30+ Best CPA Tracking Software for Affiliate Marketing [2024]

In the world of marketing, nothing should be done based on intuition or blindly. Almost everything has to be done based on data and solid reasoning. If you want something to be successful you can't just imagine users liking your marketing or your product. You actually need to analyze whether users are interested in the thing you're selling or not.

Marketers get this data and information that they need from software, such as tracking tools. For tracking website performance, we have Google Analytics, Google search console, and many other tools. For tracking sales, we have certain other tools implemented on our website or on 3rd party tools. For tracking our income, we check our invoicing tool. And for affiliate marketing, we have a special tracking software with which we can get valuable information and insight about our audience and how they are reacting to the products and services we are promoting.

In CPA affiliate marketing, which is a type of payment in the affiliate marketing world, we have specific tracking tools as well. In this article, we'll go through what CPA affiliate marketing is, how you can track the performance of CPA offers, and how you can choose the best software for your tracking purposes.

What Is CPA Affiliate Marketing

CPA or cost-per-action affiliate marketing refers to the payment model for affiliate marketing in which the merchant or advertiser pays the affiliate or publisher per action. This action can be anything as specified by the affiliate program. Sometimes this action can be installing an application, other times it could be signing up on a website, and some other times it could be depositing some money on the affiliate programs website.

affiliates usually promote these offers by telling people that they can get some freebies by signing up on a website, they can have fun by downloading a mobile game, or they can receive something they're looking for by downloading an application. So, it is not enough to send traffic to the program, you actually have to get the users you refer to complete an action in order for you to get paid a Commission.

Usually, the amount of affiliate programs and offers paid for promoting CPA offers is anywhere from $5 to $50 or even higher depending on the program and the type of product you are promoting.

What Is a CPA Tracking Software for Affiliate Marketing

A CPA tracking software tracks your conversions, clicks, referrals, actions of users you refer, and different events that are triggered by users' activity on the program's website or application.

A CPA tracking software allows you to see where the traffic you are sending to the affiliate program is from, which countries they reside in, who the audience is, and several other information. you can also see how far into the actions they continue, and when they stop taking actions and leave the website. This can be beneficial for understanding how users are reacting to the service you're promoting.

Without CPA tracking software, you can't get enough information about your marketing efforts, and almost everything you do would be based on guesses and intuition. That is not something you want to do, because that can both waste your time and money. Instead, you can use the CPA tracking software to understand your users' preferences better and promote something that they actually want. You might even be able to understand what the problem is if you are not converting. There are many other benefits to using CPA tracking software, which we will discuss in a later section.

What Makes CPA Affiliate Marketing and Tracking Special

Since we have many other affiliate marketing tracking tools and software, you might be thinking why CPA affiliate marketing software is a specific type, and what makes them so special.

As you know, CPA affiliate marketing involves asking users to complete an action that would differ in every single program. Therefore, there is no specific way to track them unless tracking software is specially designed and created to track actions instead of just clicks or views. CPA tracking software needs to understand users' behavior when it comes to the moment they need to take the action through the Commission.

Plus, in order to actually benefit financially from promoting CPA offers and make it worth your while, you would have to drive a lot of traffic to the affiliate program before actually getting one user to complete an action and earn you a Commission. Therefore, you need a lot of traffic that is essentially not earning you any money. Therefore, CPA affiliate marketing is very sensitive and requires lots of analysis of user behavior because simply asking users to click on a link is not enough. Of course, with all this high level of effort comes a high level of rewards as well. The payouts in these CPA programs and offers differ a lot, but one thing they all have in common is that they all payout on a more generous basis than other payment models like CPC.

Benefits of CPA Tracking Software

There are many different benefits to using CPA tracking software as mentioned before. These benefits make us convinced that we need to use this software to get valuable information and data on our user behavior to use them and optimize our marketing efforts. In this section, we will discuss the different benefits of using CPA tracking software for affiliate marketing.

Optimizing Marketing Performance

First and foremost, tracking software or CPA tracking software for affiliate marketing is really helpful to give us valuable insight so we can optimize our marketing performance. If our campaign isn't looking up, and we don't have any data to understand why it's not, CPA tracking software can really help us gain some insight into what is exactly happening on the user side. When we get the information we need, we can go on our marketing channels and platforms and optimize our efforts. For example, if we realize that some sort of creative or action is helping us receive more Commission and have more users complete actions specified by the affiliate program, we can use our marketing channels to do more of those techniques.

