Advanced use cases overview
Affiliate marketing is a dynamic ecosystem that continues to evolve. While many businesses leverage basic affiliate tracking to monitor sales and commissions, advanced users find creative ways to maximize both performance and transparency. In this article, we explore two sophisticated use cases that go beyond standard affiliate tracking.
Launching and managing an affiliate program for your advertisers
Advanced affiliates sometimes don’t just track affiliate referrals—they manage the entire affiliate ecosystem. A platform or business can act as both an advertiser and a publisher simultaneously:
As an Advertiser: They set up affiliate programs for their clients. They can act as the sole affiliate for a program or invite other affiliates to join.
As a Publisher: They promote these affiliate programs to their own audience, earning commissions while also helping advertisers reach more customers.
Benefits: This dual role gives full visibility into the customer journey, allows faster detection of tracking issues, and strengthens communication between affiliates and advertisers.
This scenario mostly applies when advertisers are not running affiliate marketing campaigns and do not plan to, but there is a proactive affiliate willing to manage it on their behalf.
There’s a case study our team prepared for you about a user who made it work this way. You can find it here: Cashway’s Secret to Success: Leveraging Tapfiliate as Both Affiliate and Advertiser
Single affiliate operating as an affiliate network
Another advanced use case is when a single affiliate manages multiple sub-affiliates, effectively operating as a mini affiliate network.
How It Works
Some affiliate networks have dashboards where they manage multiple affiliates. If one of these networks wants to work with an advertiser using Tapfiliate, they can use postback integration to synchronize tracking events between systems:
Clicks and Conversions: Events are first tracked in Tapfiliate and then sent to the affiliate network dashboard via postback.
Affiliate Link Management: The network generates referral links for its affiliates based on the link created by Tapfiliate. To the advertiser, it appears as if only one affiliate is participating in the program, while on the network side, multiple sub-affiliates are managed.
If there’s no option to create unique affiliate links in the network’s system, to maintain proper tracking and attribution for each sub-affiliate, the network can use Tapfiliate’s sub_id feature. By assigning a unique sub_id to each sub-affiliate, all referrals and conversions can be accurately tracked without affecting the advertiser’s view of a single affiliate.
Benefits:
Simplified management for advertisers: they see one affiliate, reducing administrative complexity.
Flexibility for networks: multiple sub-affiliates can be tracked individually.
Accurate performance reporting: each sub-affiliate’s contributions are measurable via sub_id.
NEXT STEPS
Now that you’ve explored advanced ways to scale your performance, ensure your account is fully optimized for a smooth experience.