Best affiliate marketing tools for beginners and pros 2023

Affiliate marketing is for everyone from mommy bloggers to mega brands. This win-win business model has grown to a $19B industry with more than 80% of online brands offering an affiliate marketing program. Naturally, affiliate marketing tools are increasingly being used to convert customers across the web. These tools can simplify workflows on both sides of the affiliate partnership and create trustworthy paths to purchase for shoppers.

The affiliate marketer’s toolbox should be equipped with marketing apps for SEO, email marketing, analytics, and content optimization. Whether you’re running a recipe blog or building a cutting-edge review site, you’ll need powerful marketing tools to reach your goals. Let’s explore eight tools you can start using today.

Pros: Excellent integrations, Powerful tracking tools, Loaded with features

Cons: High learning curve, No social sharing, Expensive

Features: Advanced tracking links, affiliate management, integrated payments, marketing asset management

Cost: Plans starting at $129/mo

Post Affiliate Pro launched in 2004, a bonafide dinosaur in tech years. They are leaps and bounds more experienced in affiliate marketing than the competition and they’ve built a feature-packed platform to serve merchants. The platform hosts more than 30,000 customers worldwide and boasts 200+ integrations. Social sharing is notably absent from the tool but what it lacks there it makes up for in flexibility, enhanced tracking links, payment processing, and multi-level marketing options rebranded as Forced Tiers.

In Banner Manager, affiliate campaign assets are easily shared with publishers on the platform and banners come in all shapes and sizes. Empowering affiliates is one step and rewarding them is next. In Post Affiliate Pro merchants can award affiliates for all sorts of behaviors beyond just sales. Things like newsletter signups, registrations, and web traffic can all be monetized. There are also options for recurring commissions and split commissions between affiliates.

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Pros: Database of affiliate programs, Advanced filtering, Search by earning potential, One-time access fee

Cons: No commission tracking features,

Features: Thousands of affiliate programs, SEO support, Trend data,

Cost: Starting at $149 for lifetime access

Affiliate marketing is a big, broad term. If you’re a beginner, it can be a lot of information to dig through to get started. Are you going to focus on tech, food, or the wide world of Amazon? Do you want to reach audiences on social media, buy Google ads, write SEO articles, or are you trying to be the next Wirecutter? Before you jump into making content, identify your niche with Affiliate Corner.

Affiliate Corner is not just another affiliate program database, but you’ll appreciate the search features to sift through 3000+ programs and 115+ niches. While it’s not the largest affiliate database, the pricing makes this option a winner. Pro users can unlock insights about how what makes each affiliate program unique, and you can easily filter by earning potential, average order value, and profession. You can also get access to trend data and SEO keyword research to give you a simple path to start promoting content and making sales. If you need additional support, you can make a one-time purchase to access their video course.

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Pros: Easy-to-use, Intuitive, Concierge onboarding experience

Cons: Price

Features: Heatmaps, Integrates with top affiliate networks, Aggregates all affiliate link data in one platform

Cost: Plans starting at $82/mo

The list of affiliate marketing programs is growing every day, which means new opportunities to make money and promote a wide range of products. Affilimate knows that it can be messy to manage lots of different affiliate programs so they created a single clean dashboard to manage it all.

The tool integrates with 100+ affiliate networks to help affiliates visualize a complete overview of their campaign metrics. Eliminating this step in the program management process frees you up to focus on things that convert sales like digital marketing, content optimization, page SEO, and lead generation. The tool is packed with other features like content analytics, affiliate link management, revenue attribution, and revision monitoring.

Pros: Large keyword and backlink database, Data filtering, User-friendly

Cons: Expensive, Plan limits with overage fees

Features: Keyword research, Site auditing, Backlink analysis, Rank monitoring

Cost: Plans start at $83/mo

Every website needs an SEO strategy in 2023, and affiliate sites are no exception. Ahrefs is a digital marketing and SEO tool that helps you rank higher and get more traffic. There is no free trial but the company offers a free Webmaster Tools account for website owners. The tool offers ranking monitoring, keyword tools, link building, and a backlink checker.

