates. When potential partners know exactly what you expect and what they’ll earn for meeting those expectations, they’re more likely to engage.

To make your program compelling and motivate affiliates out of the gate, every single offer you provide should include three pieces of information:

1. Payout structures and tiers: Clearly define commissions, bonuses, conversion windows, recurring payouts, and any other guidelines for conversions. For example, “Earn $40 per lead with a recurring 10% commission on subscription renewals in the first 12 months.”
2. Historical performance data: Share relevant data like typical conversion rates and average order value (AOV), or a list of your most popular offerings from the past 6 months, to demonstrate transparency and build trust.
3. Program benefits and perks: Let potential partners know how your program will make their job easier. Consider listing perks like professional creative assets, access to marketing tools or analytics dashboards, and a dedicated support team.

A clear, detailed offer signals professionalism, improves response rates, and helps affiliates quickly evaluate whether they can succeed with you.

2. Keep Your Recruitment Pipeline Active

Recruiting affiliates isn’t a one-and-done process. You can’t just post a sign-up link and expect top partners to flock to your program. The best programs maintain an ongoing pipeline, so they can adapt as trends, products, and audiences evolve. That means setting a strategy, executing on it regularly, and adjusting as needed.

Here are a few tips for how to keep your affiliate recruitment pipeline full:

• Regularly reach out through email, LinkedIn, and online communities
• Monitor emerging performance trends using analytics tools in TUNE to identify new opportunities and create content as needed
• Reach out to affiliates via their preferred platform, whether it’s TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, their personal blog, their online shop, or anywhere else
• Diversify your network by including non-traditional affiliates: influencers and creators, streamers, podcast hosts, niche specialists

A consistent, proactive approach will help you keep your program competitive.

3. Use Affiliate and Influencer Discovery Tools

You don’t have to find affiliates manually. Several tools can help you uncover new partners who already reach your target audience. Whether you’re looking for Instagram influencers, TikTok creators, or Twitch streamers, there are numerous apps and platforms created specifically to connect advertisers with affiliate marketers.

Beware any quick-fix solutions or AI-powered tools that promise the moon, however; no matter what they say, there is no one-stop shop to find every partner you need. Reputable solutions can help you find high-potential partners based on real engagement data rather than guesswork.

Based on your goals and industry, start by searching directly in the preferred platform of your ideal partner. Most social media companies now provide native tools for finding and collaborating with affiliates within the platform, such as Meta’s creator marketplace. Some other options:

• Influencer connection platforms like Upfluence, CreatorIQ, Find Your Influencer, and Aspire
• Social media and content analysis tools like SparkToro or BuzzSumo
• TUNE’s built-in partner marketplace and discovery tools

4. Work with Affiliate Marketing Agencies

For larger programs or those entering new markets, an affiliate marketing agency can accelerate the process. Agencies have established relationships with proven affiliates and can handle negotiations, onboarding, and scaling for you.

When researching agencies, look for a shop that has a proven track record of success in three areas: developing program strategy, operationalizing the program, and optimizing the program. The best agencies drive incremental value through tailored support in these phases. If your program is already established, search instead for an agency that specializes in recruitment and onboarding.

Benefits of working with an affiliate agency include:

1. Access to pre-qualified, high-performing affiliates
2. Faster, more efficient negotiations
3. Scalable support for regional or global programs

If you need to scale quickly without adding internal resources, an agency is worth considering.

Additional Ideas for Recruiting Affiliates

Beyond the strategies above, here are a few additional ways you can support your recruitment efforts and attract affiliates to your program.

• Host Webinars and Events: Offer educational webinars or networking events specifically for potential affiliates. Topics like “How to Maximize Affiliate Earnings” or “Trends in [Your Industry] Affiliate Programs” position you as a thought leader and attract motivated partners.
• Create a Referral Program for Current Affiliates: Your current affiliates likely know others in their space. Offer them an incentive to refer new partners, which can help you tap into trusted networks of quality affiliates.
• Build a Content Hub for Prospective Partners: Develop a dedicated page or microsite with resources for potential affiliates. Include case studies, earnings examples, FAQs, and program highlights to make it easy for them to see the value of joining.
• Engage in Industry Communities: Join forums, Slack groups, LinkedIn groups, and other industry communities where affiliates hang out. Participate in discussions, share insights, and build relationships over time to position your program as approachable and credible.

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

Recruiting affiliates who perform well takes more than luck. By combining platforms like TUNE with transparency, ongoing outreach, and creative engagement tactics, you can attract and onboard partners who are aligned with your goals. Remember, recruitment is an ongoing effort. The more you invest in building relationships and maintaining your pipeline, the more successful your program will become.

Ready to start recruiting high-performing affiliates? Request a demo of TUNE to see how the platform’s advanced tools and resources can simplify your workflows and help you build more profitable partnerships.

Not ready for a demo? Download our Influencer-Affiliate Blueprint for even more strategies to attract and retain top-performing partners.

Affiliate marketing can be one of the smartest ways to grow your business when it’s done right. The performance-based model keeps costs predictable and incentives aligned. But there’s a catch: because commissions are at stake, affiliate programs are also a popular target for fraud.

