Q: What is the best way to manage 300 affiliate relationships in one interface? Some are not part of CJ and ClickBank and others.
A: I’d say if you have 300 affiliate relationships that are making you money, you ought to focus on the marketing side of things and hire somebody to crunch the numbers for you and put them in a pretty format.
But assuming only a portion of the 300 affiliate programs are actually bringing in any commissions to you, the first step should be to conduct an audit and dump any affiliate programs that are not panning out.
As far as aggregating your affiliate data in one place, I think your best bet may be to manually input your data into Excel to slice and dice it, which is obviously rather laborious.
Otherwise, consider having somebody build a custom application to suit your needs. Personally, I often go to Rent a Coder to get things created on the cheap.
Years ago, this would have been a no brainer. I would have said to go with AffTrack. They enabled affiliates to track all data from affiliate programs, whether in the networks or independent affiliate programs.
Unfortunately, they are no longer able to pull in LinkShare data. If that’s not an issue for you, check them out.
I also came across a new solution recently called Affmeter. The Affmeter site for this software boasts that it “covers the following major affiliate networks: Commission Junction, Reporting.net, Performics, Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future, Tradedoubler, Webgains, Buy.at, Google Adsense, PaidonResults and Linkshare.”
I don’t see anything on there about whether you can track indie programs.
Also, I don’t really know anything about this product, the people behind it, etc. So if you are going to try it out, I’d suggest doing a little homework to be sure it’s safe. After all, you’ll be sharing your affiliate network login information.
And check your affiliate network agreements to be sure use of such a program doesn’t violate their terms and conditions. The last thing you want is to have your affiliate account suspended over the use of some third party product that’s meant to help you manage that account.