So it's important for us to actually have some sort of data to back up our guesses about our marketing efforts. It’s not OK to let a bad or wrong marketing strategy continue, so as soon as you realize through your CPA tracking software that your campaigns are not effective, you need to change them. Plus, after you optimize your marketing strategies or techniques, you need to continue observing the stats so you can make sure the techniques are working.

Increased Income

When you optimize your marketing performance, you might either do it in a bad way or a good way. If you do it in a bad way, you can always get some more insight and updates and get better results. But if you manage to optimize your marketing efforts in a good way, you can actually get more people to complete actions and earn you Commission. So, of course, that leads to you generating higher income for yourself.

Plus, the CPA tracking software you are using can give you lots of insight into your commission as well, and if their support team is good, they might even be able to give you some suggestions on how to increase your income through these programs.

Automating

By learning about what strategy works and what doesn't, you can set up automation rules. For example, through tracking software, you can understand when things are going well and when they're not. Therefore, you can set up automation rules that repeat or optimize certain marketing strategies, such as targeting or rate targeting, to do them more when the software is recognizing an increase in your commissions or actions completed by users. Therefore, you don't actually have to sit behind this screen all day. You can have the automation rules work for you and change the marketing strategies whenever there are good results from an action, and stop harmful actions whenever they are making your stats look bad.

This is especially great for marketing strategies that don't need much human involvement, such as retargeting. For example, when a certain user shows interest in a product or service, you can set up the automation to automatically retarget the same users again.

Targeting and Retargeting

Speaking of targeting and retargeting, with the analytics that CPA tracking software provides you with, you can learn more about your audience and target specific people you previously didn't know you could. Plus, with the same analytics, you can retarget users that have shown an interest in the service you are promoting. In that case, you can always be ahead of the game by understanding more about what your audience wants. For example, if you just start realizing that people from Mexico are interested in a certain service, you can start targeting and retargeting those users from that country. The same goes for every other demographic information about your users.

Next line of course, you can use the same exact functionality for automation, but if you don't want to automate your actions, you can still use the insight the CPA tracking software provides you with to retarget the users yourself.

Scalability

As mentioned before, there is always so much traffic coming to CPA affiliate programs, and most of them don't actually end up completing an action. Unfortunately, not every software and tool is capable of processing so much traffic and giving you a complete insight into all of them. CPA tracking software has the capability to scale marketing efforts, analyze everything and take you from a small community to a bigger community in no time. Therefore, with the ability that CPA tracking software gives you, you get to grow much faster and much bigger than you would without them. With the information they provide you with, you can learn to optimize certain campaigns, promote different brands, target certain audiences to grow your affiliate business, and get more actions completed across various platforms by users to ultimately increase your income.

Keep an Eye on Growth

It's always great to look back at your performance and see how you've grown so much. Using CPA affiliate tracking tools, you can always look back at your first days or the past month and previous months and understand what strategies helped you maximize your sales, learn from your past mistakes, and keep an eye on your growth in the long term. This is definitely helpful especially if you are trying to reach hundreds of dollars in commission. If you keep an eye on your performance over several months, not only will you gain lots of motivation from it, but you will also come up with ideas on how to increase your Commission more than the previous months.

Features of CPA Affiliate Tracking Software

Now that you know the benefits of CPA affiliate tracking software, let's talk about what you can look for in this software. There are many different features to this software, and each of them provides you with a different set of abilities. Of course, you only need very basic capabilities to begin with, and everything else is just extra information and data about your performance. In this section, we are going to check some of the most common features of CPA affiliate tracking software that you can expect from these tools.

Traffic Distribution

First and foremost, CPA affiliate tracking software gives you some information about traffic distribution. Traffic distribution basically refers to where your traffic is coming from, or your sources of traffic. Of course, when you are promoting an affiliate program through several marketing channels, you already know where the traffic is coming from. But you don't exactly know anything about the user demographics or what users they want. CPA tracking software gives you lots of useful information about traffic distribution across various countries, demographics, genders, etc.

