Making The Affiliate Software Switch

I have been in the affiliate space for sometime now and have tried a couple of platforms. After my trials and tribulations, I finally discovered the platform that was a perfect fit for the needs of my company. When I switched affiliate systems I had a number of clients contact me and ask me why I switched. This brought me to writing this article, hoping to shed light on the things to look for when choosing a platform.

We switched affiliate systems because we were experiencing frequent downtime and Internet attacks, unreliable tracking, and sudden spontaneous overcharge fees every month. Getting a hold of technical assistance is another story; when we did get an answer back it took ages to get the situation resolved. In the robust and fast paced affiliate marketing world, a minute is way too long. With all these issues we decided to look for another platform.

I have been using LinkTrust for over six (6) months and so far I am very content with the service and technology. I hope my assessment of LinkTrust will assist you in your decision making process for an affiliate tracking and lead management system.

The most important features that we sought out in our new choice of software were ease of campaign management, lead generation capabilities and reliability. Campaign management is very important for our affiliate managers. All our affiliates demand individualized attention and it is our affiliate managers’ job to make the affiliates jobs easier. With LinkTrust our affiliate managers can send offers with creative, links, subject and from lines in a click of a button. Important to note, is that Blinkads is very involved in the lead generation sector. We often create our own pages and must distribute our data to different vendors while taking into consideration various lead qualifications. LinkTrust allows us to do this in real-time. It is by far the best I have ever seen or experienced.

While no system is perfect, particularly because each affiliate network finds that they have different priorities and needs, we found that the available features in LinkTrust far outweighed the cons.

Some of the pros we found in LinkTrust include:

• User Friendly Interface: Forget about complex tabulated navigation. LinkTrust offers a very intuitive interface that allows campaign managers to get the job done. A nifty jump menu allows you to switch to different campaigns without having to backtrack, adding up too much saved valuable time.

• Improved Speed: Tracking and internal pages on the administrative and affiliate interfaces load much quicker than other systems. Additionally, because of the improved response time, tracking is much more accurate. Delays in response time can cause a pixel not to fire and show decreased stats. Page timeouts are much less frequent in LinkTrust.

• Reliable Servers: Throughout our time with LinkTrust, we have experienced barely any downtime despite regular updates throughout the system. Any downtime which did occur was minimal and did not last more than five (5) minutes.

• Personalized Support: LinkTrust’s staff is attentive to the needs of its clients. You can count on individual attention and support without waiting for the time consuming and inefficient ticket system which has dehumanized the industry. Instead of getting singular answers with no real solutions, you can expect the staff to work with you in getting your needs taken care of.

• Lead Generation Tools: LinkTrust’s lead generation tools have, by far, surpassed any other dominating technology. The software allows you to sell leads to multiple buyers simultaneously while fully tracking and managing the data. As an additional bonus, to further monetize your data, you can send multiple email auto responders to consumers. This is an excellent feature to help a business build out their properties.

In addition to the features, we were happy to see that LinkTrust provided flat fees for using their system. This means no overage charges for impressions or clicks and no fees for additional features. You get an all-in-one package without running into surprise fees when you try to add on additional features.

This may sound too good to be true for most affiliate networks, so we will include a few draw backs to the system. These are quite minimal in comparison to the rich features and overall experience. Here are some of the areas which we found need the most improvement.

• International traffic: You can only specify one offer for all geo-filtered international traffic to go to, on a campaign by campaign basis. We would prefer to specify an offer for each country filtered

• Fraud detector: LinkTrust does not have a fraud meter; however this is making us take more steps to approve an affiliate. However, they are working on a Certified Affiliates system which will be incorporated into the system. Our business benefits from this thorough process in the long term.

• Subid reporting: It isn’t as easy or fast to pull a single consolidated report with all campaigns and their respective subid traffic. You are limited to viewing subid traffic on a campaign by campaign basis.

The good news is that most of these features are going to be included or updated in the next release. We expect that most of our cons will be rectified by the end of the year with the flurry of new upgrades to the software.

With all of these positive factors, we feel that LinkTrust has become a serious competitor to other dominating affiliate network systems on the market today.