The Best Affiliate Marketing Tools (Free and Paid)

Introduction

Being a successful in affiliate marketing is about working smart, not just working hard.

Learning to be more efficient and more effective in the day-to-day running of your business can pay dividends.

To help you become the super affiliate you know you can be, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best affiliate marketing tools that will help you monetize faster, and pave the way to greater success!

These tools will help you at every step of your journey, from planning your campaign through to the optimization process, while being able to track your performance like a pro!

In a business where time equals money, it’s important to know how to save on both with these awesome affiliate tools.

Here’s what does it mean to be more efficient and effective in affiliate marketing:

“Efficiency is doing things right and effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker, the father of modern management

That’s easy to say, but in reality, this is easier said than done.

The tools you’ll find below will show you how to achieve this optimal performance in your own work, so you’ll be able to make brass with annoyingly cool class!

Our hope?

That you’ll get some great insights and boost your ROI by using these awesome tools for affiliate marketers!

Let’s put this in perspective for a moment.

If we can save you just 20 seconds per one hour of your work, this will basically mean that we’re gonna help you save an extra day in your work life per, just by working smarter!

You then get to enjoy all the amazing revenues this industry can provide you with!

That’s something to think about, right?

This was with only 20 seconds. Now imagine what you could do with your time if you managed to save a whole minute per working hour!

But first things first, there are two important objectives you should tackle right away:

You need people to sell to (traffic sources) and you need something to sell (the offers).

Let’s review the top affiliate marketing tools!

List of the Best Affiliate Marketing Tools

Knowing your competition is at the heart of any good affiliate marketing strategy.

Identifying industry trends and gaining insight about competitor campaigns, along with top-performing creatives and traffic sources, is essential if you want to make sure you can hit the ground running.

Ad Spy Tools

Ad spy tools are a huge advantage nowadays when compared to the beginning of online advertising, when the only way to know what your competitors were doing was to visit the website where affiliates would promote their offers and just check what appears.

Spy tools come in handy in case you don’t know much about designing creatives.

Thanks to these affiliate marketing tools, you can now keep up with whole lotta things that’ll simply blow your mind.

You’ll be able to know which offers, pre-landers, and banners your competitors are using and even be able to download them like a super pro!

Read more about Ad Spy Tools:

• Best Ad Spy Tools for Affiliate Marketing
• Best Facebook Ads Spy Tools
• Best TikTok Ads Spy Tools
• Best Competitive Intelligence Tools

With spy tools and competitive intelligence tools, you can analyze the stats and results of everything that your rivals are doing – from the carrier where the ad is running, to the conversion rate for a given GEO.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, you can also compare the performance of networks, find the best offers, and pretty much gather all the info you need to get that competitive advantage that’ll separate you from the slow-moving herd.

So, after all the hype created around these game-changing tools, here’s what we’re specifically talking about:

If mobile, desktop, e-commerce, native or push ads are high on your list, look no further that AdPlexity. This platform makes finding profitable campaigns a piece of cake and with support for multiple traffic sources, it’s an essential tool for the serious affiliate marketer.

SpyPush is the first-ever tool to spy on push notification ads that helps you dig in your competition’s funnels. Learn what works for them by accessing a database of over 200 000 ads in more than 140 countries.

SpyOver is very similar to AdPlexity, but it focuses on native ads only.

Read more about Ad Spy Tools:

• Best Ad Spy Tools for Affiliate Marketing
• Best Facebook Ads Spy Tools
• Best TikTok Ads Spy Tools
• Best Competitive Intelligence Tools

Tracking Tools

If you’re looking to optimize your ROI and keep your eCPC as low as possible, you’ll want to track your campaigns with a professional affiliate tracker.

It’s essential for keeping an eye on your balance. You see, a lot of beginners don’t pay regular attention to their stats and lose track of their ROI.

And if you don’t know where you’re standing, how can you get where you wanna be? You’ve gotta track everything and analyze the results.

How are you supposed to know whether or not your campaign is converting if you don’t have solid proof to look at?

Write every little shift, alteration, tweak and change!

It may be faster to ignore the tracking part, but it’s also a very quick way to lose money on advertising.

