An effective affiliate program that generates revenue is great, but it's important to track more than just the income it brings in.
Consider these affiliate conversion tracking questions:
- Where is the revenue coming from?
- Which areas of the affiliate program are not doing so great?
If you start tracking affiliate conversions more closely and in more detail, you get insights that can directly change your strategy and increase your revenue even more.
This guide will help you learn how to track affiliate conversions specifically for SaaS. We'll explain why you should do it, what changes it might lead to, and how to handle it.
Here's how to make affiliate conversion tracking successful for your SaaS business.
What Is an Affiliate Conversion?
In affiliate marketing, a conversion happens when a customer referred by an affiliate takes a specific action on your website. This action is usually a purchase—at Rewardful, it’s when a successful charge or payment occurs in Stripe.
But it can also be signing up for a newsletter or filling out a contact form. The exact definition of a conversion varies based on your goals.
Example: if an affiliate promotes a subscription service, a conversion can be when someone subscribes through the affiliate's link.
Each successful conversion earns the affiliate a commission, encouraging them to attract more likely customers.
What Is Affiliate Conversion Tracking?
Affiliate conversion tracking refers to monitoring how many conversions each affiliate generates and paying them based on that. It is most often done by placing tracking pixels on key pages, setting up unique URLs, and integrating with payment systems to capture purchase details.
Thorough conversion tracking for affiliates includes monitoring the actions that drive affiliate sales, such as sign-ups, purchases, or any other desired outcomes. That way, you don't just see how many conversions people are bringing in; you'll also start to understand their recipe for success.
Discover the 9 best affiliate tracking tools for SaaS here.
How Affiliate Tracking Links Work
We know what affiliate conversion tracking is and that affiliate tracking links allow you to monitor user interactions and conversions. But what makes up an affiliate link, and how does it work?
URL Parameters
These are query strings added to a URL to capture details about the click or interaction. In affiliate marketing, parameters like an affiliate ID or campaign source show where the traffic comes from. For example:
http://www.example.com/?affiliate_id=12345
When someone clicks this link, the website records the affiliate ID and connects any later actions to that affiliate.
First-Party Cookies
Cookies are small data files stored on a user's browser when they visit a website. In affiliate marketing, clicking an affiliate link adds a cookie with the affiliate’s ID to the browser. First-party cookies, created by the website the user visits, are better for privacy and are less likely to be blocked by browsers than third-party cookies. They are important for tracking sales over time, ensuring that affiliates get credit even if purchases happen days later.
Tracking Technology
Tracking links involves several parts working together, which include:
- Web servers and databases store and manage click data, conversions, and affiliate information.
- Tracking software processes data, attributes conversions, and handles payouts.
- JavaScript and tracking pixels record user actions on a website. When a user visits a page with a tracking pixel or runs JavaScript tied to an affiliate program, the pixel requests the server, which records the visit, purchase, or other action.
Understanding how affiliate tracking links work is key to a successful affiliate program, but just setting them up isn’t enough. We also need to monitor and analyze the data they provide.
This brings us to the importance of tracking affiliate conversions and how it can drive growth for SaaS businesses.
Why Tracking Affiliate Conversions Is Essential for SaaS Growth
The data you get from tracking affiliate conversions is packed with actionable tips. If you want your affiliate program to run as efficiently as possible and maximize revenue, you should look at these insights when making changes to your affiliate marketing program.
Here's why tracking affiliate conversions over a period of time is so important:
- Helps you measure the effectiveness of different strategies
Once you understand which affiliates and their corresponding methods bring in the most conversions and revenue, you can focus on what works. Identify high-performing affiliates who consistently contribute to your growth and give them extra hands to grow further, while at the same time, give more support to affiliates that struggle.
Pro tip: Do you know how to attract top-performing affiliates? Our affiliate manager experts share their tips and tricks here.
- Get insights to optimize your budget allocation
With clear insights into affiliate performance, you can allocate your marketing budget (and other resources) more effectively and focus on strategies and affiliates that yield the best returns.
- Sharing insights will improve your affiliate relationships
Don't keep your working strategies locked in a black box. Equip your affiliates with these working affiliate strategies so they can optimize their own affiliate marketing tactics and earn more.
How to Track Affiliate Conversions Leveraging Data
The real value in tracking affiliate conversions lies in using that data purposefully. If you wonder what that looks like in real life, look at the examples below.
