Many of the best marketing strategies are performance-driven. Whether it’s a target conversion rate or number of newsletter subscribers, the focus is on the end result. This is the idea behind performance marketing.
The Performance Marketing Association defines performance marketing as any “online marketing and advertising program in which advertisers and marketing companies are paid when a specific action is completed; such as a sale, lead, or click.”
To keep track of all these actions, most companies rely on a performance marketing platform. Today, we’ll go over the best performance marketing software available, plus how to determine if performance marketing software is right for your needs.
What is performance marketing software?
A performance marketing platform monitors the ROI of your performance-driven campaigns. It is used to keep track of and analyze a campaign’s data points, including leads, clicks, conversions, and bounce rates.
By bringing everything together, performance marketing software lets you easily check performance, know your cost per acquisition, give proper attribution to each conversion, analyze what’s working, and optimize your marketing efforts.
Choosing the right performance marketing platform
How to select the best performance marketing software for your business? Not all performance marketing platforms are the same. Some provide end-to-end solutions for various partner programs, while others are more specialized for specific types, like B2B marketing or affiliate marketing (a popular type of performance marketing).
The key is to choose the performance marketing platform that helps you get the most out of your campaigns. Check out our top performance marketing software reviews, based on key features, companies they’re best for, pricing, advantages and disadvantages.
Referral Rock
Referral Rock performance marketing software helps your business accelerate growth by mobilizing brand advocates. Users have the flexibility to manage and automate all types of partnership programs, including traditional partner programs, affiliate programs, ambassador programs, and referral programs.
Our robust platform automates every step of the partner management process, allowing your businesses to rapidly scale and measure the success of your partnerships. Keep your partners engaged, accurately track advocacy in real time, automate payouts, and take full control of the partner experience. And our exceptional support team will guide you through every step of the process if you need assistance.
Best for: Businesses of all sizes, in all industries, that want flexibility in their performance marketing; especially great for businesses with multi-step sales processes
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
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Professional: $175+/month (for businesses with sales reps and servicepeople)
Engage: $200+/month (for businesses with self-checkouts)
Enterprise plan also available |
Free demo, free trial | Onboarding specialists, customer success managers, chat support, product and resource guides, support center, webinars | 4.5 (55 reviews) |
Key features
- Track and manage affiliates and leads: Track and capture every purchase made from each affiliate or partner link, and automatically compensate each affiliate. Both you and your partners can monitor campaigns and all key performance indicators right on the platform’s dashboard.
- Top-notch support: Every plan comes with an onboarding specialist who knows your performance marketing program, your marketing plan, and your goals.
- Mobile app and API integration: Referral Rock seamlessly integrates with Hubspot, Salesforce, Zapier, and plenty of other marketing and sales tools you’re already using.
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Trackier
Trackier uses advanced technology and a customer-first approach to help marketers across the globe build great products, create exceptional experiences, and preserve customer privacy.
It caters to every niche of the Ad-tech industry with its three different platforms specially designed for Advertisers, Brands, and App Owners.
Best for: Larger ecommerce and B2C brands, especially those in the mobile or gaming space
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Not listed | Free demo and trial available | Knowledge base, phone, email | 4.7 (95 reviews) |
Key features
- Affiliate management: Get real-time insights into your campaign and partner performance, monetize your traffic in real-time by setting up custom targeting parameters such as location, device, etc.
- Attribution solution: Maximize your ROI by optimizing the performance of your digital campaigns with the platform’s multi-channel marketing measurement and attribution solution. Accumulate first-party data across all paid, earned, and owned digital marketing channels.
- Fraud detection & prevention: Trackier’s real-time fraud prevention works through cluster analysis, personalized validation rules, in-app fraud rules, and post-attribution fraud detection. It Identifies bots and protects you from attribution fraud with advanced in-app & CPA protection.
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Affise
Affise is a performance marketing tool built to manage, track, analyze, and optimize online advertising campaigns in real-time. Operating across industries, from ecommerce to finance to gaming,
Affise is a full-scale technology solution that can be customized for your needs. You can easily create a unique affiliate platform to align with your processes and drive your business forward.