Now, when it comes to analyzing numbers, the storyline changes. Media buying isn’t just splitting profitable and non-profitable campaigns. You’ll actually need to retrieve the information through good tracking tools!

Below, we’re sharing the market leader in tracking tools, along with some alternative sites of equally good quality for new affiliates or those with medium to low volume campaigns.

It’s worth mentioning that not only are these tools worth their weight in gold, but as an affiliate marketer, you really can’t afford to run traffic sources without having at least a basic tracking solution in place.

So, which ones should you pick?

Pretty much the market leader in tracking software, Voluum is a powerful tool for marketers.Track ads for all your campaigns and manage your team all form one place at a starting price of $44!

RedTrack is an easy-to-use ad tracker allows you to keep an eye on the impressions, clicks and conversions of your campaigns. Packed with features and regularly updated, it costs just $28/mo for a starter package and up to $939/mo for an enterprise plan.

With 100,000 free events per month, BeMob is an excellent tool for smaller volume affiliates who are looking for a low-cost way to track their campaigns. Their sixth sense tech can analyze your advertising campaigns for audience optimization and paid plans start from $25/mo to $499/mo.

Binom is a self-hosted tracking solution with blistering speeds that gives you full control over your campaign data. It has a 14-day free trial and the license fee is only $69/mo.

If you’re looking to step up your game with advanced tracking tools, AdsBridge is a perfect choice. The investment is gonna be something between $25 and $595 per month, depending on the package.

ThriveTracker is designed for mobile and web media buyers and performance marketers, who are looking for an agile, real-time campaign management tool. Plans between $79 and $799.

Hosting

As with domain registrars, when hunting for a hosting company, you really want to go with the top dogs.

The companies cited below have proven to be reliable for marketers and affiliates, and all have excellent support in a combo with a variety of features that will transform the hosting of your sites into a breeze.

Make sure to do your research to see which features are most suitable to your strategy. There’s no need to obsess too much on that tho – you’ll be in safe hands with any of the hosting companies listed below.

Consistently found at the top of many “Best hosting” lists, Bluehost is a service with a well-earned reputation. If you need reliable and affordable website hosting for your landing pages or WordPress sites, they’re the ticket! Bluehost also offers a free domain for those who choose their hosting services. Check our Bluehost review and see by yourself!

SiteGround is another great solution for expert hosting. It’s secure, affordable and packed with features that make it ideal for affiliate marketers. We found the WordPress and Joomla staging on the GoGeek plans to work particularly well and is perfect for creating a test environment for your campaigns.

Another big hitter in the web hosting space, HostGator offer packages from just $2.75/mo and you can choose yours with cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting or a dedicated server.

If you’re in the market for dedicated WordPress hosting, look no further than WPX. Fast, secure and with free built-in support, you’re sure to have everything you need to get your site up and running in seconds.

Domain Registration

Setting yourself up with a domain may sound simple, but it’s always a better idea to go through a reputable domain registrar, rather than using the hosting company.

A reliable domain registrar can save you fees in the long-term especially if you ever need to transfer your domain name, plus many offer additional services like private whois protection, customer support, ICANN Accreditation and SSL certification.

It’s usually better to go with a company that specializes in this area and has been around for a long time, rather than one that simply offers domain registration as a bolt-on service and-or doesn’t have a long track record.

Namecheap is one of the most reputable and long-standing domain registrars with discounted domains starting from just $0.98. They give free WhoisGuard on many new domains and have additional features such as trusted SSL certificates and private email support.

VPN Services

Having access to a VPN is essential for any serious affiliate.

Not only will it keep your information private in public spaces, such as cafes or while on the move, but you’ll also be able to check how your landing pages appear to people in various global locations.

Plus, you’ll benefit from the security, freedom and privacy that a VPN is all about.

There’s been an influx of VPN providers on the market in recent years, all of which offer fantastic services at a reasonable price.

To spare you the headache of researching, we’ve shortlisted the most trustworthy, so read up and if you find a match – register your account!

You’ll be glad you did.

With 5200 servers in 62 countries and apps for all operating systems and devices, NordVPN has established itself as one of the most secure and reliable services you can buy. Plans start from just $2.99/mo and allow you to secure up to 6 devices at the same time.