When you know where your traffic is coming from you can decide better about your marketing techniques. For example, if you know that most of your audience consists of women, then you can optimize your performance to appeal to an audience of that type. Or if you know that your efforts from Instagram or Twitter are not effective, you can stop promoting through those channels and instead focus on channels that actually or a new Commission. So, first and foremost, expect to see a lot of information about your sources of traffic on CPA tracking software.

URL Shortener

URL shortening is one of the most important features of affiliate tracking software, not just CPA tracking software. Plus, URL shortening is one of the most needed features among different affiliates. Basically, URL shortening refers to creating a shorter version of your affiliate links. For example, an affiliate link may look like https://affiliate-program.com/product/category/jfyftydrsetsrdfyktygkgyfy/affiliate-ID. Having a link like this as your affiliate link with which you refer people can be a bit bothersome. It is too long, and people might actually see your affiliate ID there and remove it. Sometimes, some malware can also replace your affiliate ID with other affiliate IDs in order to get commissioned. However, if you use a URL shortener, you can simply prevent all of these troubles. Plus, your links will look shorter and easier to fit in messages.

Many affiliate trashing software gives you the ability to shorten your links so you can track them easily and paste them anywhere you want. Some of them even give you the ability to shorten your links with their own systems so you can track certain things other links cannot track.

Blacklisting Bots

Bots are such troublemakers in the world of affiliate marketing. They can add fraudulent traffic and fraudulent activities on your links and marketing channels. You can simply stop bots from changing your Commission or destroying your affiliate efforts by blacklisting them on your CPA tracking tool. This way, the tracking tool will simply ignore them and they will not interrupt your activities. This is very important because there is a lot of fraudulent traffic and spam activities involved in this niche. If you do not properly blacklist these bots from ever visiting your website or your marketing channels, you can send a lot of spam traffic to the affiliate program, and believe us when we say it, programs don't like it.

So in order to have a clean and proper affiliate marketing experience, you can use the blacklist feature in CPA tracking tools to blacklist bots and forever get rid of this trouble.

Page Targeting and Deep Linking

When you give the main page of a website or an application to a user, they usually might not see the need to take action. However, when you give specific pages or screens on a website or application where the certain action a user needs to take is visible and clear, you can increase your conversion rates. If users don't have to look for what they have to do, you will get your commissions faster.

Page targeting and deep linking specifically refer to creating a link to that specific page or the screen within a website or application where users can complete the action you want. So instead of sending users to the main page, they use CPA tracking software to create customized links to the specific pages you want users to visit. This way, not only will you increase your own conversion rates, but you will also save your time and your users' time. All you really have to do is paste the link you want to refer users to and receive your own specific link that redirects users to that page.

Integrations

CPA tracking software analytics might not be enough. In that case, many tracking tools actually give you the ability to integrate them with other tracking software and tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, etc. This way you can get analytics through different platforms, channels, and campaigns.

If these platforms are not enough, and you actually need to read more analytics from different various places, you might also be able to find the specific integrations for those analytics platforms on CPA tracking software as well. This software wants to give you all the information you need to optimize your marketing, so you can expect to get lots of integrations on most of these tools.

Custom Links

Of course, you can't just copy the link to the program you want to promote. You need to have your own custom ID or referral code attached to the links so you can benefit from the tracking software and actually have the program see your performance. Otherwise, it would just be a link shared with someone else. Most CPA tracking software allows you to create your own custom links for the products or services you are promoting. This way, they can properly track the users' performance on your links. Remember, not all links will give you all the tracking data you need. Every tracking software has its own way of receiving and analyzing data, so if you don't create your own custom links with the program, you might not be able to get the most out of them.

Keep in mind that these links are different from the custom links affiliate programs give you when you start working with them. These links are mainly for your own tracking purposes, so you can get more insight into the efforts that most affiliate programs will give you. The data that programs give you on their own website or on network websites are usually very limited and mostly includes solid numbers of the number of clicks or referrals you have. Not many of them will give you more detailed information about user data, so these custom links on CPA tracking software will really help you get more valuable information.

