Post Affiliate Pro: Affiliate Marketing Software Reviews 2023: Details, Pricing, & Features
Overview
Post Affiliate Pro has been around for a very long time in terms of technology. Launched for the first time in 2004, it began its existence as a one-off order from a potential customer of Quality Unit, LLC, a software development business established by the trio of Maros Fric, Andrej Harsani, and Viktor Zeman. Initially, the company was known as Quality Unit. They developed a script to track affiliate marketing links for a potential client, but the transaction fell through somewhere around the time that they were supposed to be paid for their work. In point of fact, this was the reason why the sale did not go through: they were never paid.
They realized that they had something that may be fairly helpful, so rather than archiving or deleting their work, they started to work finding new buyers. They started selling licenses to it at just the right time, and it turned out that their timing was perfect. Affiliate marketing is not a new concept; businesses have been offering incentives to customers to recommend their products to friends and family for as long as there has been a market for goods and services. However, with the rise of blogging on the internet, affiliate marketing has been given a new lease on life. Because of the rise in popularity of bloggers, some of whom command audiences numbering in the millions, marketers all over the world have discovered a new avenue via which they may drive referrals. When the marketers who had signed with Quality Unit but subsequently stiffed them sought out to them for their custom affiliate tracking script, the company more or less fell into this situation by accident.
They came out ahead in the end despite the fact that they had not been paid. If the sale had gone according to plan, Fric, Harsani, and Zerman’s customer would have been the one to own the script, and that would have been the end of the story. Instead, as luck would have it, the company’s founders ended up sitting on a goldmine of valuable software. Instead of selling the idea directly, licensing it turned out to be a significantly more lucrative choice; it was a gift that just kept on giving. Since then, more than 20 years have passed since Quality Unit was established, and more than 17 years have passed since Post Affiliate Pro was developed. The program has now been migrated to the cloud, and there are nearly 30,000 clients using it all over the world.
And as if nearly 20 years of success and expansion weren’t enough of a hint at the software’s reception, it has also received many hundreds of positive reviews on websites such as G2 and Capterra and won several awards (from both industry experts and customers alike), firmly establishing its reputation as one of the best—and most popular—affiliate marketing solutions that are currently available.
Pricing
Post Affiliate Pro does not lack capabilities and even their most affordable subscription plan offers a significant amount of functionality, making it an excellent choice for affiliate marketers. We’ve looked at a few other platforms, and the premium plans of those platforms give a lot less than PA Pro’s entry-level plan does, providing PA Pro’s plan an exceptional Bang for the Buck ratio.
The vast majority of other affiliate marketing networks place restrictions on the number of referrals that your affiliates are permitted to send your way. These restrictions become more stringent as your subscription level increases. PA Pro functions in a comparable manner, but the limitations it imposes are placed on what the company refers to as Tracking Requests. This refers to each data point that the software tracks. Therefore, as an illustration, if an affiliate link you provided them with results in a click and subsequently a conversion, that counts as two requests. These ceilings have been set sufficiently high so it is more probable that you will upgrade in order to access more features, rather than more clicks, even though it may appear that this is a strategy to exhaust limits rapidly and induce users to go up to the next level of service.
The Pro plan, which costs $97 a month, allows you to track an unlimited number of affiliates and up to one million tracking requests each month. If you go over the limit, additional requests will cost you one dollar for every ten thousand. All tracking tools are accessible, in addition to a plethora of other features, such as automatically registering affiliates, multiple currencies and languages, a customizable interface, mass payments, over a half dozen different types of commissions, marketing tools for creating banners, coupons, and campaigns, advanced reporting, and hundreds of integrations.
• Ultimate, $197 a month — Unlimited affiliates, 5,000,000 tracking requests, 40 cents per additional 10k requests, all of the features listed above, plus custom affiliate tracking codes, campaign scheduler, multiple admins, automatic affiliate removal, lifetime referrals manager, recurring commissions, split commissions, performance rewards, and time- and rules-based commissions.
• Network, $477 per month — Unlimited affiliates, 20,000,000 tracking requests, 20 cents per additional 10k requests, all of the above, as well as features for developing and administering your own affiliate network (that you and other merchants can access)
Every plan comes with technical assistance via live chat that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in addition to email help and access to the knowledge base. Additionally, everyone receives a full setup and integration service that is customized to meet their individual requirements. Additionally, users have the option to acquire some capabilities that are already included with the Network plan if they upgrade to the Pro or Ultimate level:
• Lifetime Referrals Manager, an additional payment of $9 per month — This function is included with Ultimate and Network, but Pro users can participate in the fun for an additional charge per month.
• Membership Subscription Manager, which costs nine dollars per month — If you want to charge your affiliates a fee to become a part of your program, this is the method to accomplish it. Affiliates who have not paid their membership fees will not receive compensation for any referrals they generate and will be unable to access the affiliate dashboard.
• Audit Log, which costs $17 a month, records in reverse chronological order every action that is performed on the system by affiliates and admins.
• Smartlinks, at a cost of $19 per month, provide dynamic tracking links and banners that can be adapted to the specific place and device on which they are displayed.
• Remove Post Affiliate Branding for $27/month – This feature is completely unavailable for Pro users. Customers who subscribe to the Ultimate Plan are granted access to the Network-level capability that allows them to white label their portal or program.
