When it comes to affiliate marketing, affiliate software is a definite necessity, for if you are using the affiliate services correctly there will be far too many activities for you to successfully track by hand.

The Rise of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has been steadily gaining in popularity; especially over the last ten years. In short, Affiliate Marketing can be defined as a marketing practice that rewards their affiliates (associated companies or websites) for every visitor and/or customer that is referred to their site by the affiliate’s marketing techniques.

Using one website to drive traffic to another is actually an elegant solution to the online marketing problem. It is a simple and inexpensive way to gain market shares while simultaneously increasing product or brand name visibility. If an affiliate site is proactive, it can be a quite lucrative way of bringing in extra money while also increasing your own market share.

While the basic concept is fairly simple to understand (you get people to click on an ad or go to a specific website and you get rewarded for it) the reality of it has grown far more complex than most individuals or individual businesses can handle on their own. To what once consisted of just the merchant and the affiliate has now been added more levels of players such as management agencies, specialized third party vendors and super-affiliates, which is where the importance of Affiliate Software comes into play.

What is Affiliate Software?

If you are using performance based online marketing (such as cost per lead or cost per action) then you will understand just how complicated it is to keep track of all of your affiliate marketing activities. Affiliate software consists of programs that have been written specifically to take the headaches out of this necessary activity by keeping track of it all for you. After all, you don’t think that your affiliate network is tracking everything by hand do you? Why should you? You can streamline all of your affiliate marketing activities by taking advantage of what affiliate software has to offer.

While there are many do-it-yourself affiliate software programs available to choose from, even these can quickly become complicated if you are dealing with multiple affiliates, or especially if you are a business that has created your own affiliate network and want to manage your own affiliate relationships to your various products, services and clients as well as tracking the conversions on their sites.

If you have a high density of affiliate marketing activities to keep track of, you might want to consider an affiliate software tracking service such as Ad Serving Solutions (http://www.adservingsolutions.com/) that can plug all of your information into their own intricate software databases and provide you with regular detailed reports as to the status of all your affiliate marketing activities. The benefits of headache free tracking will far outweigh the cost of the service and free up your time and energy for more important things, like growing your business even further.