Best for: Businesses that want to run only affiliate campaigns, and no other types of performance marketing
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $500-$800/month; custom plan also available | Free trial | Affise Academy, email, live chat, dedicated onboarding for higher plans | 4.54 (120 reviews) |
Key features
- Robust analysis: Access to 50+ data breakdowns, custom comparison reports, and IP intelligence (by Digital Element)
- Optimization tools: Use AI smartlinks, anti-fraud protection, CR optimization, and automatically transfer offers to make sure your advertising campaigns are running smoothly
- Extensive customization: Introduce any needed custom integrations, with a tailored UI design, feature-rich API, and third party integrations
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Anytrack
Anytrack is a plug-and-play conversion data platform built for performance marketers. The software automatically tracks conversion data across all your affiliate marketing, content marketing, and analytics channels, while simultaneously building remarketing audiences for you.
The marketing platform offers instant integration with the apps and ad networks you use everyday, helping you grow and scale no matter what your digital marketing strategy.
Best for: Smaller businesses with fewer campaigns to track, but that still need key integrations
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $50-$300/month | Free trial | Knowledge base, FAQ, live chat | 3.97 (6 reviews) |
Key features
- AutoTrack and AutoTag: Automatically tag and tracks events, like outbound clicks and forms submissions – without writing code – to guarantee seamless funnel attribution
- One tag: Connect your entire marketing ecosystem to the same conversion data and leverage analytics across multiple platforms
- Run smart campaigns: Build custom audiences and granular data to run the right campaigns to the right audience at the right time
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LeadDyno
Since 2014, LeadDyno has been providing affiliate tracking software and marketing automation for businesses of all sizes. The platform is simple enough for those just getting started, with more advanced options for businesses wanting more out of their programs.
LeadDyno’s affiliate tracking software can be set up in minutes so you can grow and monitor the performance of your marketing efforts – all from one dashboard.
Best for: Ecommerce businesses that want a basic affiliate campaign
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $49-$749/month | Free trial | Email, live chat, guides, technical docs, 1:1 phone (for Accelerator plan) | 4.29 (132 reviews) |
Key features
- One-click integration: Your affiliate portal is automatically set up when you sign on, and integrates with 25+ platforms, including ecommerce, payment processors, and CRM, so you can start tracking immediately
- Multiple affiliate tools: Preload shareable content for your affiliates and automatically assign links, coupon codes, and specific URLs to track individual affiliates
- Automated marketing and recruitment: Keep affiliates up-to-date with current product offerings, news or other updates by sending them newsletters straight from the dashboard
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PartnerStack
PartnerStack was founded with a mission to connect companies and partners together to create incredible growth. The partner management platform accelerates recurring revenue for every kind of partner, all at once. Plus, the software does more than performance marketing work – it helps you build new revenue channels by empowering all your partners to succeed.
Best for: B2B businesses okay with sacrificing some flexibility to a partner management network
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Not listed | Free demo available | Knowledge base, email, ticket system, phone and email (for Growth plan), 1:1 management (for Enterprise plan) | 4.82 (398 reviews) |
Key features
- Scale multiple channels: Close more deals, generate new leads, bring traffic to your next campaign, and more – all at once on one platform
- Maximize partner performance: Create custom experiences with unique onboarding and marketing assets for each of your partner channels
- Automate your partner payouts: Save time by automating partner payments, receiving a single monthly invoice, and integrating with Stripe or PayPal
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AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP provides advanced affiliate and referral tracking, integrated seamlessly into your WordPress or WooCommerce site. You can create a full-featured affiliate program with a dashboard, real-time reports and graphs, and an easy payout system.
Easy to set up and packed full of features, you can use the performance marketing platform to rank higher, boost traffic, and increase sales.