If you just want a simple plug-and-play VPN service, then take a look at SaferVPN. It’s easy to use from all your devices with plans starting at $2.29/mo.

Designed to be a one-size-fits-all solution, Ivacy gives you complete freedom over however you choose to use the web. Prices start from $2.35/mo.

Great speeds and proprietary technology to defeat VPN blocking, makes VyprVPN the perfect choice for unrestricted internet access. Plans start from $5/mo.

Another popular favorite VPN service with high speeds and offshore privacy protection. ExpressVPN plans start from $8.32/my and you can buy anonymously with a preferred payment method.

Simple, automated and customizable, CyberGhost is a serious contender in the VPN space. Plans start from $2.5/mo.

Landing Page & Design Tools

If you’re a programmer and know all about coding, we recommend you stop reading this paragraph, as you’ll probably despise the tools we’re about to drop.

In case you’re a common mortal like the rest of us, there are tools that’ll do all the work of creating your pre-lander, banner and whatever creative you’ll need for your campaigns.

The most important point here is that, once you find a hit offer, you’ll need to “polish” it. It might look perfect and you might believe it will convert for every user who’s gonna see it, after all – it’s your baby, right? But the truth is – good is not good enough. You’ve gotta engage the user and create that extra step to make it irresistible to them so they click on the subscription button.

Having said that, you’re gonna need to build your own creatives adapted to your offer and even to the websites, where you’ll be advertising. The more the user sees a pattern, the more trust they build for your product.

Being into programming and coding is always be the best option in the long run. Learning PHP, Javascript, CSS and HTML will make you a master when it comes to creatives.

However, if you don’t have the time/interest/budget for all of this, there are still some tools to save you time and help with perfect your product pitch.

Nope, we’re not saying you can skip the design part. We’re saying there are plenty of landing page tools that will make the process of creating high-converting LPs easy as a piece of cake!

You don’t have to be a coding whizz to get started, so it’s a win-win situation:

Thrive Architect: If you use WordPress to create landing pages, you’re gonna love this visual page builder from Thrive. A huge time saver and the simplest way to get beautifully designed, high-converting landing pages without the need for any coding.

Landingi is a fantastic landing page tool for non-programmers that automates key tasks and analyzes and optimizes your pages. Well worth the look!

Check our exclusive Landingi coupon, and read our Landing Review.

Great for solo or team projects, Instapage will help you to maximize your conversions and it comes with neat tools to optimize and share your pages. Depending on the package, it will cost you anywhere between $29 and $127 per month.

With over 100 conversion-focused templates and a sweet page builder, Unbounce remains a popular choice for affiliates priced between $49 and $199/mo.

More than a landing page design tool, Wishpond enables you to create funnels that include contests & promotions and are ideal when running social and email campaigns.

Leadpages is a great choice for lead gen campaigns and a good all-rounder. The amount to invest is gonna be something between $25 and $199 per month, depending on the package.

Cloaking Tools

In the thrilling world of digital marketing, one must maintain an air of mystery to stay ahead of the game. Picture this: you craft the perfect landing page, only for ultra-strict traffic networks to block it in a heartbeat. Or, heaven forbid, a sneaky competitor uncovers your secrets, replicating them for their own nefarious purposes.

Worry not, curious marketers, for the solution lies in concealing your links and landing pages from these prying eyes through cloaking tools. This cunning strategy can also be your saving grace in achieving a greater victory against pesky bots, by directing them to a decoy while your true masterpiece remains hidden.

Here is a cloaking tool that you must give a try:

If finding a powerful yet simple cloaking tool is your goal, Cloaking House should be your first choice. It offers the perfect blend of features and functionality that you need for supercharged performance. You can get setup in as little as two minutes. Plans start at an affordable fee of $20 per month with no click limits.

Read our Cloaking House review here.

Email Marketing

For quality email campaigns, what you’ll need is a robust solution that guarantees optimal delivery rates.

In the list below we’ve covered everything – from capturing leads to sending and managing your campaigns. The picks we’ve selected are packed with features such as autoresponders, automation and workflow tools that will make your life much easier.