Fraud hurts more than just your budget. It damages relationships with real affiliates, distorts your campaign data, and can even hurt customer trust. In fact, global ad fraud is costing businesses more each year, and is estimated to increase from $84 billion to $172 billion by 2028. Unfortunately, affiliate programs are part of that number.

Fortunately, there are ways for advertisers and businesses to fight back. In this post, we’ll cover what affiliate fraud looks like and what you can do to prevent it.

What Does Affiliate Fraud Look Like?

Affiliate fraud happens when someone manipulates your tracking or payout system to earn commissions they didn’t really earn. These shady tactics take money away from your legitimate partners and waste your marketing spend.

Here are some of the most common types of affiliate fraud:

• Application fraud: Fake or stolen identities used to join your program.
• Click fraud: Bots or scripts generate fake clicks to inflate metrics.
• Conversion fraud: Fraudsters claim credit for sales or leads that never happened.
• Conversion stealing: Affiliates take credit for sales driven by another channel.
• Click spamming: Repeated irrelevant clicks in hopes of claiming organic sales.
• Cookie stuffing: Dropping cookies without consent to claim unearned credit.

Each of these can lower ROI, throw off your data, and even get you penalized if they violate network or platform rules.

How to Spot and Stop Affiliate Fraud

You don’t have to accept fraud as a cost of doing business. The best programs stay ahead of bad actors by combining good partner management with the right technology. Here are four ways you can do the same.

1. Use Advanced Fraud Prevention Tools

The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform gives you free, built-in tools and integrations designed to catch fraud before it costs you. Use these tools to:

• Screen affiliates before they join your program with our E-HAWK integration.
• Block invalid clicks in real time using Proactive Fraud Prevention.
• Set your own KPIs and performance automation rules to automatically flag unusual traffic patterns.
• Get full transparency with real-time reporting to spot anomalies fast.
• Use advanced tracking methods like postbacks to verify conversions accurately and securely.

2. Manage Affiliates Directly

Strong affiliate relationships go a long way. When you manage partners yourself instead of relying on third parties, it’s easier to enforce policies, verify credentials, and keep communication open. Check out our blog post for a few of the top tips for managing your own program.

3. Monitor the Data

Real-time data can tell you when something doesn’t add up — like a sudden spike in traffic with no conversions. With TUNE’s detailed performance data, including real-time data streaming via TUNE Firehose, you can act fast and minimize losses.

4. Train Your Team

Your team is your first line of defense. Make sure they know how to recognize red flags, use fraud tools effectively, and stay informed about emerging tactics.

Every fake click or false conversion wastes your ad spend and clouds your campaign data. That means worse ROI and poor decision-making. Investing in fraud prevention not only protects your budget, it helps build trust with honest affiliates who deserve to be paid for their real contributions.

Protect Your Program with TUNE

Affiliate fraud isn’t going away. But with the right approach, you can stay ahead of it. TUNE puts powerful, easy-to-use fraud prevention tools right at your fingertips, from advanced partner screening and real-time click blocking, to customizable automation rules that keep you in control 24/7.

Don’t wait until fraud drains your budget. Take control and keep your affiliate program secure today.

Ready to get started? Download our guide to performance automation, or reach out to partnermarketing@tune.com to learn more about fighting fraud on TUNE.

Today’s consumers spend more time on their phones than on any other device, and that includes when they shop, browse, and engage with brands.

If your affiliate program isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re leaving money and opportunities on the table.

In this post, we’ll explain why mobile matters in affiliate marketing, how tracking has evolved to keep up, and what you can do to make your mobile campaigns shine.

Why Mobile Matters More Than Ever

Mobile now makes up more than half of global web traffic, and users spend nearly four hours a day on mobile apps. That means your customers and your partners are already mobile-first.

If your affiliate program is still designed for desktop, you’re missing the biggest share of your audience. Whether it’s driving app installs, in-app purchases, or clicks through mobile web, mobile touchpoints are defining the future of affiliate marketing.

Apps, Web, and Why You Need Both

A strong mobile affiliate marketing strategy includes both apps and mobile web, as each has unique advantages for partner campaigns.

Mobile Apps

Apps create deeper engagement and higher retention than websites. They let affiliates guide users straight to specific products or offers with deep links, creating a seamless path to purchase. Industries like gaming, e-commerce, and fintech have seen huge growth thanks to app-focused campaigns, and affiliates appreciate the stronger conversion rates that apps deliver.

Mobile Web

Mobile web is just as important. It’s flexible, easy to access, and accounts for around 60% of affiliate-driven traffic. That’s why you should:

• Build fast, responsive pages
• Keep navigation simple
• Optimize load times

Together, apps and web create richer customer journeys that desktop-only strategies can’t match.

Tracking Mobile Performance: What’s Changed?

Mobile isn’t just a different screen. Because of the nature of mobile operating systems, this channel requires different tracking methodologies.

Cookies don’t work reliably in mobile environments, which is why modern affiliate programs rely on cookieless postback tracking and mobile measurement partners (MMPs).

Mobile Measurement Partners

Mobile measurement partners, or MMPs, integrate directly with your app, ad networks, and affiliates to deliver accurate attribution. You’ll know exactly which affiliate drove each install, click, or purchase, and you can reward them with confidence.

Server Postbacks

Server-side postback tracking bypasses browsers completely. It ensures you get accurate, real-time data, even when cookies fail.