Best for: Ecommerce businesses using WordPress or WooCommerce
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $149-$299/year | N/A | Knowledge base, documentation, email (for Plus and Professional) | 4.58 (103 reviews) |
Key features
- Easy setup and integration: Your affiliate program will be up and running in minutes, with simple installation and activation on the popular WordPress platform
- Accurate affiliate tracking: Tracks affiliate referrals, earnings, and registrations (even on servers with aggressive caching) in real-time with no delay
- Performance-ready on WordPress: Thoroughly tested and built with speed in mind, performing beautifully on all WordPress sites, no matter what size or industry
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Tapfiliate
Tapfiliate allows you to “tap into affiliate marketing today.” Their cloud-based marketing platform facilitates easy creation, tracking, and growth of affiliate and referral marketing programs for ecommerce and SaaS companies. By integrating seamlessly with your site in just minutes,
Tapfiliate can help you launch affiliate marketing programs, reward brand ambassadors, and begin boosting sales.
Best for: Businesses okay with sacrificing some flexibility to an affiliate management network, and that have an external way of paying affiliates
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $89-$149/month; enterprise plan also available | Free trial | Live chat, knowledge base, premium support (for Pro) customer success manager (for Enterprise) | 4.48 (68 reviews) |
Key features
- Affiliate autopilot: Set up a personal, branded affiliate dashboard that can onboard affiliates quickly and easily, and give them access to all the assets they need to promote your business
- Plug-and-play integrations: An all-in-one, customizable solution with 33 easy copy/paste integrations, from 3Dcart to Zapier
- Variety of rewards: Incentivize your best affiliates and partners with performance bonuses and recurring commission, whether fixed or percentage-based, per product category
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Impact
Impact aims to transform the way enterprises manage and optimize their marketing partnerships. Using science and technology to create transformational growth, the platform helps you scale every type of partnership – affiliates, influencers, strategic business partners, and more.
Impact’s performance marketing platform has a suite of products built for partner management, business development, and optimizing every stage of the partnership life cycle.
Best for: Enterprises willing to put in some work to manage lots of partners, but who want a robust suite of features
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Not listed | Free demo | Glossary, live chat, phone, email | 4.3 (187 reviews) |
Key features
- Impact partnership automation: Orchestrate all forms of referral partnerships by automating actions through the unified framework of the partnership life cycle
- Gain new partners: Discover and connect with global partners using enhanced content-based discovery, and add them to your partnership program with ease
- Partner engagement tools: Keep your partners engaged and measure their performance with proactive messaging and automated workflows
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Refersion
Refersion was designed to make performance marketing easy. By providing all the necessary tools to help you quickly create and launch your own promotion network, the platform leaves you free to focus on growing your revenue and business.
Refersion is known for being extremely user-friendly and easy to set up in six minutes or less. From there, you can customize the performance marketing platform to suit your marketing needs.
Best for: Ecommerce companies who want an easy setup, with a very simple referral or affiliate program
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $99-$249/month; enterprise plan also available | Free demo and trial | Email, live chat, phone, knowledge base (support hub), video, webinar | 3.96 (74 reviews) |
Key features
- Track all digital sales: Integrate with your ecommerce platform and instantly start tracking all digital sales from anywhere in real-time.
- Automated commissions: With unlimited commission structures and automated affiliate commissions, you can save time and manage your marketing through recurring performance reports
- Improved affiliate relationships: Make the most of your partnerships with personalized affiliate portal, an analytics performance dashboard, and commission payment visibility
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Scaleo
Scaleo brings more than 10 years of experience in tracking technologies and building affiliate software. The result is a cutting-edge “affiliate marketing software you’ll finally love.”
Built for affiliate networks, advertisers, and media buyers, Scaleo is a simple interface with lightning-fast performance, yet still packed with unique AI and machine learning features.
Best for: Medium-sized to large businesses that want AI features
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $400-$2,200/month; enterprise plan also available | Free demo and trial | Live chat, email, phone, knowledge base | 4.8 (44 reviews) |
Key features
- Anti-fraud logic: In-house Anti-Fraud Logic™ combines and analyzes dozens of internal and external measuring points to detect and eliminate fraud traffic in real-time
- Lightning-fast interface: Enjoy a seamless user experience with an intuitive interface, dozens of convenient filters, blazing-fast data reports, and redirection tracking
- Advanced targeting options: Add up to 10+ advanced targeting and segmentation rules to reach the right target audience and achieve the best results
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Voluum
What kind of ads do you run? Voluum controls all your campaigns from one ad tracker. Its quick reporting can easily monitor over 30 metrics per visit, click, and conversion from all your traffic sources in real time.
