The best WordPress affiliate plugins
Written by Emma Sharp on 6 minute read
When done right, affiliate marketing can be highly lucrative. However, to be successful you need the right set of tools. This is where plugins come in.
If you’re thinking about launching an affiliate marketing program on WordPress, you’ll want to use the most effective plugins on the market to take your program to the next level and boost your sales.
What is an affiliate marketing plugin?
A plugin is a software add-on that’s installed on a program to enhance its capabilities. An affiliate marketing plugin provides you with the unique tools you need to build a strong affiliate campaign and aid growth.
If you use a content management system like WordPress, an affiliate plugin can be easily integrated. Equally, if you run an online store with an affiliate marketing program and use WooCommerce built into WordPress, a WooCommerce affiliate plugin will allow you to manage your partnerships and campaigns.
At the most basic level, as a publisher, an affiliate marketing plugin will help you:
- Add affiliate links to your posts and get more clicks
- Manage affiliate links in your WordPress dashboard
- Track the performance of your campaigns
- Build shareable referral links
Choosing the right affiliate marketing plugin
With so many WordPress plugins available, picking the right one for your business can be confusing. Do your research, considering your goals, strategy and price range. Look at the features included. Is there a particular function you need? Are you after a solution that provides in-depth support for beginners? Getting it right will make a monumental difference in the long run.
To help you make an informed choice, we’ve narrowed it down and picked some of our favorites.
Google Analytics is a must-have technology for affiliate marketers as it enables you to track your traffic, conversions and clicks. Offering a seamless integration, MonsterInsights is a powerful, user-friendly Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that presents a host of popular features, including universal tracking, real-time stats, ecommerce reports, custom dimensions and the Google Analytics Dashboard.
2. Pretty Links
Another excellent affiliate link management plugin for WordPress is Pretty Links. Trusted by over 200,000 websites, the platform makes managing your social links, URL redirects, affiliate links and QR codes much easier – just upload and activate the plugin and create links using your website instantly.
Access detailed link reports in your WordPress admin dashboard, which allows you to see which links are performing best, plus a range of highly functional features, including automatically linking keywords to a specific URL.
Although ThirstyAffiliates was built with WordPress bloggers in mind, it’s a great option for any affiliate marketers using WordPress to manage affiliate links. The plugin has been downloaded over 400,000 times by WordPress sites worldwide.
Just some of the benefits of ThirstyAffiliates include seamless management of your affiliate links in one central location (the WordPress dashboard), "link cloaking," which disguises an affiliate link URL to make it shorter, and an automatic 404 checker to ensure you have no broken links or errors.
4. AdSanity
AdSanity is an ad management plugin that has proved to be incredibly useful for publishers. This plugin can be used to help you create and manage affiliate ads on your WordPress site with ease.
Make use of shortcodes, template tags and widgets and gain insight with easy Google Analytics integration, plus add even more features as you go from AdSanity’s extensive suite of add-ons. AdSanity also supports HTML5 ads and ad block detection, all from one user-friendly, lightweight platform that sits right in your WordPress dashboard.
5. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce
If you’re an advertiser looking for a 5-star rated ecommerce plugin, try ReferralCandy. Free to download, but with a range of paid plans to explore, it allows you to automate customer referral campaigns for your WooCommerce store. Customer referral programs encourage existing customers to refer new customers by incentivizing the process. That means that, should a customer refer the product to someone else and they make a purchase, the referrer will be rewarded with a discount, gift, or otherwise. This differs from affiliate programs – affiliate partners don’t necessarily have to be customers – but many publishers explore both avenues. ReferralCandy is designed to make creating referral programs easy and efficient. There’s live chat support, unlimited affiliates and an easy-to-use dashboard and data reporting features.
Awin’s tools
As a global affiliate network, Awin comes equipped with the tools needed to help advertisers and publishers connect and create long-lasting, profitable partnerships.
Awin’s Advertiser tracking tool for WooCommerce adds our optimized MasterTag tracking code to your advertiser website, which feeds directly into Awin’s reporting suite. Tracking is fundamental when running affiliate programs and this plugin minimizes the tech setup required – helping you get up and running as quickly as possible. The Advertiser Tracking tool is regularly updated, ensuring you never miss a sale and that your affiliate tracking is always compliant.
Similarly, Awin's Shopify app gives users everything they need to integrate their stores with the network and manage their affiliate activity. Once the simple activation process is complete, users will be able to directly communicate with affiliate partners and track coupon, product, sale, click, and impressions with publishers active on the Awin network.
The Awin Publisher MasterTag plugin allows publishers to harness the latest conversion boosting tracking technology. After installing MasterTag via the WordPress plugin, publishers will be able to activate Awin’s Bounceless Tracking, adMission, and Convert-A-Link features.
- Bounceless Tracking optimizes tracking for any given click and determines the most effective method for that particular scenario
- adMission provides easily customizable affiliate disclosure for both pages and links
- Convert-A-Link automatically turns any Awin advertiser link into a tracking link and informs the advertiser that you have sent traffic their way
If you’re looking for more information about any of these tools, our MasterTag tutorial for publishers is a helpful guide.
MyAwin, Awin’s Google Chrome browser extension, allows publishers to easily join an advertiser’s affiliate program, quickly generate short, tracked links and custom URLs, creates one-click shares for social media and can generate links to specific product pages without leaving the advertiser’s site.
Awin also provides a wealth of helpful features like tracking cross device transactions, highlighting touchpoints in sales where publishers didn’t receive the last click, and the opportunity marketplace to ensure publishers are able to optimize their campaigns and maximize their commission earning potential.
If you’re a publisher or content creator who’s new to affiliate marketing, a huge amount of support is available to help you optimize your campaigns and grow. More information can be found on our publisher success center or by getting in touch with our local teams.