With MMPs and postback tracking, you can have confidence in your performance data and help future-proof your mobile affiliate marketing program as privacy rules evolve.

How TUNE Helps Marketers Win on Mobile

TUNE was built with mobile in mind, and we continue to innovate within the space. We also have native integrations with the top five mobile measurement partners.

Here’s how our platform helps advertisers and agencies simplify mobile affiliate marketing:

• Seamless integrations with MMPs, apps, ad platforms, and affiliate networks
• Native postback tracking and cookieless tracking that’s easy to implement
• Real-time dashboards to show what’s working and what needs improvement

In other words: The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform makes it easier to measure, optimize, and grow your mobile campaigns.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing Is Mobile

Mobile isn’t just an option anymore — it’s a foundational part of modern affiliate marketing. Brands that embrace mobile-first strategies see better engagement, stronger partnerships, and higher ROI. With TUNE’s tools and expertise, you can connect with customers wherever they are and give your affiliates the transparency and trust they need to succeed.

Want to learn more about how mobile measurement partners can help to power your program? Check out our MMP vs Partner Marketing Platform Cheat Sheet, or download our Ultimate Guide to Mobile Partner Marketing.

Still have questions? Reach out to us at partnermarketing@tune.com with your questions.

How to Recruit Affiliate Marketers

It’s time for Part 8 of the Affiliate Marketing for Your Business blog series. This is your comprehensive resource for everything related to affiliate programs. We began this journey with intro material and have worked our way to more advanced strategies and concepts. Today, we’re covering how to recruit affiliates.

In case you’re just joining, here’s a recap:

• Part 1: Basic concepts for your affiliate marketing program.
• Part 2: A brief introduction to affiliate offers.
• Part 3: Understanding affiliate marketers.
• Part 4: Setting up your affiliate offers.
• Part 5: Variables and parameters for your tracking URLs.
• Part 6: Affiliate planning, research, targeting and traffic.
• Part 7: What can my program offer to attract affiliates?
• Part 8: Ways to recruit affiliates.

As promised, now we’re going to review how to recruit affiliate marketers to grow your program. There are many ways to attract high quality affiliates, and we recommend testing all of these and determining which ones work best.

Before affiliates will consider joining your program, they’ll need basic information you can provide on your sign-up page or through other mediums. Information affiliates will want included: fees, offers, payouts, tracking software, and support, among other areas. See Part 7 for more details on what to feature about your affiliate program.

Let’s jump right in and start learning about the different ways to find affiliate marketers.

Affiliate Sign-Up Page

The most important (and easiest) way to recruit affiliates is on your website sign-up page. It should be easily accessible throughout your site and featured in the footer, and maybe even in the header. Your sign-up page should clearly and concisely describe your affiliate program, providing high level details and how to join. It should be customized to your branding and colors, creating a seamless user experience from website to sign up. Unless you are a major brand, affiliates won’t waste their time searching for information and steps to sign up. Present this information right away, and you’ll expedite the sign-up and approval process to allow affiliates to begin quickly.

Your tracking software should automatically deploy an email confirmation once an affiliate is approved for your program. Soon thereafter, be sure to send a welcome email and describe the benefits of your program, their affiliate manager’s contact information, how to reach support, featured offers, and any key information they should keep in mind.

Affiliate Referrals

To build a more successful affiliate program, it’s recommended to offer an affiliate referral program. Referral programs reward existing affiliates for recruiting new ones. Incentivizing your affiliates to do this requires a proper commission structure. Your affiliate tracking software should provide the option of compensating referrals as a single payout (CPA on the successful sign up) or as an ongoing percentage of revenue, generated by the referred affiliate (the referring affiliate gets x% of the revenue the referred affiliate receives for sales, over x period of time).

As you can imagine, this provides a great incentive for affiliates to help you recruit new affiliates with relevant traffic sources.

Affiliate Directories

Listing your program and offers on various directory sites is a great way for affiliates to get visibility into your program. Affiliate directories like OfferVault and oDigger connect affiliates with programs and offers. Affiliates search these sites for offers and sign up for programs to get access to their offers.

Recruiting or Industry Trade Shows

Attending affiliate-related trade shows is a great way to get intimate access to affiliates. Trade shows connect affiliates, advertisers, and publishers with affiliate programs and networks. These gatherings make it easy to display your program’s offers by setting up a booth and participating in lectures and events. Because many affiliate trade shows draw in such a large crowds, it’s very easy to meet new and existing affiliates to create or grow your partnerships.

Email Communication

Emailing your existing affiliates and notifying them of updates such as new offers or payouts can really get them excited about your program. Affiliates network together, post in forums and blogs, review programs, comment on offers, and share, share, share. Reminding them of your referral program can get them talking and promoting your program to their affiliate friends. Check out this post for more information on communicating with affiliates.

Study Your Competition

The ideal candidate is likely already an affiliate of your competitors. Researching and studying your competition is nothing new, and it can be extremely helpful in finding new, high-converting affiliates for your program.

Study what your competitors are doing to recruit and retain affiliates. Research forums, articles, and blog content for recruiting strategies. You might even consider commenting in your competitor’s threads and replying to posts to get the attention of their existing or potential affiliates, but be prepared for reciprocation. Sometimes even a simple Google search for your competitors’ names will reveal affiliate sites that promote the competition. Feel free to contact these sites directly and negotiate a payout.

