What is a Performance Marketing Platform?
A performance marketing platform is an automated digital marketing system for intelligently targeting and tracking ads or calls to action to the results, calculating payouts to marketing partners such as affiliates, advertisers, networks, influencers, and agencies, and measuring ROI and ROAS.
Performance Marketing Platforms in Today’s Market
Performance marketing platforms are needed to manage marketing partners, run, track performance, and adjust marketing campaigns, and measure ROI (return on investment) by source, return on ad spend (ROAS), and other KPIs.
Performance marketing systems are brand and affiliate software that uses marketing automation to help your company find influencers and creators to achieve brand awareness, target with segmentation through ad networks, email marketing, social media, and SEO marketing content, track and generate multi-channel impressions and leads for sales by source, and calculate and pay partners for results.
The best performance marketing platforms are automated. They provide real-time data and analytics to improve marketing campaigns to potential buyers and can provide attribution of specific marketing initiatives to results. Marketers can use information to make fast decisions to optimize their marketing campaigns.
Performance marketing software (PMS) also calculates the amounts due to marketing partners for making payments through the platform. PMS and ERP-integrated third-party software like Tipalti can improve efficiency and add more available payment methods and local currencies to make global mass payments to affiliates and partners.
Common Examples of Performance Marketing
Performance marketing examples requiring measurement, analytics, and payouts as rewards, include social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) for marketing content, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, display advertising, native advertising, and email marketing campaigns using marketing automation. Metrics tracked include impressions, click-through rates, cost per click, and leads.
Social media is used by brands and influencers in affiliate marketing to generate content that leads to conversions, desired actions like referral marketing, or purchases requiring payment of commissions or negotiated amounts for completed actions to the partner.
Search engine marketing (SEO) performance is measured by Google Analytics for traffic stats and the search engine results page (SERP) ranking for content. Google also enables pay-per-click (PPC) marketing with Google ads. Web landing pages are created using WordPress for creation and website content management or similar Internet publishing software.
Improve performance marketing network payouts with best-in-class functionality
Tipalti mass payments software integrates with performance marketing systems to build better partner relationships and cut costs through scaling and efficiency.
Top-Rated Performance Marketing Platforms
Ten top-rated performance marketing platforms are:
- TUNE (formerly HasOffers)
- Affise
- LinkTrust
- Everflow
- Good Creator Co. (formerly Vidooly)
- CAKE
- Influence (formerly Paladin)
- HitPath
- Voluum
- Trackier
TUNE (formerly HasOffers)
Overview
TUNE is a SaaS platform for managing marketing partnerships with partnered affiliates, influencers, networks, content publishers, loyalty partners, brand-to-brand partnerships, agencies, etc. TUNE provides two separate yet distinct marketing performance platform products for advertisers or networks.
Standout Features
For Advertisers
- Conversion rate tracking
- ROI on ad spending
- Real-time reporting with metrics and KPIs
- Fraud reduction
- Commission changes
- APIs for unique tracking integration and third-party add-ons
- Automation workflows for partner onboarding, fraud prevention, payment processing, and performance optimization
- Advanced cookieless tracking on mobile and desktop
- Mobile measurement partner (MMP) integration to track marketing or ad campaign app installs and post-install events
- Promotions using coupon codes, QR codes, vanity URLs, and flat-fee placements
For Networks
- Integrate and manage advertiser and publisher partners
- Custom automated rules for conversion rate, profit margin, and type of offer
- Two-way APIs with partners
- Automated actions and alerts notification that warns and blocks traffic sources and offers
- Real-time reporting and event data livestreaming
- Single event log
- Automated invoicing and payment solutions, including third-party integrations
Pricing
For advertisers, TUNE provides three SaaS pricing plans with varying feature levels:
- Bootstrap (for small businesses): $599 per month, paid annually
- Scale: $1,500 per month, paid annually
- Custom (Contract): request a quote
For networks, TUNE provides two SaaS pricing plans with different feature levels:
- Enterprise: $899 per month, paid annually
- Custom (Contract): request a quote
Affise
Overview
Affise is a performance marketing system platform for ad networks, media buying teams, marketing agencies, and brands. With Affise, users manage partnerships, analyze marketing campaigns for optimization, and pay affiliates.
Affise performance marketing includes a choice of three solutions:
- Affise Performance for networks and agencies to manage their own partner networks
- Affise MMP to measure marketing effectiveness and improve user engagement
- Affise Reach for brands to discover partners and build a network
Affise also offers two other products. The second is a mobile attribution product for marketers and mobile app developers that links tracked user interactions with identifiable marketing efforts, including social media. The third solution is the Affise iGaming product for ad networks, operators, and media buying teams.
