The Best WordPress Affiliate Plugin

Affiliate programs are one of the best ways to monetize your website. For relatively small payments, the site owner encourages affiliates to bring users to their resource. The owner received sales, traffic managers received remuneration. But to use affiliate programs, you also need plugins. Those are software modules on the site with additional features. In our article, we will talk about the best plugins for WordPress that will help you set up an affiliate program.

Why do you need affiliate plugins

When you are just launching a site and you have relatively few products together with partners, it is easy to track statistics as you can keep it in a table. But as the resource grows, both the volume of links and the number of partners increase.

Affiliate plugins help you create, edit, and remove links from your WordPress dashboard. If the conditions for the product have changed or you have stopped working with a partner, you can clean the link in a couple of clicks.

Such plugins are also handy for tracking the statistics of the traffic managers you work with. The effectiveness of each of them will be displayed using the plugin and the best one can increase the reward.

In addition, thanks to affiliate plugins, you can automate and simplify the processes of interaction with affiliates.

Top 5 Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular analytics plugin for WordPress. It establishes a connection between Google Analytics and your site so statistics can be viewed directly in the WordPress dashboard. In total, MonsterInsights has over 2 million installs.

The plugin is extremely easy to implement. You can install it in 5 minutes. It is designed for the fact that the site owner does not have programming skills, so the installation is as simple as possible.

Through the MonsterInsights plugin, you can track how many times users clicked on ads placed on your site. The software module also monitors where and through what link people get to your site. This is how you can track the effectiveness of the affiliate program. What’s more, MonsterInsights collects user behavior reports to help you understand how your site was found and which ad headline was the most successful.

The main disadvantage of the plugin is limited functionality on the free version. And the most affordable paid one starts at $99 per month, which is quite expensive.

Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a plugin for masking links. Affiliate links are long and look ugly, and Pretty Links helps to shorten them. In fact, this is its main, but far from the only, function. By the way, it shortens links based on your domain, and not like a regular shortener that stuffs everything under one name for all users.

Pretty Links also helps you keep track of your affiliate links. It counts clicks on them and determines the most successful pages. This gives a certain insight to the site owner who can encourage the affiliate to continue making the same content to increase conversions.

The pro version of the plugin allows you to do even more. For example, you can set a link action timer. After its expiration, the link will no longer be counted in the general statistics. There are also sorting functions inside the service so links can be grouped by category or tags.

The basic version is free, but it makes sense for an affiliate marketer to buy the Pro version of the plugin right away. Its cost starts from $99 per month.

AffiliateWP

Easy AffiliateAffiliateWP is one of the best affiliate plugins for WordPress. It is easy to manage, easy to integrate and has a wide variety of useful features.

So, for example, AffiliateWP can create coupons instead of affiliate links. They can be configured for each individual partner. By default, successful ones can be assigned a higher reward.

AffiliateWP also integrates easily with other e-commerce plugins such as Easy Digital Downloads, Woo Commerce and many more.

It is worth noting that the plugin for a beginner even has too many functionality and opportunities. You have to manually manage every little thing up to updates.

Another disadvantage is the lack of access to existing affiliate networks using the plugin. The program will have to be built each time independently and from scratch.

AffiliateWP price is $149.5 per year. However, developers have a refund function – within 30 days, money can be returned if the software does not suit you.

Easy Affiliate

Easy Affiliate is a comprehensive solution for creating your own affiliate program. The plugin is ready to integrate with other e-commerce solutions and is also easy to use.

Easy Affiliate is good for its visibility. All the statistics that the software collects can be grouped into graphs and charts. So you can see where the traffic to the site comes from. By the way, reporting is displayed through the WordPress control panel, so you won’t even need to leave the site to get statistics.

The plugin is highly recommended for beginners. It installs in a few minutes, and the affiliate program can be launched almost instantly.

A useful feature is fraud protection. The plugin can detect suspicious behavior of partners, in particular, cheating clicks on the link.

As in the case of AffiliateWP, Easy Affiliate does not have a single affiliate network – it is only a tool for creating it. That is, the site owner will have to independently build their own affiliate program.

There is no free trial period for the plugin. Its price starts from $99.5 per year.

Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty Affiliates is a simple and modern affiliate link management plugin. Like Pretty Links, it shortens long links, making them look more decent.

Thirsty Affiliates has a number of interesting features. For example, the plugin is able to automatically replace assigned keywords with links. This greatly automates the work with promotion. The software can also attach images to links, which is also useful for traffic management.

The plugin has the ability to organize work. For example, links can be grouped into designated categories, making it much easier to manage and collect data. By the way, Thirsty Affiliates also has reporting, simple and understandable.

The plugin costs from $79.5 per year.

What to Look for When Choosing an Affiliate Plugin

First of all, choosing a plugin for an affiliate program is based on ease of management. The easier it is to implement, the better – preferably without the participation of a programmer at all. The speed of launching an affiliate program also matters, it should not be a long-term action.

In addition, the plugin should be easy to use. Well, if it has the ability to integrate with various e-commerce solutions – this will make your life much easier.

Finally, grouping links into categories is also a useful feature. It is not so significant, but it will greatly simplify the work if you have a large-scale affiliate program.

The main points

• Affiliate plugins are needed to simplify and automate the work with affiliates. They will show statistics and make it easier to interact with them.
• The easier it is to implement a plugin, the better. Preferably without the participation of developers.
• Additional functions for such plugins vary. Someone uploads a user behavior report, someone shortens long links. It makes sense to choose a specific plugin according to your needs.