As a cloud-hosted tracking software, your entire team can access data analytics insights and AI-powered optimization tools wherever they are.
Best for: Businesses of all sizes that want to track traffic from ads, and that want some AI features
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $199-$10,000/month | Free demo and trial | Live chat, documentation, video tutorials, webinars, dedicated support, guides, onboarding, Q&A session | 4.65 (221 reviews) |
Key features
- Traffic distribution AI: Quickly find the most profitable combinations of ads and landing pages that are proven to work for your specific audience
- Automizer: Connect the platform to your traffic sources via API integration, allowing you to create auto-rules, change bids, and perform other actions on your campaign
- Anti-fraud kit: Automatically analyze your traffic in real time using 10 different metrics to identify suspicious behavior in your traffic
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CAKE
Revolutionizing the performance marketing space, CAKE empowers organizations with the insights to measure the impact of their marketing effort and make intelligent marketing decisions. The company strives to make its product simple, so you can easily manage, monitor, and optimize performance marketing in real-time.
CAKE’s performance marketing platform brings clarity to your campaigns and makes the most of your digital ad spend.
Best for: Larger businesses that want many performance marketing features
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Not listed | Free demo | Email, phone, webinars, knowledge base, ticket support | 4.5 (76 reviews) |
Key features
- Multichannel marketing: The attribution software provides performance marketers with the tools needed to measure digital campaigns holistically across marketing channels
- Intelligent lead routing: Capture, validate, and distribute leads in real-time, and measure closed-loop performance to optimize acquisition efforts
- Secure, dependable data: All data is safe, with an enterprise-grade platform and world-class infrastructure that are subject to ongoing GDPR efforts and additional security regulations
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TUNE
TUNE helps you “partner the way you want to,” with a flexible SaaS platform for managing marketing partnerships across mobile and web.
As one of the first cloud-based platforms to support affiliate marketing, TUNE has grown to support the expansion of every performance partnership that marketers and their teams want to manage. In addition to affiliate marketing, you can maximize ROI of business development relationships, influencers, content marketers, networks, and other types of partnerships.
Best for: Medium-sized to large companies experienced in the performance marketing space
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $599-$1,500/month; custom plans also available | Free trial available | Live chat, email, phone, guides, TUNE academy, webinars, customer success manager (for Scale and Custom) dev team (for Custom) | 4.33 (166 reviews) |
Key features
- Branded partner experience: Powerful tools to integrate, manage, and compensate your marketing partnerships, plus over 650 endpoints to personalize and differentiate your business
- Intelligent tools: Advanced automation tools to streamline workflows and minimize risk, as well as real-time reporting and data streaming power better decision-making
- Secure controls: High standards in safeguarding the data of your business and end users, with SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 Type II certification, GDPR compliance, proactive fraud prevention, and more
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Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro helps run your entire affiliate program from top to bottom. Its dashboard is built for both merchants and affiliates, with over 170 CMS and payment gateway integrations.
Offering personalized commission structures and settings, Post Affiliate Pro’s performance marketing platform is intuitive, fast, and infinitely expandable – allowing it will grow with your business.
Best for: Businesses experienced in the performance marketing space, that need several integrations
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $129-$649/month | Free demo and trial | Email, live chat, forum knowledge base, learning center | 4.58 (633 reviews) |
Key features
- Tracking methods: Implement multiple unique tracking methods, with support for all types of affiliate links and matrixes, which results in the most accurate affiliate tracking software on the market
- Various commissions: Assign the best commission for every partner you work with, including commissions per action, commission groups, assign lifetime commissions, or multi-tier commissions
- Advanced tracking tools: Using what’s called SubID or ad channels tracking, you can know exactly which of your promotions efforts are bringing in the best results
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Everflow
Everflow was created to provide a cutting-edge platform that addressed the complexities, scale, and functionality required by modern marketers. Its “smarter partner marketing platform” helps businesses drive performance from every partnership: affiliates, influencers, referring customers, media buying partners, and more.