Standout Features
Standout features of Affise performance marketing are:
- Affiliate marketing campaign tools to manage, measure, drive engagement, analyze, and prevent fraud
- Advanced tracking and targeting
- Real-time data analytics and metrics to adjust campaigns for market trends and customer behavior
- Automated optimization tools
- A/B tests for offers
- Meets privacy standards
- Mass affiliate network payments in a few currencies
Pricing
Affise offers three SaaS pricing plans for small, medium, and large agencies and networks, respectively. The feature set, volume limits, and customer support available vary by plan. Pricing from Affise is by quote.
- Entry
- Scale
- Custom
LinkTrust
Overview
LinkTrust offers performance marketing tools on a platform for almost every type of partner program for agencies and networks.
Standout Features
- Attribution and real-time reporting
- Advanced tracking of every action from first impression to sale, with geotargeting
- Lead generation reporting and lead management
- Traffic monetization
- Campaign management
- Fraud mitigation, smart routing, and ping tree
- Publisher/affiliate management with messaging via custom emails
- Third-party API integration with Scale and Custom plans
Pricing
LinkTrust has three SaaS pricing plans for its performance marketing software, with increasing features and limits, with functionality customization in its Scale and Custom plans:
- Starter: $488 billed monthly + optional Lead Gen billed monthly
- Scale: $879 billed monthly + optional Lead Gen billed monthly
- Custom: customizable plan with pricing by quote
Everflow
Overview
Everflow is a performance marketing system that tracks and manages all marketing channels, provides ROI analytics, and automates compliance and optimization of marketing strategies. Everflow use cases are e-commerce, B2B partnerships, agency, and ad networks.
Standout Features
- Extensive tracking of performance from partnerships, affiliates, referrals, and marketing
- Full attribution of unlimited events for conversions, leads, sales, CRM stages in the customer journey, and renewals
- Analyzing channel revenue generation with drill-down features
- Engagement for decision-making and results improvement
- Dashboards for unlimited partners to track conversions, sales, and payouts
- Connecting to your tech stack (shopping cart integrations for eCommerce (like Shopify), CRMs (like Salesforce), ad platforms, PPC, and other third-party software add-ons)
- Leveraging data to auto-optimize traffic
- Activate ad integrations for performance tracking of ad spend
- Recruit new partners
- Managed payouts
- Enterprise-level security
Pricing
Eveflow offers customized price quotes by pricing tier, with the ability to have unlimited seats, access, clients, partners, and marketing channels.
Good Creator Co. (formerly Vidooly)
Overview
Vidooly was acquired by The Good Creator Co. in 2022 and now provides performance marketing with greater social media functionality through the expanded GCC platform. Good Creator Co. specializes in influencer marketing, social media, and recruiting influencers through its performance marketing platform. GCC leverages actionable insights from India’s largest database of creators.
Standout Features
- Influencer and campaign management for the creator economy
- Real-time reports of past marketing campaigns for analysis
- Discovers and recruits influencers by niche and category for monetization and growth strategies
- Creates digital video insights and influencer profile insights
- Identifies Top Influencers and Top YouTubers by category
- Topic and keyword research for recent consumer, content marketing, and creator trends
- Understand insights and data for thousands of social media platform publishers
Pricing
Good Creator Co.’s marketing performance platform is priced by custom quotes.
CAKE
Overview
CAKE is real-time performance marketing software that provides solutions for advertisers, publishers, and networks. Its PMS solutions include Affiliate Marketing, Lead Distribution (for automated lead capture validation and distribution), and MultiChannel Marketing (to optimize digital campaign performance and boost return on ad spend – ROAS).
Standout Features
Standout features of CAKE’s Affiliate Marketing software are:
- Measures, manages, and optimizes affiliate partner campaign performance
- Real-time insights into partner and campaign performance
- Customizable alerts
- Granular data
- Unique commission structures for partners
- Leverages custom targeting parameters
- Location
- Device
- Browser
- Traffic caps
- Redirects
- Accurate measurement for each impression, click, and conversion
- Data security
- Partner support and attraction
Pricing
CAKE offers custom pricing quotes.
Influence (formerly Paladin)
Overview
When Brandwatch acquired Paladin in 2022, Paladin’s performance marketing platform became the software product named Influence (by Brandwatch). Influence provides influencer marketing tools for agencies and brands. Brandwatch also provides solutions for consumer intelligence, social media marketing management, and media intelligence and insights.
Standout Features
- Discovery tool tracking 30m+ global creators to find influencers
- Influence directory management
- influencer contact and payment information
- contracts
- custom field data
- influencer correspondence with automated email tracking
- Tool to review creator applications to join your influencer network
- Customized influencer onboarding and relationship management
- Run, measure, and report on multichannel performance marketing campaigns for online marketing
- 13 languages to connect with influencers with your branding
Pricing
Brandwatch provides custom quotes for its SaaS plans.