You’ll probably also want to segment your lists and split-test your subject lines. Say no more!, You’ll find that all recommended solutions below are more than adequate and can help you set up professional-looking campaigns, whether you have a list of 1,000 or 100,000 subscribers.

To capture more leads from your WordPress site, you need ThriveLeads in your life asap. It’s more than your average leadgen plugin – it will help you increase your opt-ins and conversions, and can spit-test variations of the form with its A/B testing engine.

With excellent mobile-optimized templates and an intuitive interface, Constant Contact is an all-in-one solution to send and manage your email campaigns, taking your email marketing to the next level.

Campaign Optimization

Once your campaign has been running for a while, you’re gonna want to make sure it’s optimized for the best results.

Unprofitable campaigns can (sometimes) be turned around, and a profitable campaign can always be made better. Split-testing is the heart and soul of any affiliate marketing success.

The following tool can help you with automatic optimization for conversions across multiple campaigns so that you can focus on the winners for your offers.

TheOptimizer gives you the ability to automate and optimize your native, pop redirect and push traffic with its hassle-free campaign management software.

They have 3 versions:

• TheOptimizer Mobile
• TheOptimizer Native
• TheOptimizer Adult

The best in the business!

Traffic Sources Tools

Sometimes you wanna be able to manage multiple traffic sources from a single platform.

Or, you might want a tool that can facilitate the creation and optimization of your campaigns, to save you time across multiple offers.

This can help by linking together various accounts from paid traffic sources, helping you visualize and optimize your ad performance in a jiffy.

If you regularly create Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads campaigns, you’ll find this tool to be a real timesaver. You’ll be able to create campaigns and manage them all in one place, leaving more time to enjoy your profits.

SEO Tools

If you’re looking to get more organic traffic to your landing pages and wanna know what the competition is up to, then these tools are for you.

With these tools at your disposal, you’ll be able to analyze and track competitor campaigns and identify top-performing keywords in your niche, relative to the competition.

Make sure you give your landing pages a thorough SEO and content audit and then work through the list of recommendations to get your pages up to scratch.

You’ll be racing ahead of the competition!

If you’re looking to track the performance of your competitors’ organic search campaigns, then SEMRush is a tool you need in your stack. For detailed analytics on your competitors including SEO, Paid Traffic, Social Media, Content & PR it’s just what the doctor ordered and the reporting and layout is a dream to work with. Check them out now!

Related: SEMrush Review

As both an SEO and competitor research tool, Ahrefs is well respected in the industry. Use it to get a complete overview of your competition’s search marketing campaigns, whether that’s organic or paid channels. It’s well-maintained and regularly updated, making it one of the most feature-rich tools out there.

This fully-featured website crawler is a must-have if you want to drill down into the technical side of your competitors’ on-page SEO. In addition, you can use it to carry out comprehensive technical audits on your own sites to make sure there are no technical errors that could cost you visitors.

Keyword Research

If you’re working with any type of paid search to promote your offers, you’ll first need to carry out keyword research.

This is what will separate your target audience from the traffic you don’t want.

Identifying profitable keywords in your niche can and will drive down costs by finding keywords that are within your competitive reach.

Which ones, you ask?

The ones who are looking for your product!

The ones who are gonna make you $$$!

You’ll want to have an awesome keyword research tool so you can understand what people usually search on the web; that also happens to be similar to what you’re selling.

Keyword research tools will be one of your biggest allies by helping you target your campaigns and promote them to the right customers.

In addition, don’t limit yourself to one tool as you’ll find the results will vary from one solution to another.

There’s also a difference between keywords for SEO and those for paid search campaigns. Make sure you use the right tool for the job of tailoring keywords to your traffic source.

Here are some of the best choices in the market:

KWfinder makes you finding long-tail keywords easy as 1+1. Use it to identify keywords with low SEO difficulty to increase the flow of converting visitors to your landing pages.

This free keyword tool is owned by Neil Patel. It’s a great way to get new suggestions for keyword ideas for both SEO and PPC projects.