Pay-Per-Click

Leverage search engines to advertise your affiliate program’s ads to trigger based on search queries. Finding inexpensive and targeted search terms to bid on is key when building your affiliate base. Great PPC sources for targeting affiliates include Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads, Bidvertiser, and more.

Target your audience and potential affiliate base using relevant keywords and demographic information. To start, this might take some research, or begin broad and narrow in until you find the best keywords and phrases.

Social Networks

As social networks take over communication and marketing efforts, use this popularity and momentum to promote your program. Share information and link to your affiliate sign-up page. Test different types of messaging and see which renders the highest engagement levels. Remember to encourage others to share your message to increase visibility.

Posting on social bookmarking and message board sites such as Reddit is another great way to recruit affiliates, so try to spread your message across platforms beyond Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Look to podcasting networks, online communities, streaming services, messaging apps like Discord, and beyond.

Article Marketing

Online article marketing is one of the easiest ways to recruit affiliates. Begin by writing a content-rich article emphasizing the products or services your program offers. Remember to hyperlink key phrases and words back to your sign-up page, offers, or information pages. The advantage of this method is that you’re attracting only affiliates who are legitimately interested in your offers and program, and who happen to be searching for related offers.

Reviews and Forums

Reviews are a great way to attract affiliates by providing information and featuring your program’s strongest qualities. Contact existing customers, clients, partners, or affiliates and request (or incentivize) them to provide a review. Ask to focus on the benefits and advantages of your products, offers, or features. Lastly, have someone in your organization write a comparison article, comparing and contrasting your program to others. Reviews provide valuable information and have a strong influence on readers, and can help make a name for your program and its offers.

Creating a forum is a quick way to get readers to post comments and encourage the community to talk about your program. This can spur interest with potential affiliates and get them thinking about your program. Use these forums to post benefits, advantages and opinions about your program, and provide a link and/or clear call-to-action for interested affiliates to easily sign up.

Before you begin placing links, make sure they’re working and tracking properly. Your reputation will be tarnished if an affiliate clicks on your link and is sent to an error page.

Now that I know how to recruit affiliates for my program, what’s next?

Now that you know how to recruit the affiliates you want, we’re going to look into how you retain them and build those relationships to promote growth and retention. Stay tuned as you’ll learn how to help, engage, reward and communicate with your affiliates.

Ready to get started with your own affiliate program? Request a demo of TUNE, the platform of choice for marketers who require true flexibility and control of their data and affiliate program.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2012 and has been updated with new information and links.

The affiliate marketing industry is changing rapidly. That’s why I’m excited to share a change that we think is important to our customers as they grow.

We have brought together the TUNE and CAKE teams under a unified leadership team and strategic direction to better support you, our customers and partners. You’ll benefit from the best of both companies, now unified with the intention of a connected ecosystem for all businesses that rely on affiliate marketing tracking.

You may not know this, but TUNE and CAKE are both owned by the Perseus Operating Group, which is a part of Constellation Software Inc. (TSX: CSU). Constellation is known for buying best-in-class vertical marketing software, and TUNE and CAKE both live in the Affiliate Marketing Group. Up until recently, the businesses have operated independently; as time went on, we asked ourselves if that’s the best solution for our customers.

This change marks a significant step forward in delivering what matters most to you: trusted platforms, long-term product vision, and an ecosystem designed to solve today’s challenges and embrace the innovations of tomorrow.

Why This Matters to You

More Focus on Customer Needs

Our newly unified leadership brings together a combined 90 years of affiliate marketing expertise with one priority in mind: your growth. This isn’t just a change on paper. It’s a renewed investment in building smarter tools, more seamless integrations, and a community where affiliate marketers thrive. We work with fantastic advertisers, publishers, and networks across the ecosystem, and we love to accelerate their growth.

Stronger Product Vision with a Sharper Roadmap

With TUNE and CAKE working in tandem, we’re focusing our energy on the innovations that matter: performance, scalability, customization, and transparency. Our combined leadership is building a robust product roadmap driven by customer input and powered by the experienced teams behind two of the most trusted platforms in the industry.

New Energy, Same Commitment

Affiliate marketing has grown more complex. You need partners who understand what it takes to win in this space — not just today, but for the long haul. That’s where Constellation’s long-term, buy-and-hold philosophy matters. It means stability. It means confidence in your tools. And it means we’re not here to flip products; we’re here to build lasting solutions that evolve and scale with you.

What’s Changing (and What’s Not)

What’s Changing

The two most trusted platforms in the industry are now combined under a unified leadership team within the Affiliate Marketing Group of Constellation Software. This team represents some of the most tenured experts in the space, and they are focused on setting the strategic direction, product roadmap, and shared vision across the entire portfolio.

As President of Affiliate Marketing, I’ve asked Garth Harris, former General Manager of CAKE, to widen his focus to both companies as our Chief Operating Officer. In this new role, he will lead our product roadmaps, onboarding/client services, and thought leadership with marketing. Additionally, Karen Nugent, Vice President of Customer Success, will now be leading both TUNE and CAKE customer success teams. Karen and Garth have more than 40 years blended experience in the affiliate marketing industry and can offer strength to both teams.