HitPath
Overview
HitPath is a multi-channel affiliate tracking system that’s used by advertisers, ad agencies, and publisher networks for tracking touchpoints with marketing automation. The HitPath performance marketing tracking software platform provides affiliate management, advertiser management, and campaign management for networks.
Standout Features
- Built-in suppression management, multivariate sales capping, and fraud control
- Affiliate recruitment and onboarding
- Track multiple payable actions for a single campaign with multi-sales capabilities and custom pixels for event tracking
- Vanity tracking domains to isolate traffic
- Detailed reporting for decision-making by the marketing team on marketing programs
- all traffic with trends
- performance stats for affiliates and campaigns
- Accounting tools for payments with third-party integrations
- Advertiser and affiliate reconciliation
Pricing
HitPath provides quotes for custom pricing.
Voluum
Overview
Voluum is an ad-tracking tool for optimizing marketing campaigns through a performance marketing automation platform. It offers different software solutions for affiliate marketing, agencies, lead gen, E-commerce, and mobile apps/iGaming.
Standout Features
- Comprehensive ad tracking for desktop and mobile ad campaigns
- Affiliate marketing dashboard to view metrics, including visits, clicks, costs, and profits
- Impressions tracking (for each ad page load)
- Custom tracking of different types of conversions throughout the journey
- Track visits from other web pages or search engines (not from Direct Tracking URL)
- Condition-based redirect webhook to notify server and respond with different landing pages/offers
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
Pricing
Voluum’s SaaS pricing plans, which are billed annually, provide varying feature levels and customer support:
- Start-up: $539/month
- Agency: $799/month
- Enterprise (for agency or media-buying team): $1,599/month
- Corporate: $3,999/month
- Executive: $7,999/month
Trackier
Overview
Trackier is a performance marketing platform to optimize partner performance that provides real-time partner analytics data. Besides its performance marketing platform product, Trackier also provides a software solution for mobile marketing and an iGaming platform.
Standout Features
Standout features of Trackier’s performance marketing system are:
- Multi-layer fraud protection for campaigns
- Real-time marketing analytics across platforms
- Customizable reporting
- Seamless API integrations with third-party software
- Automated payouts and commissions
Pricing
Trackier provides custom quotes for the performance management software that’s specified either as your solution for brands or for ad agencies/network.
How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Business
Choose the right performance marketing platform by looking for the ability to track marketing campaign events and tie them to revenue attribution in real-time. You want real-time data analysis for decision-making to adjust your marketing campaigns and reporting that includes KPI metrics, ROI, and ROAS.
Your organization also needs a system that attracts, manages, supports, retains, and enables timely, integrated payouts to affiliates and network partners (that includes third-party software integration).
Level Up Your Performance Marketing Platform with Affiliate Payments
Because marketing campaigns measured by performance marketing platforms for affiliate program management often calculate required payouts of different types, including influencer payments, your organization needs to find the best solution for making those payouts to your global affiliates and partners.
Even if the performance marketing platform offers a feature that makes payments, evaluate using Tipalti mass payments integration with your performance marketing software instead to improve your payment options, range of functionality, and payment process.
Tipalti provides a user-friendly affiliate and influencers solution called mass payments that seamlessly integrates with top performance marketing platforms to enable making agency, network, and affiliate payments from within your PMS platform. Partners can choose their preferred payment method for making global payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies.
Tipalti also provides AP automation for accounts payable, advanced FX (Multi-FX and FX Hedging), Expenses, and Procurement software products as a unified platform of products for finance automation. Besides integrating with a performance marketing platform, Tipalti integrates and syncs data with your ERP or accounting software and performs real-time payment reconciliation to your accounting system.
Scalable Tipalti finance automation software for participants in your affiliate network and businesses uses Tipalti AI℠ technology and securely streamlines and automates workflows to save time and reduce hiring needs. Tipalti provides self-service onboarding for affiliate and supplier management, easy tax compliance, fraud control, enterprise-grade security, automated global regulatory compliance, and 26,000+ rules to reduce payment errors by 66%. Tipalti automation software can help you accelerate the accounting close by 25%.
Cloud-based Tipalti automation software provides an excellent user experience and top-rated customer support. Tipalti has a 98% customer retention rate.
Conclusion
Using the right unified performance marketing platform can help your business track the results of its marketing initiatives, understand the source of leads generated, and better measure marketing partners’ payouts and your company’s marketing ROI.
Integrating the best performance marketing software with Tipalti’s finance automation software for paying affiliates, creators, and influencers increases your company’s efficiency and controls for making mass global payouts. Learn more about how to make timely global payments to keep your marketing partners happy by integrating Tipalti’s unified finance automation software.