A. Identify and Reward Top Performers
Recognize and reward your best-performing affiliates. By increasing their commission rates or adding bonuses, you could keep top performers loyal, motivated, and active.
B. Support Underperforming Affiliates
Richer data from conversion tracking isn't just about identifying top performers. It empowers you to uplift new and underperforming affiliates. By analyzing the data, you can pinpoint areas where affiliates might be struggling. This allows you to tailor your approach: providing better promotional materials, sharing best practices, or even offering personalized coaching sessions. This targeted support helps them refine their affiliate conversion strategies, leading to mutual success.
C. Optimize Affiliate Marketing Strategies
If you know what to look for, you can more easily find the parts of your tactics that need changing. Here are some examples of it:
- Affiliate conversion data shows a high cart abandonment rate: simplify the checkout process or offer limited-time discounts to encourage buying completion.
- Low engagement with email promotions: revise email content, timing, or frequency to better align with customer preferences and increase engagement.
- Certain products have higher conversion rates through specific affiliates: to optimize affiliate conversion rates, focus promotional efforts on top-selling products, and provide more support to those affiliates.
- Tracking reveals peak conversion times: schedule affiliate campaigns to coincide with these high-traffic periods for maximum impact.
- High conversion rates from certain geographic regions: tailor campaigns and offers to target those regions more effectively.
D. Make Sure Your Team Understands When To Act on Data
Data is only as valuable as your team's ability to act on it. A data-driven culture that embraces calculated risks and course corrections is crucial. Building a flexible team that is comfortable admitting mistakes and pivoting based on insights fosters this.
However, rushing into changes based on limited data can backfire. Thorough testing remains essential before implementing major adjustments. Striking this balance ensures your team leverages insights to optimize your affiliate program effectively.
Related: avoid these 21 basic mistakes when managing an affiliate program. What are those, and how can they be mitigated? Learn here.
5 Ways To Optimize Affiliate Conversion Rates
Before you start, clearly define what you want to track. There is so much data available that it can become overwhelming and lose its practical value. Knowing what you want to track will also help you navigate the steps below with much more ease.
1. Choose Your Conversion Tracking Tools
Selecting the right tools is the first step. Here's what to look out for:
- Integration capabilities: ensure your tool integrates with your existing CRM, ecommerce platforms, and other marketing tools.
- Customization options: don't get stuck measuring metrics you don't need. The right tool should offer customizable reporting and tracking options to suit your specific tracking goals.
- Fraud detection: ensure the data is clean. Look for tools with advanced fraud detection features to protect against invalid or fraudulent conversions.
- Ease of use: choose a tool with a user-friendly interface that your team can quickly learn and navigate without extensive training.
2. Set up Your Conversion Tracking
After choosing your SaaS affiliate conversion tools, it's time to set it up with a focus on accuracy and integration.
- Define specific conversions: identify and clearly define the exact actions you want to track, such as sign-ups, completed purchases, or free trial activations.
- Install tracking pixels: place tracking pixels on critical conversion pages. It's mission critical that these pixels are correctly installed and active on every page where a conversion action occurs so your data is complete and accurate.
- Integrate with payment systems: set up your tracking tool to integrate with your payment system. This will allow you to track every completed purchase accurately, right down to the payment confirmation.
Regularly test your setup to ensure it captures data correctly. You should periodically review and update your tracking parameters to reflect any changes you made in your strategies or objectives.
3. Analyze the Data From Different Angles
Time to extract those actionable insights to refine your affiliate program. Here are some pointers to keep in mind:
- Compare conversion rates: look at conversion rates across different affiliates and campaigns. Identify who drives the most valuable traffic and determine why they perform well.
- Measure Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): determine the long-term value of customers acquired through your affiliates. Focus on affiliates who bring in customers with high CLV.
- Calculate Return on Investment (ROI): assess the ROI for your affiliate program. This will help you understand the financial benefits and justify the investment in your affiliate strategy.
Related: What important metrics should you track from your affiliate program? Discover the 30 key affiliate marketing metrics here.
When analyzing numbers, be sure to segment your data. This can give you new angles and fresh insights that a generic overview might not reveal. Break down performance by different customer groups, time periods, or affiliate segments to spot patterns and trends—play around in your dashboard and see if anything interesting pops up!
4. Optimize Based on Insights, With a Focus on ROI
Don't be afraid to experiment. Data might not immediately reveal the right way and best strategy to supercharge your SaaS affiliate marketing program, but it often does reveal what's not working and what you should change.