The two products will retain their own engineering teams, with Bernard del Valle leading TUNE as Director of Engineering and David Wilson leading CAKE as Vice President of Product Development. Lastly, I have added Ksenia Loginova as our Manager of Finance to help us bring both businesses under a single strategic umbrella.

What’s Staying the Same

TUNE and CAKE will continue to offer their distinct platforms tailored to their unique customer bases. TUNE remains focused on its customizable platform for advertisers and program managers, while CAKE continues to support enterprise networks with scalable solutions and robust performance tracking.

Hear From the Team

I asked members of the new leadership team to share their thoughts on this milestone and what it means for our customers:

“Customers have been asking for greater collaboration between these two platforms, and we’re responding. This move is about clarity, consistency, and bringing more value to the people who rely on us every day.”
— Karen Nugent, Vice President of Customer Success

“We’re not just maintaining our platforms. We’re meeting with our customers and their partners. We’re having conversations about how we can work together to drive strategic value. And we’re actively building toward a smarter, more connected affiliate marketing ecosystem. That’s what this alignment is all about.”
— Garth Harris, Chief Operating Officer

What’s Next

Together, we’re bringing the best of both worlds to our customers and partners: TUNE’s precision and flexibility for advertisers, and CAKE’s depth of scalability and infrastructure, now aligned under one common vision. We can leverage the strengths of each team to address the biggest challenges in the market today and prepare you for the opportunities ahead.

Expect to see more unified messaging, more strategic product investments, and a stronger presence in the industry, from events and webinars to platform updates and customer roundtables. We’re here to serve the entire affiliate marketing ecosystem, from brand advertisers to global networks.

If you have questions, comments, or simply want to make an introduction, I invite you to reach out to me at any time: cynthia.sener@tune.com.

We’re thankful to have you with us.

Influencer marketing has been increasing in popularity for years, as more brands discover influencers to be some of their most effective marketing partners. But influencers can also be one of the most difficult partners to measure, since they work across multiple channels and platforms. Luckily for performance marketers, there’s a simple solution: clickless tracking via promo codes.

In this article, we’ll explain how clickless tracking works, where promo codes fit in, and why you should start using promo codes to measure your influencer campaigns. 

What Is Clickless Tracking?

Clickless tracking is a way to attribute conversions without requiring the customer to click on a tracking link. 

One of the most common examples of clickless tracking is the promo code. Promo codes, which are also known as vanity codes, discount codes, and referral codes, are perfect for measuring campaigns where tracking links are ineffective or impossible to use. 

For example, let’s say you want to promote your subscription meal delivery service on a podcast about cooking. Listeners who are interested in your service can’t click on an affiliate tracking link. Instead, the podcast host reads your ad, directs users to your website or app, and tells them to enter a special promo code at checkout. Whenever a listener uses that promo code to sign up for your service, the podcast partner gets credit for the conversion. 

With clickless tracking, the promo code acts like an affiliate tracking link, letting the advertiser know exactly which influencer drove which conversion. And because promo codes are not restricted to a specific link on a website or app, they offer advertisers valuable access to scale. 

Promo Code Basics

While popular with marketers for measuring influencer campaigns, promo codes can be used virtually anywhere that advertising exists (given you have the technology to implement them). This includes online platforms, offline media, and anything in between. That makes promo codes infinitely adaptable, and allows them to open up additional marketing channels for any advertiser or affiliate program. 

Examples of channels where promo codes can be used to track conversions: 

• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Twitch
• podcasts
• brick-and-mortar stores
• billboards
• magazines
• radio
• TV

Influencers in particular are fans of promo codes because they are platform agnostic, making them perfect for cross-channel promotion. An influencer can use the same promo code in an Instagram feed, an email blast, and a YouTube video, and easily track conversions across each of those channels, despite the difference in how their fans consume each medium and message.

To make clickless tracking work across these channels, advertisers need to have a certain level of control over their shopping cart functionality and tracking capabilities. Specifically, you need to be able to add a promo code field to your website or app checkout page. You also need to be able to pass checkout data in a conversion link (i.e., identify what code is used at checkout and send that information back to a tracking platform like TUNE). You can learn more about how the TUNE platform handles promo codes in this help article.

All this sounds great, right? However, it is important to remember that promo codes are a niche solution, not a way of life. If you are an advertiser with an affiliate program, and you have the ability to use link-based tracking, use it — as long as you’re using postback tracking, not pixel tracking. Pixel tracking is an inherently risky attribution method to use, with browsers like Safari fully blocking the use of third-party cookies for marketing purposes and others like Chrome constantly changing their stance and technology for handling them. 

To future-proof your tracking, we suggest adopting server-to-server tracking methods like postback tracking as soon as possible. (Check out this help article to learn more.)

Final Thoughts

Promo codes are a great way for advertisers to diversify their partnerships beyond traditional web-based affiliate marketing. And because clickless tracking does not require cookies to work, promo codes will remain in use for the foreseeable future, even as other tracking methods become obsolete or fall out of favor.

If you’d like to learn more about how to track promo codes in a platform like TUNE, visit our Promo Codes help article. Still have questions? Email us at partnermarketing@tune.com. 

This article was originally published on PerformanceIn.com and has been updated with new data and insights.

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.

