Ready to grow your business? There’s probably an app for that—especially if you’re looking to dive deeper into the world of affiliate marketing and referral marketing.
From link shorteners to platforms that offer tools to help you manage affiliate partners, we’ve rounded up some of the best apps out there to help you boost sales. Read below to learn about each of these apps, their top features, pricing, and more.
What to look for in an affiliate marketing app
Before investing in apps, it’s a good idea to learn what you should look for. The features below are the basics that each app should have to enhance your campaign and make your workflows easier.
Tracking and reporting capabilities
The ability to track links and generate reports makes affiliate marketing possible, so in any app you use, this is a must-have feature. At the most basic levels, affiliate marketing apps should be able to track clicks and impressions plus clicks that lead to sales so that you know when it’s time to pay (or receive) commissions.
Other metrics are helpful, too. For example, things like bounce rates or time spent on page can indicate which of your pieces of content are most valuable to consumers.
User-friendly interface
Affiliate marketing is difficult enough—the tools that you use don’t need to make it any harder! Get demos of apps if possible, or watch a few review videos that show users actually using the apps to get an idea of user-friendliness. Choose the apps that work best for your entire team to save yourself future headaches.
Customization and branding
Whether you’re using an app to create content or to create your affiliate links, it needs to offer features for customization and branding. Most content creation tools will give you these things by default—but make sure that your link generation tools do, too.
Branded links look and feel a lot more authentic to the average consumer, and if you can shorten and customize links, you can create attractive, clickable links that users are inclined to trust.
The 9 best affiliate marketing apps for businesses
Looking for a few awesome apps to help propel your affiliate marketing efforts to new heights? We’ve got a few recommendations for you to look into.
1. Bitly
Bitly is a super useful tool for link-shortening with a lot of other great features to help you improve affiliate marketing campaigns. Use it not only to generate short links, but to generate attractive affiliate links, create a Bitly Link-in-bio, make QR Codes, and more. Get the details on Bitly’s top features below.
Generate affiliate links
Affiliate marketing links are crucial. These are links with unique identifiers that allow you to track clicks and other activities. They’re what merchant businesses use to track affiliate sales so that they know when to pay out commissions.
Most of the time, whether you’re a merchant or an affiliate, you’ll get the links you need from an affiliate network, which will have tools set up to generate links on demand. The problem is that these links aren’t always the most attractive—and that’s where Bitly comes in.
With Bitly, you can improve your affiliate links if they’re long and clunky by using the link shortener. You can even take things a step further and create enticing, custom-branded short links that will make customers want to click.
Link-in-bio
For affiliates who rely on social media channels as part of their marketing campaign, the Link-in-bio is an essential tool—and you can create them easily on Bitly.
A great link-in-bio will make social profiles work harder, providing an easy, clickable link where fans and viewers can access carefully curated content. That includes links to other social profiles or platforms like your website and any affiliate links you happen to be promoting.
QR Codes
With Bitly QR Codes, you can customize the color, shape, frame, and fonts to create an attention-grabbing QR Code that matches your branding. You can also track QR Code performance across email and social channels to better understand the customer journey.
Bitly’s QR Codes are another great tool that helps you take your affiliate marketing campaigns a step further. You can customize your Codes to match your branding, streamline campaign analysis with real-time engagement metrics, and manage everything from a single dashboard. For affiliate marketers, all you need to do is attach your links to QR Codes to create an easily scannable link that helps you increase conversions.
Additional features and pricing
- Integrate with many of today’s top productivity and marketing tools.
- Track links and measure analytics easily with link management.
- Access real-time analytics so you can measure geographic data, top referring channels, and more.
As for pricing, Bitly offers several tiers to support your needs:
- Free plan with access to basic tool
- Starter: $8 per month
- Basic: $29 per month
- Premium: $199 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing only
2. Affiliatly
Affiliatly is a good all-in-one platform for marketers. You can use it to create and manage your entire affiliate marketing program. It offers link-generation tools and a campaign builder so you can customize your program, analytics, and more.
Key features and pricing
- Create and share affiliate links.
- Customize your program’s look and feel.
- Track analytics across your affiliate program.
- Manage affiliates individually.
- Integrate with your Shopify store, WooCommerce, and other major retail platforms.
Pricing is monthly, and packages are based on the number of affiliates you’ll be working with, starting at a maximum of 50 and scaling up to unlimited affiliates.
- Starter: $16 per month
- Advanced: $24 per month
- Professional: $39 per month
- Pro 1000: $59 per month
- Pro 2500: $ $79 per month
- Pro Unlimited: $129 per month
3. UpPromote
UpPromote allows you to create, customize, and share affiliate programs. You’ll start by using the platform to build an affiliate program and create customized rules. From there, you can invite affiliates to take part in the program.
Key features and pricing
- Leverage offer rules to create promotional discounts.
- Invite affiliates to your program or list your program on UpPromote’s marketplace.
- Customize your campaign to fit your brand’s look.
- Communicate with affiliates through email and chat.
- Generate analytics and reports to track team performance.
UpPromote offers four pricing tiers, each offering additional features:
- Free plan with basic tools
- Growth: $29.99
- Professional: $89.99
- Enterprise: $199.99
4. Refersion
Refersion is an affiliate network—and it’s a good one to start with because it offers access to merchants across a huge range of categories, plus products from big shopping platforms like Amazon and Shopify. For marketers, Refersion offers a lot of great tools to build programs, track metrics, and more.
Key features and pricing
- Find the right affiliates and content publishers for your brands.
- Onboard affiliates easily and track their performance.
- Generate analytics reports.
- Integrate with your favorite tools and ecommerce platforms.
For affiliates, it’s free to join, but for marketers, plan prices are based on the number of conversions per month:
- Professional: $99 per month
- Business: $249 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing only
5. Social Snowball
Social Snowball is an affiliate network similar to Refersion—but with some key differences. This platform focuses on direct-to-consumer sales and word-of-mouth marketing. It also lets you easily create and manage affiliate programs; you can even leverage tools to help turn your customers into affiliates to boost your word-of-mouth marketing efforts even further.
Key features and pricing
- Create referral programs that transform customers into affiliates.
- Manage influencers and creators in a simple dashboard.
- Enable easy communication through email and SMS.
- Track analytics, attribution, and ROI data.
- Automatically detect coupon code leaks.
Social Snowball offers three tiers for marketers, each offering additional features:
- Pro: $99 per month
- Blizzard: $499 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing only
6. Goaffpro
Goaffpro is a great service for ecommerce stores needing robust features for affiliate marketing—plus access to an affiliate network. This app is designed to integrate directly with your store through Shopify, Woo Commerce, or whatever ecommerce platform you use. From there, you can set up a program, contract affiliates to work with, and watch your sales grow.
Key features and pricing
- Leverage advanced analytics to track affiliate performance.
- Create custom-branded affiliate portals.
- Use machine learning and AI to optimize your affiliate program.
- Automate payouts to affiliates through PayPal.
Goaffpro bases its pricing on the number of daily sales you anticipate:
- Free: Fewer than 100 daily orders
- Premium: $24 per month for more than 100 daily orders
- Business: $89 per month plus 0.9% of net affiliate sales volume
- Enterprise: $199 per month plus 0.9% of net affiliate sales volume
7. ReferralCandy
ReferralCandy is all about influencer marketing and word-of-mouth marketing. This platform works with a lot of big-name brands, but small businesses will find a lot of value here, too.
There’s a ton that you can do with this platform. It allows you to design your own affiliate program and reach out to influencers to help spread the word. You can also use ReferralCandy to create automated post-purchase emails with additional savings, distribute rewards to customers for referrals, and create promotional widgets for your website.
Key features and pricing
- Create automated post-purchase emails to send to your customers.
- Create and manage referral campaigns to enhance your word-of-mouth marketing.
- Design widgets to offer deals directly on your website.
- Launch an influencer marketing campaign using InfluencerCandy.
ReferralCandy offers three pricing tiers:
- Premium: $47 per month plus a 3.5% commission rate
- Plus: $239 per month plus a 1.5% commission rate
- Enterprise: Custom pricing only
8. LeadDyno
LeadDyno is a platform specializing in helping you develop, manage, and grow your affiliate program. It’s ideal for both ecommerce stores and software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses. Use it to set up your program, track ongoing performance, and grow sales through referrals and scaling out your affiliate program.
Key features and pricing
- Set up your affiliate program quickly—without the need for a developer.
- Track analytics across campaigns to monitor performance.
- Offer rewards for all kinds of promotion—clicks, leads, and sales.
- Connect to top ecommerce platforms like Shopify, PayPal, and WooCommerce.
LeadDyno’s pricing structure is more complicated than some. It’s based on unique website visitors per month and charges both a monthly fee and a fee for additional unique visits per month.
- Starter: $49 per month for up to 3,000 unique visitors; charges $0.10 for each additional unique website visit
- Plus: $129 per month for up to 15,000 unique visitors; charges $0.05 for each additional unique website visit
- Pro: $349 per month for up to 100,000 unique visitors; charges $0.01 for each additional unique website visit
- Premium: $749 per month for up to 500,00 unique visitors; charges $0.001 for each additional unique website visit
9. AffTrack
AffTrack helps you enhance your affiliate and performance marketing efforts. It’s an all-in-one platform where you can manage affiliates and advertisers, and track everything via the platform’s robust suite of analytics.
AffTrack also offers a lot of features to help you build high-quality traffic, including traffic analysis to protect against fraud and targeting that helps you better zero in on particular market segments.
Key features and pricing
- Use real-time analytics to track, manage, and refine your marketing efforts.
- Safeguard your business with proxy and fraud detection tools.
- Target specific audience segments with offer targeting tools.
- Customize access control settings to give your team members the right permissions.
- Access a full API to use your account with custom interfaces or integrations.
AffTrack’s pricing is an outlier among affiliate marketing platforms because it’s super simple. After a one-month free trial, $199 per month unlocks everything—no tiers, no other fees for features.
Optimize your affiliate marketing strategy with Bitly
Ready to take your affiliate marketing strategy to the next level? Look for apps that offer customizable features, robust affiliate management tools, the ability to create incentives, and a link shortener like Bitly that lets you create customized affiliate and referral links for your affiliates to share.
It’s easy to get started with Bitly—and inexpensive, too. Find your perfect plan here.