Tune affiliate tracking Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing

Tune is an affiliate management platform that serves direct-to-consumer, subscription-based, and financial service brands. You might recognize big names like Groupon and Zaful on their customer roster. But how compatible is Tune with your brand’s affiliate program? What does pricing look like, and which features make it a solid choice for affiliate software? We’ll answer those questions and more in this comprehensive guide about the Tune affiliate tracking tool, and present Tapfiliate as an affordable alternative for smaller businesses.

Tune Affiliate and Referral Tracking

Tune’s affiliate tracking features offer real-time conversion and event tracking through deep links and universal affiliate tracking links that you can customize for affiliates. All that data gets plugged into filterable reporting, which you can see in real-time. The platform also offers cross-channel performance optimization to make the most of the data it tracks for each customer.

Tune Features

Let’s dive into more of Tune’s features and what customers are saying about the platform: 

Partner, Manage and Pay Affiliates Easily

Tune offers affiliate management features to streamline brand affiliate marketing programs from onboarding to payouts. The software helps you consolidate all your affiliate partners and respective commission payouts in one place, helping you easily view your progress on a user-friendly dashboard. Furthermore, Tune has an interactive campaign management tool that helps you manage multiple campaigns across multiple affiliates. It also offers full transparency to your affiliates and you as a brand via granular reporting and filterable dashboards on both ends. 

Payment processing is automated with integrated accounts payable workflows, international payment processing, and there’s even an integration with Payoneer; however, we noticed one Verified User in Marketing found it difficult to stay on top of payout history: 

Some functionality [isn’t] as intuitive, which makes it inconvenient to execute certain needs; i.e. payout groups and rules, and lack of simplified documentation of payout history makes it difficult for our accounting teams to perform proper audits.

On a more positive note, Tune customers tend to cite satisfaction with its performance management features, as the platform offers real-time reporting and useful insights to improve your affiliate marketing strategy. 

Customer Support

Tune’s customer support comes in a 24/7 email format, with a categorized drop-down menu to help you find relevant information for your queries: technical support, billing support, Tune Pay.

Most reviewers have good things to say about Tune’s customer support, praising response time and competence. 

System and Data Security

Tune has a few robust security features to protect customer data and maintain fraud detection, including:

• SOC2 Type II & SOC 1 Type II certification
• Verifiable payments
• Compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Customization

Brands can customize commission payouts, pay periods, currencies, and approvals across different affiliate groups. Customers also enjoy the platform’s role-based permissions that help streamline access across large teams.

Furthermore, Tune offers customization potential through its two-way API that goes over 650 endpoints. On top of that, they offer separate customization via their separate developer and consulting services for their customers, where they can build custom elements and solutions for brands. Their services might cover tasks like onboarding and branded elements, platform migration, and even completely custom features not offered on the platform. 

Analytics

Tune’s reporting and analytics help you track important conversion data on apps, desktop, and mobile web. Brands can see click and conversion specs in real-time via cookieless, native postback capabilities for tracking on a user-friendly chart that displays conversion values and numbers. 

Reports are downloadable and can display reversed and refunded conversions, too. You can also stream all the data Tune tracks into your internal system or a third-party system via its integrations or custom exporting features. 

Tune Integrations

Tune offers a wide range of direct integrations with customer relationship software tools, email marketing platforms, and payment processors like Payoneer. But they also offer completely custom integrations through their API and dedicated developer services. 

Tune Pricing

All of Tune’s subscription plans come with 24/7 email customer support, promo codes (coupon codes), fee-based onboarding and partner payments, real-time reporting, desktop and mobile tracking, and a minimum of 300 conversions (more as you go up the tiers). Partner recruitment features are available as add-ons to the scale and contract plans.

Here are some more specifics about each tier’s offerings and pricing:

• Bootstrap: $599/month. Up to 300 tracked conversions per month, 24/7 email support, and all the basic features listed above.
• Scale: $1,500/month. Up to 2,500 tracked conversions per month, customer success manager, email, live chat, and phone customer support, performance automation, funnel metrics, time-to-action reports. 
• Contract: Custom pricing. Personalized product training, program migration, fully automated event delivery, development teams support, 2,500+ conversions tracked per month. 

Overall, Tune is a bit pricier than other competitors in the market. Furthermore, we noticed a review from Rakesh Sharma, an SEO analyst, citing a price increase without notice:

Tune Customers

Sometimes TUNE increases the prices without any notice.

