Best tracking solution for independent affiliate programs?

**Azam.net** · 24-08-07

Just wondering if anybody had experience of independent affiliate tracking solutions. There's countless ones out there, but not many that have features we're looking for such as the ability to pay recurring lifetime commissions, forms of tracking other than through cookies, second-tier payments - and also provide great support.

Must have researched over a hundred and short-listed AllAffiliatePro.com, DirectTrack, AffiliateTracking.com, Affiliate Trail and a couple of others. Any opinions on these?

Any other robust, top quality scripts that people would recommend?

Cheers.

**morleymouse** · 25-08-07

hi Nadeem,

Can only advise on what i've used but for our in house were using iDev affiliate at the moment which off the shelf is about $400. We've had it heavily customised but the basic off the shelf bpackage should get you everything you need.

iDevAffiliate - Affiliate Tracking Software - Affiliate Program Software

Looks very american (and is) but supports okay, depends what you need from them really though. Advantage for us was that we host it so your never reliant on a 3rd party's server being up or down, getting slow etc.

Lifetime commissions - its mentioned, we dont use it, but Id imagine its easy to set up.

Non cookie tracking - has IP tracking as well, primerily cookies though

Second tier - yep

Got loads of nice little extras too, top quality both affiliate and merchant side.

**Azam.net** · 25-08-07

Thanks for your helpful response. iDevAffiliate is one of the ones on our short-list, so thanks for your input into that.

Your new interface looks fabulous. I can see that you've put quite a lot of effort into customising the script.

**scifind** · 27-08-07

ForbiddenPlanet uses the idev software, but the cheep $99 version.
All the files are encrypted (but not complicated task to decrypt, but there are a lot of files) the interface is passable, affiliate reporting is complete rubbish, merchant reporting is OK. But needs some serious work.

Biggest problem with it was that there was no deep linking!

I had looked at post affiliate pro for another project - looks good on paper, but not tried it personally. Then again it is only $99 and you get the unencrypted source so may be worth a punt.

**Azam.net** · 27-08-07

Thanks for that Brian.

Based on your comments I did some more investigation. In the demo on the iDevAffiliate website, the only statistics available to affiliates are as follows:

"Current Commissions - From Last Payout To Date
Transactions 1
Earnings To Date
$30.00 USD
View Payment History
Standard Earnings $20.00 USD
Tier Earnings $0.00 USD
Recurring Earnings $0.00 USD
Current Earnings $20.00 USD

Traffic Statistics
Visitors 507 Total Sales and Sales Ratio
These statistics do not include recurring or tier commissions.
Unique Visitors 357
Total Sales 2
Sales Ratio 0.394% "

I couldn't find where to see which URLs had resulted in sales or breakdown the statistics by a time-frame such as a week or month. Surely there must be more statistics available somewhere?

And sure there is no deep-linking option? No use to us if that is the case.

**morleymouse** · 27-08-07

Hi,

There are 2 deeplink options. One where you pre set the landing page and save that link, the system then reports on that link individually. So if you created a deeplink to product page 1, saved it, the system would tell you that link had had X clicks and resulted in X sales. So it will show you the conversion of that link.

The other otpion is the more standard way (this might have been one of our developments actually):

http://tracking.alpharooms.com/idevaffiliate.php?alpha_id=100&alpha_keyword=major ca&alpha_url=http://www.alpharooms.com/guide/spain/mallorca-(majorca)/default.aspx

Where you just define the landing page.

All in all one of the things I like about the system is everything is stored in a very comprehensive mysql database, every click, IP, user, keyword etc is logged. So if you need specific reporting tasks then you just need to get a php developer to write you a script to get the relevant data.

**scifind** · 27-08-07

Originally Posted by morleymouse

The other otpion is the more standard way (this might have been one of our developments actually):

alpharooms.com: Discount hotels and apartments worldwide. Specialists in Majorca and holiday resort destinations.

This is what I was getting at that was lacking.

Did you pay to access full source code or did you just work round the encryption?

**morleymouse** · 28-08-07

we hired the guy that did the encryption to change a few things, and he might have just happened to leave a lot of the files unencrypted afterwards so we can play with them

saves us having to ask people to tag ?r=affiliate onto all the links!

**Vrindavan** · 29-08-07

why i cannot subscribe this thread without doing a reply ?

**Azam.net** · 13-09-07

Once again thanks for the help offered.

We are down to three finalists for our particular needs: All Affiliate Pro, DirectTrack and iDevAffiliates.

Dan and Brian have kindly provided feedback above. Anybody else had experience of using one or other of these packages?

**morleymouse** · 14-09-07

Hi Nadeem,

If your at adtech try and get some time with Cindy from Digital River (they own DirectTrack) stand 122, only spoke with her o nthe phone but very keen and seems to know what shes talking about + lovely american accent!

Cheers