Ahrefs has one of the largest databases of live links which gives them a competitive edge on backlink checking. Ahrefs puts a heavy emphasis on competitive analysis and offers strategies to beat those competitors in search rankings. This is important for any business but especially so for affiliate sites when you’re competing with the brands and other affiliates trying to convert the same customers.

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Pros: Large affiliate and advertiser network, Advanced filtering, Easy-to-use dashboard

Cons: High learning curve, Long implementation, Sign-up fee

Features: Campaign management, Email marketing, Analytics, Social promotion

Cost: $50 per month

It’s easy to see why publishers flock to Awin to tap into its vast network of merchants and affiliate programs. Last year Awin affiliates earned a whopping $1.3B in commissions. Advertisers trust Awin to market their affiliate partnership opportunities to affiliates en masse. With more than 25,000 advertisers and 270,000 active affiliates, Awin is an obvious win for the best affiliate network. The platform is intuitive and easy to use and the support team is readily available to help users get set up. Publishers can easily find advertisers to work with and generate trackable links that are measured and reported in the analytics platform.

Pros: Easy link management, Automations, Amazon compliance tools

Cons: WordPress plug-in only

Features: Link cloaking, Auto-link keywords, Geolocation links,

Cost: Plans start at $199.50 per year

ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link management WordPress plug-in that gives you total control of your affiliate links. The tool allows you to cloak your links, protect yourself from commission hijacking, and easily insert your affiliate links throughout your blog posts. Link cloaking works by redirecting your unique URLs to different destination URLs.

Not only do cloaked links look pretty, but they are also more trustworthy to customers and have higher conversion rates. International audiences have a great experience with links due to automatic geolocation links serving up shoppable pages. Hello, geo-targeting! Links can also be easily uncloaked to comply with Amazon’s affiliate program rules. All in all, it’s an affordable tool that is great for WordPress websites looking to monetize their content.

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Pros: Variety of eCommerce integrations, 100+ templates, clean interface, AI features

Cons: Costly, Limited control of page design, Difficult to manage multiple landing pages

Features: AI landing page builder, Integrations, A/B testing, Brand style guide

Cost: Plans start at $74/mo

Websites and landing pages have two key differences. Websites are designed for open exploration while landing pages give customers a compelling focus. Focus is especially important for affiliate marketing when you are driving traffic for a specific product or service.

Enter Unbounce, a gorgeous landing page builder packed with landing page templates, AI writing support, and plenty of other features to boost your digital marketing efforts. You can add pop-ups and sticky bars to your landing page, A/B test creative, and connect to eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. Smart traffic features can also help users understand how pages are performing and identify behavior patterns in as few as 50 site visits.

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Pros: Track conversion across platforms, One-click integrations, No coding skills required

Cons: Learning curve, Price

Features: ROAS tracking, One tag for all your conversions, Google Analytics and Facebook API

Cost: From $50 monthly

Slogging through a sea of data to drill down on your affiliate link campaigns is time-consuming and tedious. If you need a simpler option, no further than AnyTrack! This all-in-one conversion tracking platform is excellent at attribution and helps users make sense of marketing metrics.

With AnyTrack, you can track conversions across all your channels - Google Ads, Meta Ads, Bing Ads, and more. That means no more trying to piece together your marketing performance from multiple platforms. AnyTrack also offers automated conversion tracking, so you can quickly discover insights and use them to generate better content. Plus, with advanced attribution modeling, you'll know exactly which campaigns and channels are driving the most conversions. It's like having a personal data analyst right at your fingertips!

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The affiliate marketing world is constantly growing. Upskilling and refreshing your toolset is a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition. The right tools can help automate and streamline many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks involved in managing an affiliate marketing program, freeing up time to focus on more strategic initiatives such as launching new marketing campaigns and finding new partners.

Whether it's tracking and analyzing data, managing relationships with affiliates, or optimizing ad campaigns, there are a plethora of tools available on Product Hunt that can help marketers do their jobs more effectively. From comprehensive analytics platforms to powerful automation tools, the right affiliate marketing tools can help you save time, reduce costs, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.