Tune serves a wide variety of clients in the web services, ecommerce, SaaS, financial, and tech services. Many of them are brands that bring in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. 

Here are some examples of their clients:

• Prodege: Loyalty and Rewards brand; $100 to $200 million in annual revenue; US and UK majority customer base

• Credit Sesame: Fintech offering loans and credits; $25 to $50 million in annual revenue; US brand

• Zaful: Retail ecommerce; over $1 billion in revenue; US and European customer base

Tune Reviews

Tune’s reviews are generally positive, like their average 4.6-star rating on popular review site Capterra. Positive notes include praise for its management features for affiliate marketing campaigns, premium customer support, majority uptime, and user-friendly affiliate marketing dashboards. Critical reviews lament the platform’s high price point, difficulty in toggling geographically based payouts, and high learning curve. 

How to Figure Out Which Affiliate Software Would be Best for Your Business

The affiliate software market is expected to surpass $30 billion in market size by 2028. Meaning? You have a ton of software to choose from. Here are some expert tips to help you narrow things down:

Figure Out What You Need

Start with your marketing and affiliate goals. Is your affiliate program leaking with commissions that don’t generate long-term customers or high order value? Are you having trouble identifying poor-performing affiliates? Or maybe you need support expanding your affiliate network. 

Consider what you need and rank your top three priorities. Then, you can review software features and reviews to see if a particular software has helped another brand meet that same need.

Look at What’s Available on The Marketplace

Begin with a simple Google search to get an idea of what comes up in your area or niche. You might also reach out within your network to see if digital marketers you know have good experiences with a particular software—those should be at the top of your list. 

Find Out What Features Are a Must For Your Business

Return to your original business goals for an affiliate software: does each software in your roster offer features to make those goals happen? For example, a brand that wants to improve affiliate engagement should look for software that offers branded creatives to make promotions easier for their partners. Similarly, a brand that craves more strategic insights should prioritize software with custom filters and segmentation for reporting and dashboards. 

Another important thing to consider is the price point across software with those features. One might be more expensive than the other—but if you’re in need of a specific feature and reviews look great, it might be worth it to spend the extra dough. 

Find Out What Integrations They Have Available And if it Works For Your Business

Every marketer has an existing tech stack, whether that’s a fully automated series of business processes via Zapier, email marketing streamlining with Mailchimp, or very simple day-to-day organization via Microsoft Suite and Excel. The right affiliate software for you will integrate with tech tools you use everyday. 

Another pro tip? Cross-reference softwares with your ideal integrations with customer reviews that mention those integrations. The last thing you need is to pay a premium for a specific, direct integration only for it to not work well. 

Look at Your Budget

Here’s the thing: the highest-tier subscription for a cloud-based, well-reviewed affiliate management platform might not be worth it if it takes up half your marketing budget. Meaning? You have to balance needs with wants when it comes to affiliate marketing solutions. 

It also doesn’t hurt to check out reviews to assess value for money. Use your non-negotiable list of features and corresponding reviews to prioritize software accordingly.

Try it Out

Did someone say free trial? That’s a must when selecting an affiliate marketing platform. You won’t know how each feature, integration, or dashboard feels until you actually try it. Most software offer a 1-2 week free trial with access to customer support so you can test out each feature. 

Pro tips? Know exactly what you want to test within the software before you start. This saves you a ton of time and helps you make the most of the trial. Schedule time for the testing process and give your marketing team or anyone else who will interact with your affiliate program lots of notice to ensure they can feel out the software as well.  

Check The User Experience

You can assess user experience through customer reviews as well as your experience with the platform’s free trial. Consider how you feel navigating the software: is it easy to navigate from point A to B? Does it have a simple interface that’s clean and visually intuitive? Do you feel confident toggling the features and customizing your experience? You might also check what previous customers have to say about the platform’s user-friendliness and learning curve.

Look at Security Measures

Ever noticed a particularly click-heavy affiliate? It’s worth looking into. In 2022, brands lost a combined $3.4 billion to affiliate fraud. If you want to avoid paying commissions on fake individual clicks and conversions, make sure your affiliate software has robust fraud prevention features and ones that are committed to data privacy. This might look like:

• GDPR compliance: EU law that helps businesses protect customer data
• IP address flags: Alerts for when affiliates and customers have the same IP address
• Manual affiliate approvals: Option to review each affiliate before you accept them into your program

Psst. Tapfiliate has all these fraud prevention features—peep them here. 