The third-party cookie has been on quite the roller coaster over the last few years. In 2017, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), a WebKit feature designed to reduce cross-site tracking. A year later, ITP 2.0 killed the third-party cookie in Safari, leaving anyone who still relied on client-side tracking scrambling for a solution. And in 2020, Apple started to block all third-party cookies in Safari and iOS by default.

While all this was going on, Google, Mozilla, and other major browsers made their own promises and plans to phase out the third-party cookie. But in 2024, Google did what no other browser had done before: a u-turn on their third-party cookie plans. They announced that they were giving up on eliminating the third-party tracking cookie in Chrome, shocking the affiliate marketing industry and raising even more questions about the future of privacy and tracking.

The saga above is just one reason we’ve always said to “cut out the cookies” in resources like our tracking guide. Third-party cookies are bad for your health — your tracking health, that is. In the context affiliate marketing, what this means is third-party tracking cookies will compromise your campaigns. First-party tracking cookies aren’t great for them, either, but there are important differences between the two.

In this post, we’re crumbling the tracking cookie to show you what it’s really made of, addressing the differences between first- and third-party cookies, and reviewing why relying only on cookie-based tracking will only hurt you in the end. 

Browser Cookies: A Bite-Sized History

While the internet has been around in some form since the 1960s, it didn’t evolve into the World Wide Web we know today until 1991. The first websites were basic, clunky, and far from user friendly, but their commercial potential was obvious. 

However, unlike brick and mortar businesses, websites had no way of knowing who was walking in the door, so to speak. Every user was anonymous, so websites offered every user the same experience — a poor one.

That all changed in 1994, when Lou Montulli invented the HTTP cookie.

An employee of Netscape, Montulli had been tasked to find a way to store incomplete transaction information in a user’s computer, rather than a business’s servers. His solution was a browser-based “cookie,” or a piece of data that could be stored by a web browser on a user’s computer. (He borrowed the term from “magic cookie,” a data file used in programming.) 

Suddenly, cookies made it relatively easy for a website to collect, store, and monetize visitor data. So, naturally, every website started using them. 

Different Types of Cookies

Cookies improve user experience. They make it possible for websites to remember user preferences, store items in shopping carts, and do a thousand other useful things. Cookies also perform essential functions on the web, such as authentication. Some of these jobs are more sensitive than others, or require specialized functionality, so different “types” of cookies exist to handle different tasks. 

(We say “types” in quotation marks because, technically, every cookie is the same type of file. They can contain the same information and functionality. What’s different is how they are created and used.)

Some types of cookies include:

• Session cookies
• Persistent cookies
• Secure cookies
• HTTP-only cookies
• SameSite cookies (of Google Chrome 80 fame)
• First-party cookies
• Third-party cookies

If you’re a digital marketer, you’ll recognize the persistent cookie, just maybe not by name. 

A persistent cookie is simply a cookie that expires after a specific date or time frame. Until it expires, a persistent cookie will share its information every time the user interacts with the domain it belongs to. This interaction can be on the website where the cookie was created, or via a resource belonging to the original website that is hosted by a different publisher, like a banner ad. 

For this reason, persistent cookies are also called tracking cookies. 

Tracking Cookies: First-Party vs Third-Party

Tracking cookies come in two flavors: first-party and third-party. The “party” in both terms refers to the website that sets the cookie. 

First-Party Cookies

First-party cookies are set directly by the website you’re on, either by the publisher’s web server or JavaScript loaded on the website, and only the same domain can access them. The domain of a first-party cookie will be the same as the domain in your browser’s address bar.

As first-party cookies come from a trusted source — the website you’re actively visiting — browsers allow them by default. That’s generally a good thing, because these cookies enable much of the functionality you’re used to when browsing the web. 

If first-party cookies were blocked, you would have to log in to your favorite website every time you visited. You wouldn’t be able to purchase multiple items while shopping online, because your cart would reset with every item you add to it. And so on.

You can still choose to disable first-party cookies in any browser, or delete them at will — just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are not set by the website you’re on. Instead, they are set by an external server (e.g., a tracking platform) via a piece of code loaded on the website you are visiting. These cookies can then be accessed on any website that loads the code from the same third-party server. Since they share information across websites, third-party cookies are also known as cross-site cookies.

Third-party cookies are used in online advertising because they make it easy for marketers to collect data about consumers and use it to serve relevant ads across the internet. Unfortunately, many websites use third-party cookies to collect this data without the consumer’s knowledge, mine unnecessary personal and behavioral information, and track users wherever they go online. These practices have led to increased global scrutiny and mistrust of the digital advertising industry and driven new legislation to protect consumer privacy and data security.

Browser support for third-party tracking cookies is rapidly declining. Many major browsers now block them by default, and others have announced plans to phase them out entirely:

• In Safari and iOS, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) blocks all third-party tracking cookies by default. (Remember ITP 2.0? It started the shift towards cookie blocking in late 2018.)
• In Firefox, Mozilla’s Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks all third-party tracking cookies by default.
• Google announced in January 2020 plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years, while Chrome’s Incognito mode now blocks all third-party cookies by default.

Should You Use Cookies in Performance Marketing?

We admit it — not all cookies are bad. The internet as we know it couldn’t work without first-party cookies. Tracking cookies, however, are a different story.