Once you know that, see it as an opportunity to test and iterate. Try out different commission structures, promotional materials, and marketing tactics and see how this affects conversions. The more you test, the closer you'll get to the right strategy for your business.
When you optimize, make sure you focus on ROI—don't get blinded by wanting to improve certain metrics if it doesn't significantly impact your revenue.
5. Stay on Top of Compliance
We can't let you go without mentioning compliance with legal and ethical standards. This is crucial for a trustworthy affiliate program that considers the long term.
- Make sure your affiliates clearly disclose their partnerships. Transparency builds trust with your audience and complies with regulations.
- Adhere to data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. All data handling practices should be secure and ethical, with no exceptions.
- Set up times to review your compliance policies and update them as needed. Don't let compliance be something you have to test when it's already too late.
These optimization strategies will help refine your affiliate program, but as we mentioned in Step 1, you need to choose the right tools. Now, let’s look at the best tools for tracking affiliate conversions.
The Best Tools for Affiliate Conversion Tracking
These are the top tools to consider when choosing an affiliate conversion tracker:
Rewardful
Rewardful is an easy-to-use affiliate management platform designed for SaaS and subscription businesses. It's perfect for AI software, fintech, or health and wellness companies looking to launch an affiliate program.
With Rewardful, you can quickly set up your affiliate program by integrating with Stripe or Paddle Classic in just three easy steps, all without coding. Plus, it offers seamless connections to various email marketing platforms, including Mailchimp and Customer.io.
Track your affiliate conversions and streamline your affiliate management tasks with Rewardful to save time, reduce administrative hassles, and drive growth.
Pricing: plans start at $49/month for up to $7500 in affiliate revenue, with a 14-day free trial.
Key Features: affiliate conversion tracking, two-way Stripe sync, PayPal and wise mass payouts, customizable cookies and commissions, last touch attribution, and more.
Tapfiliate
Tapfiliate is a cloud-based affiliate tracking software that helps businesses manage and automate their affiliate programs. It supports integration with various platforms and offers real-time tracking, customizable programs, and automated workflows.
Pricing: Plans start at $74/month.
Key Features: real-time tracking, customizable programs, automated workflows, multiple integrations.
Impact
Impact is known for its partnership management solution that extends beyond traditional affiliate marketing. It also helps you manage referral and influencer marketing programs and is particularly well-suited for large enterprises with complex needs and substantial budgets
Pricing: contact them for a quote, as their pricing is determined on a custom basis (starts at around $500 per month, according to Capterra).
Key Features: partnership management, cross-device tracking, flexible contracts and payouts, and more.
Partnerstack
Partnerstack takes a broader approach by catering to both affiliate and reseller programs focusing on B2B businesses. This means the tool can have more versatile features, which could suit specific companies looking to expand their affiliate and reseller pools.
Pricing: Plans start at $129/month (billed annually).
Key Features: reporting, affiliate management, automated payouts, and PartnerStack marketplace.
Be sure to consider your goals, as each affiliate conversion tracking tool depends on your business's needs and objectives. Finally, lets take a look at the best practice to follow when tracking affiliate conversions.
3 Best Practices for Affiliate Conversion Tracking
Tracking affiliate conversions requires precision and smart data use. Here’s how to make your efforts effective:
1. Regularly Audit Your Affiliate Conversion Tracking Setup
Ensure your affiliate tracking mechanisms are always accurate. Verify that tracking pixels and integrations work correctly regularly, update tools as needed, and test different scenarios to capture every customer action accurately.
2. Use Multiple Data Sources for a Holistic View
Integrate tools like Google Analytics, CRM, and affiliate tracking software to gather comprehensive data. Analyze the customer journey to identify key touchpoints and optimize the affiliate impact. Compare your data with industry benchmarks to identify areas for improvement.
3. Use Predictive Analytics
Leverage advanced analytics to forecast trends and make proactive adjustments. Implement machine learning models to identify potential high-performers, analyze historical data to guide strategy, and adjust commission structures and promotional materials based on predictions.
Rewardful: SaaS Affiliate Conversion Tool You Can Rely On
It all starts with the right tool for affiliate conversion tracking. Want to keep your tech stack integrated and have all your data in one place? Discover how Rewardful offers an all-in-one solution for comprehensive affiliate management.