Use Customer Support to Check The Experience

You can have the most robust reporting features, user-friendly interface, and budget-friendly affiliate software. But guess what? None of that matters if you have a bug or other barrier blocking you from properly engaging with or paying your affiliates. In some cases, non-responsive customer support teams can directly impact your program’s ROI. Less severe but still not ideal, a poor customer support experience can discourage your marketing team and hurt your operational efficiency. 

That’s why it’s vital to pick an affiliate marketing tool with responsive customer support, ideally including multiple communication streams. This might appear as email support, live chat, premium call support, or even knowledge bases of articles that answer common questions. 

A Flexible Alternative to Tune: Tapfiliate Affiliate Tracking Software

Tune offers robust reporting and customization features that might appeal to larger businesses looking to scale. But if you’re looking for an affordable affiliate management platform and value affiliate engagement features like triggered email templates and flexible commissions, Tapfiliate might be a better fit for your affiliate program. 

Tracking and Attribution in Real-Time

Be the first to know when a customer clicks on your website or makes a purchase via an affiliate’s promotional efforts. Our accurate tracking and real-time attribution gives you fresh eyes on the latest developments in your affiliate program through direct, custom affiliate links, discount codes, and third-party tracking. 

You can view all this juicy data in our user-friendly, filtrable dashboards to get strategic insights about what’s working and what isn’t working in your affiliate program. Notice an affiliate performing lower than others? View their full history to compare and catch any snags before they become a problem. 

Integrations With a Wide Variety of Solutions

Tapfiliate is proud to offer over 34 integrations to all your favorite business software, whether it’s customer relationship management tech like Salesforce, email marketing tools like Mailchimp, or payment processors like Stripe. We also integrate with dedicated ecommerce tools like Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as to Zapier for unlimited automation potential. If you don’t see your favorite tech stack tools on our direct integration list, you can leverage Javascript or our Rest API to create custom integrations that work for your business. 

Recruit Your Customers to Promote You

Nobody promotes your products better than the people who bought them by choice. Aka, your customers! Tapfiliate helps you recruit this valuable group of people to promote your products with its automated referral program. Our software sends automated emails to customers at different milestones, inviting them to start promoting your products and referring new customers for discounted products. 

Provide Flexible Commissions For Your Affiliates

Wanna really impress that niche influencer affiliate with thousands of potential customers as their followers? Then you better offer them a seriously attractive commission package to promote your products. The result? Seriously engaged affiliates, which translates to upgraded conversion rates and skyrocketing affiliate traffic to your site. 

That’s all possible with Tapfiliate’s flexible commissions, where you can increase commissions by performance milestones or manually adjust commissions by affiliate individuals or groups. You can even offer product-specific commissions to encourage affiliate sales for specific products—perhaps overstock or last season’s items. 

Automate Your Work

Today’s day and age runs too quickly for anyone that hasn’t jumped into automation. We know you have tons of tasks that take up time in your day-to-day affiliate marketing. That’s why we made it a priority to provide a Zapier integration in our affiliate management software. Whether it’s auto-approving an affiliate, increasing a performance-based commission rate, or sending out a welcome to our affiliate program email, our webhooks and workflow automations keep your program running as smoothly as possible. 

Customize Your Affiliate Program

Whether it’s branded elements on the platform dashboard and interface, custom onboarding fields for affiliate approval, or perfectly tailored commissions for ultimate affiliate engagement, Tapfiliate’s affiliate tracking platform allows for serious customization potential. 

Stellar Customer Support

We pride ourselves on technical excellence in our affiliate management features—but the real magic happens with the human element. After all, performance marketing is all about relationships, so we prioritize the most important ones in our business, and that’s with our customers. You can count on access to 24/7 live chat no matter what subscription tier you’re on. Plus, our customer service reps are trained to answer questions comprehensively, with screenshots, video demonstrations, and descriptive text to ensure your understanding as much as possible. All this contributes to our impressive 94% customer service excellence ranking in Intercom. 

Tapfiliate Pricing

Tapfiliate offers three pricing tiers that make the platform accessible to every kind of business, no matter how much revenue you’re bringing in. You’ll have access to real-time reporting and filtration features, ample tracked conversions and clicks, custom and direct integrations, affiliate onboarding, and communication functionalities. 