Conversion Tracking

The most important part of CPA tracking software is the part where they give you conversion tracking information. You want to know what channel of marketing you are driving more successfully. These tools will show you your conversion rates through different platforms and methods. For example, they will show you whether your latest campaign has converted many users, or whether your website has managed to get anybody to complete an action on the program's website. Conversion tracking can be shown with various graphs across various months and days. Without conversion tracking, there is always something lacking and you can't get enough information about what Marketing action is successful and what is not.

Payment Processing

Affiliate CPA tracking software is sometimes responsible for processing your payments. For example, the software can help get data about your conversions and commissions and send you your payments automatically without you having to look up how much money you've earned. They give you straight-up information about your income, they help send them to you, and they give you insight into how much money you're earning on different days of the month, after different campaigns, and your total financial growth over several months. So, if you need another platform besides the affiliate program to manage your affiliate finances, this CPA tracking software can be really helpful.

How to Choose a CPA Tracking Software

So now that you know what CPA affiliate tracking software or, its benefits, features, etc., you can get started by choosing one of them and tracking your affiliate performance. But before that, you can't actually use all of them. You need to choose one and stick to that one based on your own needs and the quality of the tracking software. So in this section, we are discussing the most important factors to keep in mind when choosing a CPA tracking software.

Pricing

First and foremost, since most of these tools, at least not the good ones, are not free, you really have to choose among them and only pay for the subscription for that specific one. Of course, you can just go with the free CPA tracking software, but they come with a fewer number of data they provide you. The pricing of these services matters a lot because it can relate to how much data they actually collect, and how much of it they show you. You will be receiving whatever you are paying for, so you might as well understand what you're paying for. In the table below, we are comparing some of the most prominent CPA tracking software along with their pricing so you can understand what to expect in this niche.

Interface

Nobody likes analytics pages with lots of different data scattered around the page without any actual hierarchy or features that improve readability. In the world of marketing, data comes and goes very quickly, so it's important to read the data and analyze it very quickly. Tracking software that doesn't have a simple interface for you to get all the data you need out of them quickly and easily with just the Press of a few buttons is not good at all. You need tracking software with a simple interface with which you can work easily. In fact, a child should be able to work with the same analytics tool and get the same data you can get as an adult. So it's important for the interface to be user-friendly, easy to read, simple to navigate, and smooth in transitions. The simpler the better.

Data Retention Time

Obviously, no analytics software keeps the data they collect from your activity forever. Most of them retain the data for about a year or two, and then they delete all of them because they cannot afford to populate their servers and keep the data that you might never need again. Of course, you can always download the data from your activity on a regular basis and avoid losing all your data from the past, but keep in mind that every CPA tracking tool has a specific period of data retention. In this period, you can see all the detailed analytics of your affiliate performance, but after that period, you might not be able to see it. So check how long the data retention time in different CPA tracking software is, and make a solid decision. In the table below, you can see some of the data retention time information we could retrieve from different CPA tracking software.

Support

A lot of people think that tracking tools don't need to provide you with any support, but that is wrong. Tracking software processes lots of information, so they are dealing with lots of life-changing decisions and impacts and different people's lives, including marketers. So if they are not responsive to your questions, so you can understand your analytics better, it's better to not approach that tracking tool. The ones we introduce in this article are definitely great considering this, but just in case you need to know more about the support team of the tracking software, a quick search on the Internet and research with peers could be helpful.

Tracking Limit

Every tracking software has a limit of clicks, actions, users, websites, offers, and various other things that they can track per month. For example, some tracking software might only support up to 1M clicks a month, while others have unlimited tracking. This is important because usually, it depends on how much money you are paying for the tracking software. In the table below, we are investigating the tracking limits of various CPA tracking software so you can make a better decision regarding the tool you end up choosing.

Conclusion

Tracking, data, analytics, and information are what keep marketing live and allow marketers to flourish, grow and sell more products to more people successfully. Without data, it always feels like you are making efforts, and trying different strategies, but with no actual data to back them up. CPA affiliate marketing is a sensitive type of affiliate marketing, and it's quite rewarding. Without special data regarding this sphere, you cannot have successful campaigns. So, use the tips mentioned in this article to choose the best CPA tracking software and get started with them right away.