With robust features that are constantly updated to suit your marketing needs, Everflow helps make partnership marketing your best channel.
Best for: Fairly large businesses experienced in the performance marketing space, that want to run different partnerships
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| $750+/month; custom plan also available | Free demo available | In-platform live chat, email, phone, support tickets, helpdesk, pre-launch training calls, full data and setup migrations | 4.82 (158 reviews) |
Key features
- Track performance without using links: Go past traditional tracking links that drive more performance from more types of partners, including direct linking, tracking code URLs, and impression tracking
- EverXchange curated partner marketplace: Connect with partners driving performance through social media platforms, native advertising, search engine marketing (SEM), and more
- Deep reporting and analysis at scale: Easily break down partner performance by each placement, with drill-down reporting that’s fast and in real-time
Our take: Everflow lets you manage several types of partners and performance campaigns, and they also have a partner discovery solution to help you strategically launch campaigns. However, current clients report that it’s hard to navigate and use. And we wonder if the partner discovery solution is similar to a network, or if you still maintain control over partner data.
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Partnerize
Partnerize helps brands unlock the full potential of their partnerships, elevating the channel into a primary business driver. Its partner automation platform is an end-to-end, SaaS-based solution for forming, managing, analyzing, and predicting the future results of your partner marketing programs.
Partnerize delivers the performance marketing software and tools to automate workflows, optimize performance, and maximize your return on media investment.
Best for: Businesses okay with sacrificing some flexibility to a partner management network, that want optimized partner discovery tools
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Not listed | Free demo | Live chat, phone, learning catalog, learning resources hub | 4.55 (71 reviews) |
Key features
- Partner discovery: Leverage the AI-powered partner discovery tool that individually analyzes all active partners and recommends those that can drive great scale for your campaigns
- More commission options: Set partnership management commission terms that align to specific KPIs, like acquisition, reactivation, AOV, and LTV
- Track every customer action: Track every buyer action, from first-click to conversion, and pair events with no limits
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Benefits of using performance marketing software
Now that you’ve seen the top performance marketing platforms, let’s review the benefits of using one. Performance marketing has been growing in popularity in recent years. It’s completely trackable, transparent, and very low risk. You only pay after the desired action is complete – no unclear, upfront costs.
Built-in analytics and customizable dashboards present a clear picture of how all your performance marketing campaigns are doing. And thanks to advances in tracking and attribution, performance marketing software can measure almost every action so you can see what’s working and what’s not.
There are many benefits to using performance marketing software for your campaigns:
- Brings important campaign data all in one place
- Accessible by the entire team
- Real-time data collection and tracking
- Easy to perform and analyze A/B testing
- Builds brand awareness and customer engagement
- Automatic attribution and performance reporting
- Integration with other platforms and software
- Payout management
- Email notifications
- Fraud protection and added security
Of course, the exact features and benefits depend on the performance marketing platform, as you’ve seen above. But by choosing one that streamlines and analyzes your campaign data, you can better optimize your performance marketing to increase results and ROI.
Is performance marketing software right for you?
Performance marketing can benefit almost every business. And if you’re currently running (or thinking of running) a performance marketing campaign, dedicated software is a big help.
Over the years, performance marketing has grown to encompass different media channels and payment models.
For example, affiliate marketing is a subset of performance marketing that gives commission for every sale an affiliate generates. Or a company can publish sponsored content on another site, and pay for every visitor who ends up booking a free trial.
Note: Performance marketing ties payments to measurable actions, like a lead, sale, or other conversion. While some marketing may be performance-based, like SEO or brand strategy, they aren’t technically performance marketing because you don’t pay for results.
If you’re more interested in software for other marketing campaigns, here are a few options:
- Top digital marketing software tools
- Affiliate marketing tools
- Referral software solutions
- Marketing automation software
- The best lead generation software
Performance marketing platforms: Wrapping things up
Performance marketing combines strategy and technology to help you get the most out of your campaigns. It’s completely measurable and trackable – down to every click.
Using a performance marketing platform can help you manage all your ongoing partnerships and campaigns. Done right, performance marketing can deliver win-win opportunities for all parties involved.