Here’s a bit more on what each plan offers: 

• Essential: $89/month. An affordable affiliate management plan that offers up to 200,000 tracked clicks and 75,000 tracked conversions.
• Pro: $149/month. A scaled-up subscription that increases your clicks and conversions tracked to 500,000 and 250,000, respectively. It also includes custom onboarding fields for affiliate recruitment and performance incentives. 
• Enterprise: Contact us for pricing. Our most extensive affiliate management plan that offers no click or conversion limit for tracking, along with premium support and custom verbiage.

Tune Affiliate Management vs Tapfiliate Affiliate Management

Let’s look at how Tune and Tapfiliate compare re: tracking capabilities, customization, pricing, and general user satisfaction with both affiliate platforms.

Pricing

Tapfiliate’s subscription tiers are much more affordable than Tune’s and offer more flexibility. 

Our Essential plan is perfect for small businesses, or businesses just starting out with affiliate marketing with its low-commitment $89 per month pricing. Similarly, our pro plan is $149 and offers more key features. For our Enterprise plan you’ll need to get in touch with our customer service team. All our top features, including custom verbiage, premium support, and unlimited tracking for affiliate programs, are accessible for under $500 per month, whereas Tune only offers a maximum 300 tracked conversions for their $599 beginner plan. See the difference? Furthermore, Tapfiliate doesn’t require one-year commitments from our customers. Tune requires it for their Pro plan, which small business owner David B. found to be exploitative:

I think the new pricing structures of 1 year commitments on pro feels like a cash grab – i’d just reduce support for Pro and have alerts go out to Pro users via SMS/email

Tracking and Reporting

Both platforms offer real-time reporting features with filtration capabilities, but Tapfiliate stands out with more customizable dashboards and greater segmentation potential. 

While Plalogenics S. had positive things to say about Tune’s customer support and filtration functions, they weren’t totally blown away by Tune’s reporting features: 

Reporting can be a bit slow having to jump between conversion reports, event tracer logs, and other pages, but this has been partly addressed with the conversion data now available with a click in the reports.

Affiliate Program Management

Both platforms offer dashboard views of important affiliate performance stats in an accessible format with the ability to export data as well. Additionally, both Tune and Tapfiliate have custom commissions and payout options for affiliates. Still, Tapfiliate stands out with its custom, branded elements, affiliate dashboards, triggered communications, and ability to share creatives to smooth out the affiliate’s workflow and engage them further. 

Customization

Tapfiliate and Tune both offer API-based customization for custom integrations and branded elements. However, Tune does offer more customization potential through their separate consulting and technical development services, which could even include completely new features if a brand so desired. 

In terms of commissions, both platforms offer custom commission structures and payouts depending on the affiliate group. Tapfiliate uniquely offers product-specific commissions to help brands offload excess inventory. 

Support

Both Tune and Tapfiliate have strong customer service reviews and ratings on all the popular review sites. Customers for each platform cite satisfaction with speedy replies and competent representatives. The only thing that stands out with Tapfiliate is access to live chat support versus Tune’s isolated email support, as well as Tapfiliate’s more competitive pricing for tiers that include premium support options. 

FAQs about Tune Affiliate Tracking Software

What is Tune?

Tune is an affiliate marketing software that caters to businesses in the subscription services, financial services, and direct-to-consumer niches. It offers various tracking, reporting, and management features at a slightly higher price than similar software competitors.

What are the Limitations of Tune?

Tune is much pricier than most affiliate management software on the market. Additionally, some customers report dissatisfaction with its endless add-ons that drive pricing higher, as well as a lack of intuitiveness in some features. 

Who are Tune’s Competitors?

Tune is an affiliate management software for subscription-based, financial, and B2C businesses. Some of their competitors include: 

• Tapfiliate: A dynamic, affordable, cloud-based affiliate program that supports SaaS, ecommerce, and dropshipping businesses with affiliate program management and scaling.
• RedTrack: Affiliate and ad-tracking software for brands and ad agencies that offers affiliate tracking and customer journey insights.
• AffiliateWP: This is a WordPress plugin that adds affiliate management features to websites hosted on WordPress.
• Ambassador: This affiliate program software caters to medium and large business sizes with affiliate tracking and word-of-mouth marketing. 
• UpPromote: This affiliate marketing tool is dedicated to supporting ecommerce owners (specifically Shopify store owners) in managing their affiliate programs. 

If you’re looking for more Tune alternatives, check these out.

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