Affiliate Networks - Bad User Experience (15)
This post is going to be me complaining a bit, but I think it's a valid gripe.
So many of the networks I sign up for have a terrible user interface, slow servers, slow page loads and can be very cumbersome to navigate. It's hard to sort though offers, many have poor filtering or no filtering options and it can take forever to sign up for offers.
It's interesting in an industry that is all about maximizing CTR/ROI, Conversions, page load speeds etc, the very networks providing the offers spend very little time incorporating these elements into their business models. Especially when it's proven to drastically influence the bottom line.
Most of the time I just go back to a network I'm comfortable with because it's too frustrating to search offers on the other networks.
Affiliate Networks Employees / Owners
It's a lot of work on our end to find good offers and sign up for them along with the countless other things, like researching, building landers, testing traffic sources, optimizing, setting up tracking etc. A few $$ in developers on your end could save us tons of time and make you much more $$ because I'll actually promote your offers instead of bouncing from your site because it's such a burden to use.
Of course, there are some networks that do an excellent job at this and I thank you for that, it makes a big difference.
I would have to agree with you on this. Some affiliate networks that are quite big already are still running on CAKE platform. I think it is time for these guys to give a better UI to their users.
Cake is horrible, but at least it’s consistent across networks. I’d rather one terrible interface than having to figure out the tracking weirdness and quirks of ten custom trackers
Worth checking out the cake API, pretty straightforward to have a developer build a tools that pulls in all the info from your networks
Yes, also agree. I use also Cake for my own agency, but it's not so bad as most of people think. To be honest you need now a good team and big money to build your own platform, which we will fast and useful.
But based on my experience I can say - The better platform - the worse offers 
Often really good networks have very shitty platforms, but offers can be really good.
Originally Posted by mrbraun
But based on my experience I can say - The better platform - the worse offers
Often really good networks have very shitty platforms, but offers can be really good.What would you say is your preferred interface? CAKE is def popular with networks because of the functionality for the network/adv.
We've taken to using a specific title format for offers to kind of help mitigate the issues you describe, not to mention the standard vertical and traffic type designations... That being said, any direct and specific input you guys have I'd, personally, love to hear. I'm sure my fellow network reps would too.
On one hand I agree with you - there's a lot of room for improvement to network interfaces and some are pretty terrible.
On the other, I think it's a small gripe and in no way should be holding you back. A good AM generally makes things pretty easy for you pasting links in Skype and setting you up with the right offer(s), so you shouldn't really need to be browsing through vast lists of offers anyway.
I would say of all the networks that I am currently signed up with,
I believe this all depends on a concrete affiliate's preference. Some are fine with a not-that-well-developed platform, as far as a network provides great offers and support. Others are focusing on the user interface. It really depends. What's important for any network to do is to listen to its affiliates. Thank you @wes888 for your opinion, it's really great to see our work being appreciated, but our approach of building an in-house platform and improving the platform navigation is mainly due to our attention to what our affiliates ask for. Simple 
And the fact of affiliates asking for more is normal, taking into account the industry's development. Thinking of affiliate marketing couple of years ago, there was no problem to work with any kind of platform, as long as there are converting offers and a good volume of traffic provided.
Nowadays, with so many tools developed for affiliates and so many affiliate networks operating on a same market, it's a matter of healthy competition for networks to focus on improvement based on affiliates' feedback. As the industry grows, we need to grow too.
All you need to do on the platform is apply for offers, get your link and setup postback. Most of the offer research should be through your relationship with your AM.
I think you are looking at it like it was Amazon, where you browse through offers.
I actually prefer that networks standardise on Cake. I find it annoying to be trying to troubleshoot why my postback won't work on some proprietary platform. That takes time away from running campaigns.
@wizler I hear you, for me relationships with networks are similar to dating. Sooner or later you will find exactly what you're looking for and when you do, you're not gonna wanna leave. And it will probably be not even what you thought you were looking for in the fist place
I know many networks that use CAKE or HasOffers.
CAKE and Hasoffers are dinosaurs and too old to fairly compete in the growing ad tech/affiliate SaaS market. I agree that their APIs are well documented and structured (say, Hasoffer’s webhooks is a good feature) and that their UX & visual patterns might be user friendly and ... handy. Both companies provide excellent customer & technical support.
But they both use old technology stacks behind their SaaS that are hard to scale and expensive to maintain - this is the weakest side. I can hardly believe that CAKE or TUNE will be able to migrate to a new tech stack. Perhaps, it is better to develop a new backend.
Look at the number of new frameworks, databases and libs that have been popularized over the last few years: node.js, mongodb, react, redux... New tech stacks allow for faster redirects & data aggregations at lower cost, which is the core of affiliate tracking and reporting.
So, I think that in near future many networks will be likely to change their current SaaS providers (incl. CAKE) for fresh, affordable and faster affiliate management platforms backed up with new technologies.
I agree, there are newer technologies that can help build better and more optimised platforms.
On the other hand, it's very hard for a new player to build such a complex platform, match all the features of the competitors while having zero revenue coming in and no clients list.
Also for most networks it's a huge pain to migrate to a new platform, moving all offers , accounting etc etc.
That's why I think not too many competitors are coming up.
I think Cake and HasOffers are decent alternatives compared to the ones when I started AM ( LInkTrust , DirectTrack etc ).
Grab the top offers report, and start there. Randomly searching for offers has a slim chance of yielding a winner.
I believe that Cake is still a fairly well platform, and has been one of the most stable ones to work with, even though it's a bit old. In the end a good Affiliate Manager makes the affiliate's life much easier by providing insight knowledge on the networks best offers.
I do like custom platforms from certain networks, but a lot of them are not too stable in my opinion.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum