The Ultimate Marketing Tech Stack for an Affiliate Marketer

Buckle up! The bottomless list of affiliate marketing tools will make you the biggest player in the game – or at least give you a life-changing boost. You’re about to uncover a shortcut to unprecedented affiliate marketing revenues and ironclad stability.

As lucrative as a well-thought-out affiliate marketing campaign can be, only around 15% of affiliate marketers make $50,000 or more annually from their affiliate marketing endeavors, with 57.55% not exceeding $10,000, a far cry from what you might be hoping for.

How come, considering affiliate marketing is all the buzz?

The answer is that too many marketers lack the right affiliate marketing tools up their sleeves, lagging behind the progress of the rapidly developing market. A sub-optimal affiliate marketing tech stack leads to less-than-efficient campaign management and, as a result, lost profits. At the same time, the industry is only gaining momentum, with the global marketing automation software market size estimated at $5.4 billion in 2023.

Solution?

Here you go: to consistently beat the affiliate marketing competition, you must leverage the most advanced affiliate marketing tools and update your stack continuously with newly appeared tools (don’t worry, they appear fairly often, so your searches won’t be in vain).

What do we offer?

• Basic knowledge of the best affiliate marketing tools
• Access to the categorized list of the top affiliate marketing tools

We wish we could do more for your success, but it’s really up to you to pave your unique path in the affiliate marketing realm. Should you find yourself astray, fear not: we’ve got a whole team of marketing professionals to back you up and tons of affiliate marketing guides to put you back on the right track.

What should you do on your side?

Two things. First, read this blog to the end to acquire a theoretical base. Second, use our bottomless list of affiliate marketing tools to find your best tools.

With that, it’s time to jump into the unknown, unraveling the tangle of best tools for affiliate marketing step by step, starting from the short field summary.

Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell (Really Short and Clear)

Just in case you have never heard of affiliate marketing, here’s what it is:

• Affiliate marketing is a business model where affiliates (also known as publishers; there are small differences between the two, but these are irrelevant now) promote products of a third-party company (known as a merchant) in exchange for a commission.

The affiliate marketing game may or may not involve a middleman called an affiliate network, which creates a favorable market for both parties. However, whether an affiliate network is involved or not, the core affiliate marketing principle stays true: advertisers buy leads while affiliates generate and sell leads, and both meet at a certain value-price point to conclude a deal.

That’s about it – you promote products for money. Et voila! End of story.

Source: GIPHY

In reality, though, things are much more complicated. Affiliate marketers go to great lengths to achieve their goals, making the competition tough. Really tough.

Why Do You Need Affiliate Marketing Tools?

You need advanced affiliate marketing tools to have a fighting chance against the fierce competition. You must be able to automate and improve everything you can to remain cost-efficient on the battleground. Otherwise, how do you expect to beat someone who does the same things as you but faster, more accurately, and…just better?

• Affiliate marketing tools level up the playing field. They are no longer a secret weapon that gives an unfair advantage but a necessity. Automated affiliate marketing tools are crucial to your success in 2023.

And these are not just affiliate link trackers, although you need them as well. There are a whole bunch of other affiliate marketing tools you can use in your campaigns, from well-known Google Marketing Platform and Google Ads to dozens and hundreds of narrow-focused ad analyzers, landing page builders, content optimizers, and more.

Source: HULU

The game is complicated, but you’ve already set yourself on the path of improvement.

Here are your 11 most wanted affiliate marketing tool types:

• Ad intelligence tools
• Web design tools
• Content tools
• Paid media tools
• SEO tools
• AI tools
• WordPress plugins
• Landing page builders
• Referral software
• URL shorteners
• Web analytics tools

Make sure to acquaint yourself with all categories and navigate to the dedicated reviews for the affiliate marketing tool categories you want to know more about.

Now, it’s time to open the magic box for you, starting from ad intelligence tools.

Ad Intelligence Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Let’s unveil the curtain behind ad intelligence first:

• Ad intelligence provides insights into your competitors’ advertising campaigns across many dimensions. Take, for example, SensorTower: this ad intelligence tool can provide exhaustive insights into competitors’ mobile affiliate campaigns, including what ads are placed where and how much they bring.

Some call ad intelligence tools spy tools, but you shouldn’t worry about that. Any licensed ad intelligence tool won’t allow you to cross legal boundaries, keeping you safe to analyze fellow affiliates and advertisers.

SensorTower

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
1,310,221	6	225	0.33	65.66%	28.51%	0	1.92%	2.90%	1.02%

 

SensorTower is a popular ad intelligence tool for affiliate marketing that mostly focuses on the mobile app ecosystem, enabling insights into competitor advertisement strategies, including:

• Types of ads used
• Ad location
• Estimated ad spend

On top of the ad intelligence insights, you can analyze competing apps, keywords, creatives, and more.

AdScan

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Bounce Rate	Avg. Visit Duration
13,900	6	0.28	07:12

 

AdScan is one of the newest ad intelligence tools for affiliate marketing, offering the biggest library of YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook ads running in real-time across markets, all searchable and trackable. AdScan is like Facebook Ads library but even more easily trackable from a paid perspective.

AdScan provides tons of helpful ad intelligence data, including transcripts and ad spend estimates for every ad creative, an AI analysis of why a particular ad is good or bad, and the ability to save the ads you want to reference from the Chrome extension.

Here’s your winning list of ad intelligence tools for affiliate marketing success.

Web Design Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Web design tools for affiliate marketing include niche and well-known website and landing page builders, image editors, design tools, CSS frameworks, plugins, heatmaps, and other instruments to capitalize on your online presence.

• With dozens and hundreds of web design tools, you can choose the level of complexity and optimization for your website, spanning from quite complex content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla to easy-to-use automated website and landing page builders.

The best web design tools for affiliate marketing can help you increase page loading speed, make your website mobile-responsive, and provide insights into the keywords you should incorporate for better search rankings.

Adobe

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
262,178,069	5	232	0.46	53.63%	34.26%	1.14%	8.00%	1.71%	1.25%

 

The well-known celebrity of the design world, Adobe provides a huge library of products for designers, including Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator, each one with unique advantages:

• Adobe XD
  • Website and landing page design
  • Testing CTA locations and customer journey
  • Ensuring the right design of the affiliate offer

• Adobe Photoshop:
  • Developing affiliate banners, ads, and other visuals
  • Optimizing image size to increase website loading speed

• Adobe Illustrator:
  • Designing branding elements like logotypes and icons
  • Designing high-quality promotional graphics

Adobe allows you to design a stunning website, blog, or landing page that glues your visitors to the screen, with higher engagement and conversion rates. No less important, you will look professional and thus be perceived as an industry leader.

Wix

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
47,943,076	7	483	0.36	65.64%	24.58%	0.53%	3.01%	2.84%	3.39%

 

Uniting over 800 designer-made templates, Wix allows you to drag-and-drop your website and optimize it for users and search engines. Likewise, you can design customer landing pages for specific affiliate marketing campaigns and integrate direct sales features like payment gateways or shopping carts. The all-encompassing platform also provides an SEO toolset, web hosting, and custom domain names.

Here’s your winning list of web design tools for affiliate marketing success.

Content Marketing Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Whether you use affiliate links, banners, or videos to refer customers, you need two things to succeed: compelling content with a unique value proposition and the right content marketing tools to expose your content to the target audience.

• Social media aside, the most popular affiliate marketing channels for business promotion are blogs (27.8%), review sites (18.7%), coupon sites (14.8%), newsletters (7.2%), and editorial sites (6.5%).

Luckily, most content marketing tools for affiliate marketing not only help with promotion but also content creation and customizations. AI-driven writing assistants like Grammarly correct your errors and ensure your content is unique, while enterprise-size content marketing hubs like HubSpot help align content marketing with your other business avenues.

Canva

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
418,410,773	5	627	0.27	75.96%	17.94%	0.05%	0.88%	3.31%	1.86%

 

The biggest web design platform for affiliate marketing, Canva provides everything you need to design any website element barring the website itself (Canva is more of a graphic design tool than a website builder). The platform’s humongous library encompasses hundreds of templates and elements and a grad-and-drop editor to put it all together in a few clicks.

Here are some of the content you can design with Canva:

• Infographics
• Social media graphics
• Guides and e-Books
• Banners and ads
• Print materials

Canva runs a design school, making it easier to kick things off with web design.

BuzzSumo

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
511,659	3	185	0.4	59.11%	27.78%	0.04%	7.40%	3.63%	2.04%

 

BuzzSumo is an intelligence and content marketing tool for discovering and analyzing trending topics, popular ideas, and niche influencers. On top of competitor analysis and content discovery, you can set alerts for specific domains or keywords to respond to the content market shifts and changes. Speaking of responsiveness, you can also use Question Analyzer to identify the most popular questions people ask on platforms like Quora.

BuzzSumo can improve your strategic positioning, guide you through content creation, and make your content visible and engaging.

Not only is plagiarized content unengaging, but it also ranks poorly, if ever. Plagiarism checkers for affiliate marketing ensure your content is ethical and your writers put effort into what they do. With plagiarism checkers like Grammarly, you can scan your content in just a few seconds, knowing the assumable sources for plagiarized content, if any.

Grammarly

 

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
57,223,000	3	188	0.42	62.86%	25.19%	3.19%	2.49%	2.28%	4.00%

 

Powered by NLP technology, Grammarly is one of the best writing assistants to hunt for misprints and correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling if you’re not a professional wordsmith. Grammarly is invaluable if you have to check an overwhelming amount of content while ensuring it’s plagiarism-free.

Grammarly is compatible with almost every device and platform. As a browser extension, it can become your faithful writing sidekick in daily correspondence, including emails and chat messages.

Here’s your winning list of content tools for affiliate marketing success.

Paid Media Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Organic exposure is great, but it’s hardly enough to drive the desired attention to the promoted product. In most cases, you must combine organic advertising tools like SEO with paid media tools for affiliate marketing.

From pay-per-click (PPC) ads to display ads to social media ads, paid media tools for affiliate marketing help increase reach, engagement, and conversions, with revenues covering the paid campaign costs several times over.

• Take, for example, Facebook Ads Manager, the in-house tool for managing Facebook and Instagram ads. It can help you with targeting, attracting similar audiences, retargeting customers from your website, and bidding strategies, all to maximize the efficiency of your paid ad campaigns.

On the other hand, there are standalone tools – for example, Acquisio – that provide AI technologies like machine learning to increase the efficacy of your paid media campaigns. The world’s really your oyster here.

Google Ads

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
65,442,619	10	624	0.31	81.93%	12.65%	0.56%	2.25%	2.44%	0.17%

 

Google’s online paid media advertising platform, Google Ads provides world-class advertising opportunities through its search engine, YouTube, partner websites, and more. With Google Ads, you can reach the widest audience with your most effective ads, whether search ads, display ads, shopping ads, video ads, or other supported ad types.

Among other things, you can use:

• Keyword Planner to understand how specific keywords affect your ads
• Conversion tracking tools to uncover the customer journey

Google Ads works through bidding on audiences and keywords to trigger ad displays.

Here’s your winning list of paid media tools for affiliate marketing success.

SEO Tools for Affiliate Marketing

SEO tools for affiliate marketing are invaluable for drawing organic traffic, increasing your website visibility, and ensuring your content hits the right audience at the right time. Likewise, SEO tools for affiliate marketing can improve your website structure, backlinking, and local targeting.

SEMrush

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
13,773,682	6	398	0.36	62.89%	28.55%	2.25%	1.52%	1.81%	2.97%

 

SEMrush is yet another multifunctional affiliate marketing tool you can use for SEO insights as well as social media marketing. SEO-wise, SEMrush works across the whole optimization spectrum, offering keyword research, competitor analysis, local & on-page SEO, link building tools, and more.

Here’s your winning list of SEO tools for affiliate marketing success.

AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Artificial intelligence tools for affiliate marketing can do almost everything a human marketer can do, but incomparably faster and better. Even free AI tools for affiliate marketing can create text and visual content, make data-driven predictions, communicate with referrals, and automate and optimize your marketing across the board.

Here’s your ultimate guide to using AI for affiliate and performance marketing.

According to Statista, marketing professionals extensively use AI to improve customer experience through predicting customer behavior and needs (60%), uncovering frequent customer journeys (47%), improving omnichannel messaging (45%), and over a dozen more reasons.

ChatGPT

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
1,473,067,970	4	432	0.39	93.09%	2.34%	0.01%	3.28%	0.79%	0.49%

 

The epitome of deep learning technology, ChatGPT can help you with content creation, customer support, market research, and language translation by integrating with your chatbot or standalone at https://chat.openai.com/. The record-breaking assistant is used by almost 1.5 billion people monthly, having evolved from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4.

Here’s your winning list of AI tools for affiliate marketing success.

WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketing

Powering 43% of all existing websites, WordPress can do faster, higher, and stronger if enhanced with plugins. WordPress plugins are the most important affiliate marketing tools for WordPress, allowing you to beautify your affiliate links, automatically insert them into keywords, and track and analyze clicks, among many other opportunities.

Pretty Links

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
48,470	2	130	0.5	34.41%	58.22%	0	4.75%	2.57%	0.06%

 

One of the best affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress, Pretty Links does what its name suggests: shrink affiliate links so they look tempting to click. On top of that, Pretty Links allows you to customize URL slugs and provides link tracking and reporting features.

The plugin covers links and URLs through and through, maximizing the input of these marketing elements into your affiliate success. Some of the features include no-follow toggling, link redirects, automatic keyword replacement, scheduled link expiration, and more.

Here’s your winning list of WordPress plugins for affiliate marketing success.

Landing Page Builders for Affiliate Marketing

Landing page builders for affiliate marketing are all about combining the ease of use and the features and level of customization you want to see on your website. You can find all types of builders on the market, from the simplest grad-and-drop editors to complex CRM platforms like HubSpot, to create landing pages, blogs, and websites without technical knowledge.

Unbounce

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
922,313	6	400	0.41	62.04%	31.37%	0.09%	2.83%	1.98%	1.70%

 

Unbounce is a landing page building Promised Land, offering a wide range of optimized templates,  an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, and tons of useful features like dynamic text replacement, lead form creation, pop-ups, and more. To connect Unbounce metrics to the bigger picture, you can integrate it with Google Analytics and tools alike.

HubSpot

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
42,463,250	13	793	0.36	57.14%	28.09%	0.20%	2.94%	1.62%	10.01%

 

HubSpot needs no introduction. The online marketing powerhouse is also a great landing page builder for affiliate marketing, featuring drag-and-drop templates, customizable landing pages, blogging tools, and more.

HubSpot is really a platform to cover your marketing from A to Z. Even the free plan includes tools for email marketing, forms, landing pages, blogs, and live chat.

Here’s your winning list of the best landing page builders for affiliate marketing success.

Referral Software for Affiliate Marketing

Referral software for affiliate marketing is used more by advertisers and affiliate networks – not so much by affiliates themselves – simplifying affiliate management and bringing it all together so you can get an overarching view of your affiliate marketing strategies.

Referral software is a broad term that can take many manifestations. It can help you run affiliate programs, track affiliate links, issue payouts, customize payout structures, onboard affiliates, manage cookies, and detect fraud.

Speaking of affiliate marketing fraud, here’s the quiz to measure your marketing fraud prevention proficiency.

ReferralCandy

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
577,216	2	71	0.63	41.43%	33.63%	1.84%	8.89%	7.44%	6.78%

 

ReferralCandy is an affiliate marketing tool that encourages users to invite referrals to your products, enabling word-of-mouth marketing for advertisers and an extra income channel for affiliates. The whole referral process is automated, from invitation to reward issuance.

Here’s your winning list of referral software for affiliate marketing success.

URL Shorteners for Affiliate Marketing

Short and descriptive URLs are not only pleasant to the eye but also informative, translating the value of the content. URL shorteners for affiliate marketing can beautify your URLs while adding relevant keywords so you can generate more clicks.

Bitly

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
1,349,988,183	1	4	0.09	41.25%	30.52%	0.42%	11.11%	16.27%	0.42%

 

With the main focus on shortening URLs, Bitly also allows creating branded URLs like “yourbrandname.link/xyz” and customizing URL slugs so your URLs look informative and professional. The service analyzes every shortened link, including clicks, location, and the clicker’s device.

Here’s your winning list of URL shorteners for affiliate marketing success.

Web Analytics Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Web analytics tools for affiliate marketing are your biggest source of knowledge, with the potential to unlock every bit of website traffic and customer activity data. From tracking traffic sources to analyzing user behavior to conducting A/B tests, you can use web analytics tools in every affiliate marketing avenue.

Google Marketing Platform

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Search Traffic	Paid Referral Traffic	Referral Traffic	Social Traffic	Mail Traffic
2,497,585	2	69	0.66	35.75%	27.84%	1.49%	34.08%	0.75%	0.10%

Uniting multiple proprietary marketing and analytic products, the Google Marketing Platform is equally helpful for affiliates and advertisers, with almost no limit to the amount and depth of data you can collect. Using Google Analytics, part of the Google Marketing Platform, you can unlock the full on-site journey and every touchpoint a particular customer has undergone on their path to conversion or before they bounced.

Here’s your winning list of web analytics tools for affiliate marketing success.

Get Your All-Encompassing Affiliate Marketing Toolkit at Phonexa

Phonexa offers affiliate marketers what they want – the comprehensive affiliate marketing software suite that unites heterogeneous campaigns under a single dashboard, closing the loop between clicks, calls, and revenue. Eight proprietary marketing solutions ensure every customer gets to the destination point while being tracked down the road.

Get your affiliate marketing software suite now, or schedule a free consultation to learn more about how Phonexa can supercharge your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

What affiliate marketing tools make up a winning marketing stack?

The winning set of tools for affiliate marketing depends on whether you are an affiliate, advertiser, or affiliate network.

As an affiliate, you may get access to affiliate marketing tracking tools used by your partner advertiser or affiliate network. Besides, an affiliate network may provide you with creatives – ads, landing pages, visuals, etc. – to boost your performance and secure more commissions.

Most of the time, though, it’s more reliable to take care of yourself than to rely on a third party.

Consider the following affiliate marketing tools to level up your game:

• Ad intelligence
• Web design tools
• Content marketing tools
• Paid media tools
• SEO tools
• AI tools
• WordPress marketing plugins
• Landing page builders
• Plagiarism and AI content checkers
• Referral marketing software
• URL shorteners
• Web analytics tools

You can find platforms that include most of the mentioned within their ecosystems. For example, Phonexa unites click tracking software Lynx with seven other performance marketing tools, covering your marketing through and through from a single intuitive dashboard.

What are spy tools for affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing spy tools allow you to track competitors’ affiliate marketing campaigns: where they advertise, the types of ads they use, and how successful a particular strategy is. That said, spy tools for affiliate marketing are not really spying but collecting publicly accessible information within the respective legal framework.

Among the best spy tools for affiliate marketing are Adplexity, SpyPush, AdPeriscope, Antrex, BigSpy, PowerAdspy, WhatRunsHere, SEMrush, Similarweb, and more. Even well-known tools like SEMrush and Similarweb can be used to analyze your competitors’ traffic and paid ad strategies.

Are free tools for affiliate marketing worth a shot?

Free affiliate marketing tools are worth trying if you want to get the hang of it without overcommitment. Many platforms provide a free version with a limited functionality of their tools. For example, the free version of Google Analytics is enough for most small and medium-size affiliates.

At the same time, there’s no doubt that paid tools for affiliate marketing provide the most valuable marketing insights. There’s a good chance that it will be worth paying a few dozen extra dollars to unlock some game-changing data.