The Finer Points
In most cases, we will utilize this section to provide specific information (thus the name) regarding the user experience, including any features that really stand out and any features that are conspicuously absent. This would require a review the length of a Russian novel to cover everything, but we want to keep your attention and keep you reading to the conclusion, so we can’t take that approach. Instead, we’ll focus on the highlights. And it’s possible that it’s not completely vital: When it comes to the user experience, all you really need to know is that the company has been in business for 17 years and has served 30,000 consumers. Customers of software products can’t possibly attain this degree of success by being made to feel frustrated and confused (Microsoft Windows and Office notwithstanding).
Regarding the features, we cover the fundamentals in full. To reiterate, there is no chance for longevity for a product that does not adequately address the fundamentals. It is necessary for the feature list to go above and beyond in order to accomplish what PA Pro has. In addition, Quality Unit’s software lives up to its name by adhering to these standards. All of this is being done with the intention of providing as much freedom and control as possible over their programs.
Even the most fundamental elements, such as tracking links, exhibit this “go the extra mile” approach to feature design. If you were to choose an affiliate marketing platform at random and give it a try, you would most likely come away with the impression that tracking links are required to adhere to a specific style and structure at all times, with little room for variation. You do, however, have options while working with PA Pro. You can use old-fashioned links that rely on redirects if you’re in the mood for something a little more nostalgic. Those of you who are more up to date can use the more recent technique, which has parameters embedded directly into the URL. However, it is more likely that you will want to use the anchor links that are helpful to SEO, or even the direct links, which are much more user-friendly. You may even provide affiliates the ability to personalize their own links according to their needs (though you still get to review then approve or decline what they come up with).
PA Pro is one of many platforms that offers MLM-related choices, but it differentiates itself by also including a Forced Matrix feature. Affiliate program managers now have precise control over the size and “shape” of the various affiliate levels thanks to this development. When levels are mandatory, everyone has the opportunity to make money off of someone below them, and administrators have the ability to keep commissions from becoming unmanageable.
Along the same lines as the Forced Matrix, Fraud Protection is something that we have seen in other systems before, albeit not to the extent that it is implemented in PA Pro. Because of the emphasis placed on adaptability and command in this context, it should come as no surprise that the software in question provides its users with the ability to approach the problem of fraud from a variety of perspectives. You may protect yourself from fraudulent clicks, sales, and affiliate signups, as well as other types of activity, based on a number of different parameters.
The same can be stated for the commissions themselves; there are just a lot of different methods that you may reward your affiliates. They may be contingent on activities other than sales, such as registering as a user or subscriber to a newsletter, and similar activities. There is the option for recurring commissions, and you can also divide commissions among several affiliates. You can make sure that everyone is getting what they deserve by using commission groups, and PA Pro’s performance incentives feature allows it to automatically shift affiliates to higher earning groups when they hit certain performance milestones. [Citation needed]
The distribution of marketing materials to affiliates is an essential component of campaigns, and PA Pro once again outperforms its rivals in this regard by going above and beyond. There is literally no limit to the variety of banner ads that may be purchased, including interactive banners, static image banners, and lightbox banners. Support for Flash-based banners is also included in PA Pro, which is one of the program’s few failings and begs the question: why? The date that it was supposed to stop working has passed by one year. There is a function called a banner rotator that rotates the banners in exactly the same way that it sounds. The Banner Manager makes it possible to control all of these aspects.
The advanced reporting options live up to their billing as such. PA Pro is an extremely versatile piece of software, so it should come as no surprise that it has a plethora of information that can be gleaned by using it. In addition to the typical tracking data that one would anticipate, one sees that data displayed in a variety of different ways in order to gain actual insight into what is successful and what is not. You can determine which banner advertising are performing best with reporting that is related to those banners. You can examine the geographical distribution of any metric that interests you with the help of the Map Overlay report (sales, commissions, etc.). This map is one of the other mistakes made by PA Pro. It allows you to zoom in as deeply as a country, which is a feature that is useful in Europe but totally unnecessary in the United States. Despite this, the reporting is quite detailed, to the point where one of the features is the ability to have everything condensed into a Quick Report.
Integrations
PA Pro has support for a total of 229 integrations in its software. There are over 100 of them that are shopping cart and e-commerce systems, so if you are curious about whether or not the one you use is supported, the answer is yes. The same is true for the selection of the payment platform you like. There are around seventy of those that are supported.
The remaining 54 integrations are almost entirely for specialized apps, with just a few larger and more widely recognized brands tossed in for good measure. Mailchimp and Infusionsoft are the two most helpful programs out of the bunch. In spite of the fact that the developers of Post Affiliate Pro intended to make it as flexible as possible, they did not include interfaces with a number of the most widely used e-commerce technologies on the market. Salesforce and HubSpot were conspicuously absent from the product’s feature set. The program is also not particularly compatible with many forms of social media. The only way for affiliates to share content with their followers is to copy and paste their links into a post, as there is no other mechanism for them to do so.
In conclusion, Post Affiliate Pro is head and shoulders above its rivals in virtually every respect. When you consider how long they’ve been doing this, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. It provides unequaled flexibility for creating affiliate campaigns, an enormous array of capabilities, and a variety of ways to configure the use of each of these features, according to the requirements of individual users.
It is also a touch behind in the sense that it is lacking a few integrations, which is difficult to say about software that is compatible with over 225 other pieces of software. The makers of Post Affiliate Pro are showing their age a little bit in areas such as this and the fact that there is no link with social media networks. In spite of this, the platform is so comprehensive, and it comes at such an affordable cost, that it is difficult not to recommend it to companies of virtually any size. It is within the financial means of a small business, but it is possible that they will never make use of half of its features. But Post Affiliate Pro should be the software of choice for everyone who wishes to exert a great deal of influence over the manner in which they conduct affiliate marketing.