The mac daddy of keyword tools, Google Keyword Planner should be your go to tool for Google Ads campaigns. Look for high monthly searches with low competition in an affordable bid range when planning your campaigns. Remember also to choose buying keywords, as you want traffic that converts as well as bringing visitors to your site.

Search over 28 million Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords for words that have relationships to the primary keyword in your campaigns. These words are great for anchor text links and for discovering new keyword opportunities that are closely related to the ones you primarily want to rank for.

Learn more: Affiliate Marketing Glossary of Terms

Bonus Tools

If you made it till here, we bet you’re hungry for more tools?

That’s why we’ve prepared a few bonus picks (to make you happy!).

They’ll hopefully turn you into a more rounded marketer, as well as help you to spot new opportunities when promoting your offers.

Networking: Networking is crucial for quality business development. We need other people to buy from us, sell to us, and break through with us. Of course, to get people to be excited to do all these things for and with us, we must give something of in return. So go out there and meet all the interesting prospects you can. At the end of the day, the benefits of working with others go well beyond the immediate sales figures.

Affiliate Marketing Forums: You’ve also got great forums where you can learn all there is to know! This is a way for you to learn from others players’ mistakes instead of making your own (costly and time-consuming, don’t you think?). Wondering which affiliate marketing forums you should explore? Check the top ones!

• STM – English speakers
• affLIFT – English speakers
• AffiliateFix – English speakers
• Forobeta – Spanish speakers

The superstar forums are not free. Yes it will cost you to register, but trust us – your long-term ROI will be worth more than those pennies.

Conferences and Trade Shows: We hear many people argue that conferences aren’t worth it. We disagree. You see, the trick is to know how to take full advantage of the potential of any event!

These 5 tips will help you make the most of conferences and trade shows:

1. Have a goal: why are you going there, what do you want to achieve, etc.
2. Pre-arrange meetings: trust us – this is a must. Don’t schedule meetings in the morning since the probability of missing them is higher!
3. Work on your introduction. The first impression is all that counts!
4. Attend the parties and ALWAYS give those cool business cards!
5. Quality is better than quantity: you’re not trying to meet everyone. Time is money, you feel us? Making 5 really good friends is better than making 100 scattered acquaintances that you’ll never meet or connect with again!

Account Managers: Account Managers are a crucial aspect of affiliate marketing.

You can almost see these guys as tools for marketers; tools that help you get awesome advice, optimize with knowledge, and recognize mistakes in order to maximize profits!

They are your most priceless source of info, guaranteed to give you the latest updates on the market.

Therefore, when asking them to show you the hottest campaigns to promote or which GEO to target, you should always be as specific as humanly possible.

Don’t go about asking them for “their best campaigns.” They hate that! Instead, ask about their “top 3 dating campaigns in the UK based on EPC”. Help them help you. Easy!

Google Sheets or Excel: Hey, wait. Did you think we were never getting to Excel?

Believe us when we tell you the following jaw-dropping, life-changing truth: Excel might as well be all you need to dig deep in your data.

Information is power and this power comes from doing serious continuous analysis for which Excel is perfect:

• Easy to analyze data
• Good at summarizing in different ways
• Building a pivot table report is a piece of cake compared to the process of building the same report manually. Boring, indeed!

Through the use of the pivot tables, you can perform a successful A/B testing and split-test offers. It basically helps you to create cross-tabulations of ‘keywords’ against all the others.

For example: ‘operators’, ‘creatives’, ‘countries’, etc. Input these parameters into the sub-ids of your target URLs.

All this precious info will then be processed through pivot tables in order to optimize your campaigns.

Conclusion

In conclusion, today’s affiliate marketing industry is busier and much richer in terms of resources to work with. It’s also much more competitive.

Where are we going with this?

The more you know about your niche and the better prepared you are, the more you’ll benefit from that tasty extra-mile advantage.

Remember: being smart today means saving money tomorrow!

Equipped with the various tools we shared above, you’re sure to make it rain like a real affiliate pro! If you think we missed anything important, don’t be shy and reach out! We wanna hear from you so shoot all the questions you have in the comments below!

Also, remember to take quality time out – it can never be all work and no play!

Loved this awesome huge list of affiliate marketing tools?

Then tell us what are your favorite tools in the comments below!