Increase efficiency and automate your business with Awin’s APIs

Automation is increasingly becoming an important part of online marketing. It streamlines processes and enables better use of available data to make informed decisions about your marketing strategies and campaigns. 

APIs are an essential tool for automation. With their help, you can speed up workflows, connect different systems directly, monitor programme performance, relationships and transactions. They offer a great way to scale your business more effectively.  
 
If you're not automating your business using APIs, you may be missing out on a great time-saving and efficiency tool that your competitors are already using. 

Learn more about how to simplify your daily tasks and diversify partnerships with API endpoints Awin offers. 

What is an API and what does it do? 

API is an acronym for application programming interface. It is mostly a set of commands, protocols and objects that developers can use to interact with an external system. You might wonder how that could be relevant to your business? 

To make it simple, our API data points give you access to data that you would normally access through our user interface. Instead of downloading reports or editing data manually, you can automate the export, import and use of our data in your own ecosystem. 

Making the best use of APIs 

APIs offer a wide range of automation opportunities. Depending on your internal system and the data available at Awin, they can be set up and used as desired to increase efficiency. Whether you want to control your publisher management via an internal monitoring tool, compare different marketing channels internally with the help of reporting or get an overview of generated transactions. With the help of our API endpoints, you can easily integrate and use the data provided by Awin in your own system. 

Below we have compiled some of the most common and useful examples of how APIs can be used by publishers and advertisers. 

Publishers 

• Promotion of brands and their offers: The use of tracking links is essential for most publishers. However, creating them can take a lot of time, whether they are deep links, product links or short links. With the link builder API, you can create Awin tracking links in bulk based on the target URL and advertiser ID. In addition, with our latest update, you can generate short links via the API and check your daily remaining allowance.  
  Brand new is Awin’s offers API, which enables publishers to retrieve details of promotions and voucher codes from advertisers. This allows you to use the API to get data on active, upcoming and expiring offers and voucher codes, letting you promote only existing offers on your website. 
• Tracking event updates: By definition not really an API, yet very similar in functionality, transaction notification provides our publishers with a real-time reporting function that ensures that every time a transaction is generated, a notification is sent to the publisher's system with all the relevant details about that transaction. In this way, campaigns can be optimised and potential tracking problems can be solved quicker. Transaction notifications are particularly popular with loyalty publishers, who can inform their users in real time about successfully collected points or cashback.  
• Reporting and analytics: To create customised analytics and reporting you can use the various API endpoints we offer. Information on clicks, sales, commissions, shopping cart, partnerships and status can be easily accessed via the API. Furthermore, the advertiser can share additional information about products in the basket as well as custom parameters, which allows you to enrich your reporting with additional data and gain further insights.

Useful endpoints would be 

• Aggregated report: provides aggregated reports for the advertisers you work with 
• Transaction list: provides a list of your individual transactions  
• Commission groups: provides information about the commissions you get from a certain programme 

Advertisers 

• Transactions management: Every affiliate manager knows how time-consuming the validation of sales can be. However, with the help of the Transaction Validation API, you can link the transactions generated via Awin with your internal validation system, and process sales automatically. This eliminates the need to manually download Excel spreadsheets, edit them and upload them again. As soon as your internal system knows which transactions can be confirmed, rejected or amended, the information can be sent to Awin via the API and applied accordingly. This will save you time, minimise errors and shorten processing times, which in turn has a positive effect on the attractiveness of your programme. 
• Reporting and insights: Creating internal reports, analysing performance and comparing it with other marketing channels and departments is one of the daily tasks in affiliate marketing. With the API endpoints for reporting data, you can easily retrieve information on sales, commissions, turnover, status, and publishers to create your own analyses, compare with your other marketing channels and evaluate campaigns. In addition, you can use the data for publisher monitoring and development. 

Useful endpoints would be: 

• Aggregated reports: provides aggregated reports for the publishers you work with 
• Transactions: provides a list of your individual transactions 
• Publishers: provides a list of publishers you have an active relationship with 

What now? 

As the digital environment becomes faster and more complex, automation and therefore APIs are the future for successful marketers. If you're already using APIs, make sure you're using our newest endpoints and enhancements. If not, discuss with your development team how you can use the accessible data to reduce your manual effort and increase automation so you have more time to grow your business. 

• Access and Authentication: API access is secured by an industry standard authentication. You can find detailed instructions here. 
• Documentation: To ensure a seamless integration, you should take a look at the developer documentation of our Advertiser API and Publisher API in our Wiki. 

Awin is constantly evolving and views APIs as a great tool for automation and a technology enabler that diversifies partnerships and drives growth. If you would like to keep up to date with our latest product developments, please subscribe to our Market Insights.