When we tell you to cut out the cookies in our white paper, we mean tracking cookies in general, and third-party tracking cookies in particular. But even first-party cookies, when used for digital tracking purposes, have limitations and drawbacks. 

Third-Party Cookies and Pixel Tracking

Third-party cookies and web browsers power pixel tracking, also called client-side tracking or cookie-based tracking. Cookies are simple, and web browsers do all the work of storing and sending information in pixel tracking, so it’s easy to implement and use. Unfortunately, cookies are also easy for browsers to block, users to delete, and bad actors to leverage, leaving marketers and their campaigns at risk. Not to mention, pixel tracking works only on desktop web.

Pros: Easy to set up and share data. 

Cons: Inaccurate, unreliable, prone to fraud, doesn’t work on mobile, doesn’t work in browsers where third-party tracking cookies are blocked (i.e. Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, and soon Google’s Chrome).

First-Party Cookies and JavaScript SDK Tracking

First-party cookies can be used as third-party tracking cookies in certain situations. This can bypass some browser restrictions, but it’s not a panacea for pixel tracking.

TUNE’s version of this tracking method is called JavaScript SDK tracking. It uses a JavaScript code snippet and first-party cookies, and still makes the browser do all the work. Therefore, it’s still susceptible to some of the same risks and limitations as pixel tracking. For example, Safari deletes all first-party cookies (and other script-writable storage) after 7 days without user interaction. If you use this tracking method, then your conversion windows on any Apple device are capped at one week. We go into more detail on the effects of Apple’s anti-tracking measures here.

Pros: Works on desktop web and mobile web, more reliable than pixel tracking, less sensitive to browser restrictions.

Cons: Implementation is more complex than pixel tracking, browser and cookie restrictions still apply, cannot track cross-channel, difficult to troubleshoot.

Conclusion: Cut Out the Cookies, Pivot to Postbacks

We stand by our point: All tracking cookies, whether first-party or third-party, will hurt your tracking health in the end. When superior solutions like postbacks are available, there’s no need to risk your campaign health with either one. 

Postback tracking, unlike pixel and JavaScript SDK tracking, does not rely on web browsers to work. Also called server-side tracking or server-to-server tracking, postback tracking uses direct server communication instead. This frees marketers from cookie-based browser restrictions and provides complete control over campaign tracking. Even better? It works cross-channel on desktop web, mobile web, and mobile apps. 

For the short list of pros and cons, plus how postbacks compare to cookie-based tracking, read “Pixels vs. Postbacks: Which Tracking Method Should You Be Using?”

For a more in-depth look at all of these tracking methods, download our white paper: How to Become a Track Star: Your Guide to Tracking for Performance Marketing Campaigns. 

Performance marketers who continue to rely on the dying third-party cookie do so at their own risk. Whether the same fate awaits first-party tracking cookies is unknown, but we don’t suggest waiting around to find out.

In the vibrant and diverse landscape of Europe, building a successful affiliate program can be a potent strategy for expanding your brand’s presence and driving revenue growth. Tailoring your approach to the unique characteristics and regulations of the European market is essential for laying the foundation of a thriving affiliate ecosystem. In this guide, we’ll explore the essential steps to establish a successful affiliate program specifically tailored for European brands. 

How to Understand the European Market 

Before diving into the intricacies of building an affiliate program, it’s crucial to have a solid understanding of the European market landscape. Europe comprises diverse cultures, languages, and consumer behaviors across its various regions. Take the time to research and identify key market segments, trends, and preferences relevant to your industry and target audience. 

Navigating Regulatory Compliance 

Compliance with European regulations, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is paramount for any brand operating in the region. Ensure that your affiliate program is fully compliant with GDPR requirements, including obtaining explicit consent from users for data processing and providing mechanisms for data access and deletion. Implement robust data protection measures to safeguard sensitive information and build trust with your audience. 

Localizing Your Offerings 

Cultural sensitivity and localization are essential considerations when developing your affiliate program for the European market. Tailor your products, messaging, and promotional materials to resonate with the cultural nuances and preferences of each target market. Consider factors such as language, currency, and local regulations to ensure a seamless and relevant user experience for European consumers. 

Building Strategic Partnerships 

Selecting the right affiliates is key to the success of your program in Europe. Look for influencers, bloggers, and content creators who have a strong presence and credibility within their respective markets. Prioritize affiliates who align with your brand values and resonate with your target audience. Consider collaborating with local influencers and micro-influencers to leverage their authenticity and reach within specific regions or communities. 

Offering Competitive Incentives 

Incentivize affiliates with competitive commission structures and incentives tailored to the European market. Consider factors such as average order value, conversion rates, and seasonal trends when determining commission rates. Offer bonuses, exclusive discounts, or performance-based rewards to motivate affiliates and encourage active promotion of your products. 

Providing Comprehensive Support 

Offer comprehensive support and resources to empower your affiliates to succeed. Provide access to high-quality marketing materials, product information, and promotional assets in multiple languages. Offer training sessions, webinars, and tutorials to help affiliates optimize their campaigns and maximize their earning potential. Foster open communication channels to address questions, provide assistance, and gather feedback from affiliates. 

Leveraging Cross-Border Opportunities 

Exploit cross-border opportunities to expand your reach and tap into new markets within Europe. Collaborate with affiliates who have a pan-European presence or target audiences spanning multiple countries. Customize your promotions and messaging to appeal to diverse cultural backgrounds and linguistic preferences across different European regions. 

Tracking and Analyzing Performance 

Implement robust tracking and analytics tools to monitor affiliate performance and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Track key metrics such as clicks, conversions, and revenue generated across different markets and channels. Analyze this data to identify trends, optimize your strategy, and allocate resources effectively to maximize ROI. 

Cultivating Long-Term Relationships 

Invest in building long-term relationships with your affiliates to foster loyalty and mutual success. Recognize and reward top-performing affiliates for their contributions and achievements. Regularly engage with affiliates through newsletters, updates, and exclusive events to keep them informed and motivated. Solicit feedback and collaborate with affiliates to continuously improve your program and adapt to evolving market dynamics. 

Potential Difficulties to Prepare For When Creating an Affiliate Program in Europe

Navigating Taxation Challenges 

One of the primary challenges European brands face in managing affiliate commissions is navigating the complex landscape of taxation regulations across different countries. Each European country may have its own tax laws and requirements regarding income earned through affiliate programs. It’s essential for brands to stay informed about VAT (Value Added Tax) regulations, withholding taxes, and other relevant tax obligations applicable to affiliate commissions in each jurisdiction where affiliates operate. Seeking professional tax advice, can help ensure compliance with local tax laws and mitigate the risk of potential liabilities. 

Overcoming Currency Conversion Hurdles 

Currency conversion presents another significant challenge when paying out affiliate commissions in the European market. With affiliates operating across various countries and using different currencies, brands must navigate fluctuating exchange rates and associated conversion fees. These currency conversion challenges can impact the accuracy and timeliness of affiliate payouts, potentially leading to discrepancies or delays in payments. To address this issue, brands can consider utilizing payment platforms or services that offer multi-currency support, allowing affiliates to receive payments in their preferred currency with minimal conversion fees. Additionally, establishing clear policies and procedures for currency conversion, including transparent exchange rates and payment schedules, can help mitigate confusion and ensure fair compensation for affiliates operating in different regions. 

By proactively addressing taxation challenges and currency conversion issues, European brands can streamline their affiliate program operations, enhance trust and transparency with affiliates, and facilitate seamless cross-border transactions within the European market. 

Get Started with an Affiliate Program in the EU

Building a successful affiliate program for your European brand requires careful planning, strategic execution, and a deep understanding of the region’s unique characteristics and regulations. By prioritizing compliance, localization, strategic partnerships, and comprehensive support, you can create a thriving ecosystem that drives sales and fosters brand loyalty across diverse European markets. With a commitment to transparency, integrity, and continuous improvement, your affiliate program can become a powerful driver of growth and success. 

Through these strategies, your brand can forge meaningful partnerships, expand its reach, and establish itself as a trusted authority in the region. 

For more advice on how to work with partners like influencers and content creators to expand your affiliate program, download our free e-book, The Influencer-Affiliate Blueprint: Building High-ROI Creator Communities.

TUNE has completed another successful audit of its system and organization controls, assuring the availability, processing integrity, security, confidentiality, and privacy of customer data. This latest audit marks another year that TUNE has earned both SOC 2 Type 2 certification and SOC 1 Type 2 certification. 

What Is a SOC 2 Audit? 

SOC stands for System and Organization Controls, a suite of services provided as part of the reporting platform of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). 

Essentially, a SOC 2 audit examines and evaluates the operational controls of a business. This audit requires a company to document and adhere to comprehensive information security policies and procedures, among other responsibilities. The resulting report gives interested parties, such as prospects and customers, additional information and insight to make a decision about working with that business.  †

What Is a SOC 1 Audit? 

SOC 1 audits focus on user entities, testing their relevant internal controls over financial reporting system design and operating effectiveness. We view SOC 1 audits and other periodic third-party reviews as a valuable resource to help enhance our current product and operations, especially when they address both the TUNE platform and TUNE Pay, our payments system. 

What Is a Type 2 Report?

To earn a Type 2 report, a company must undergo testing over an extended period of time. Type 1 reports, on the other hand, test only a single moment in time. TUNE’s usual audit period for SOC 2 and SOC 1 covers 12 months, demonstrating our ongoing effort to uphold the Trust Services Principles. 

TUNE has always voluntarily pursued the more demanding and comprehensive Type 2 report rather than the Type 1 report. Type 2 reports for both audits signal that our customers can expect high standards across TUNE’s operational, data security, and privacy practices, as well as stringent change management controls throughout our software development life cycle.

Our Commitment to Our Customers

Using an independent third-party to audit these controls is an investment companies do not take lightly. A SOC audit is, by design, an intrusive, time-consuming process designed to test a company on a variety of levels, necessitating active employee engagement and diligence across a broad swath of the organization. It’s a difficult process with a valuable payoff for our customers, and therefore one we are proud to undertake. 

As with our prior SOC audits, TUNE’s auditors determined that our controls were effectively designed and followed throughout the audit period. We intend to sustain our investments in customer-centric compliance in the years to come to protect both our business and the businesses of our customers.

Relevant portions of both reports are available upon request to security@tune.com for TUNE customers as well as prospects under a current non-disclosure agreement. 

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.