Top 5 VPN Tools For The Affiliate Marketer

Part I. Why check? The link is the technological foundation of the digital world. Just as well, it is the core of the affiliate marketing, basically “linking” the viewer through the publisher to the advertiser (not to mention all parties that come in between). What if the tracking link is broken? There are a number of reasons why and how this could happen, but the outcome is what they all have in common. The goal of the ad won’t be achieved. From the direct advertiser’s perspective – the potential customer, who’ve displayed the certain level of interest in their product or services by clicking on the ad, will get directed to an error page or get lost on one of the redirect pages. Lost potential customers = lost potential revenue. A broken link is a bad news for the publishers. While direct ones (app, website or blog owners) can suffer from tarnished reputation and the loss of potential revenue, it’s media buyers who risk the most. Sending prepaid traffic to the wrong destination is as good as throwing your dollars out of the window. Affiliate networks too can suffer from inactive offers if they’re not excluded from their lists. There’s obviously the question of reputation. As both publishers and advertisers can lose when the tracking link is off, they would try to partner up with networks that can assure such occurrences happen as rarely as possible. And there’s an obvious revenue loss when $ are spent on traffic to the link that leads nowhere. So how does one, regardless of the place in the affiliate chain, make sure the offer is active? Obviously by checking the link upon receiving. Let’s have a look at a couple of routes to do that. Part II. Fun and tricky ways to check your first 100 links. The first thing to try is to view the redirection chain manually. Import the tracking link into your mobile browser and see where it leads. However, if your device and GEO is not the one the offer is targeted to, the only thing you’d see is the links in the chain, no content+ the setting might lead you to the pages destinated for your own location. You can try using a VPN tool (and we’ve previously featured a comparative analysis of such software on our blog). Drawbacks: number of countries is very limited; low connection problems even when GEO is a country on the list of available ones; no particular device emulation option to check offers with precise targeting settings; many public IPs make it to the blacklists; you only see the final page. There are creative ways, invented by sole affiliate marketers, where you can employ people from the often targeted areas to check the links and send the results. Drawbacks: a whole lot of manual work looking for people from targeted countries with the specific devices, specific OS version and the desire to help you; this one basically depends on the quality of your communication skills, but how many people would do the checking and send you results (even if not detailed) for free? There just seems to be too much communication and too many people involved. You’d need to come up with a spreadsheet (make that plural) to monitor the whole bunch of offers you’re dealing with on a daily basis. Sounds like a lot of routine. Part III. How to check your affiliate links efficiently. Where there is routine, there is a software made to automate. If you’ve reached the level when you can brag about the number of offers you’re working with, it’s time to automate. Although some of the tools that can do the scanning have been in the industry before Orangear took up the job of creating Checker, there is a significant difference in performance. As with any theory, this one required a process of proving it right and this is what the second part of this article is about. The idea of creating a tool for verifying links came from our close partners – affiliate networks. With the number of offers they deal with on the monthly basis reaching far more 300k, they were obviously scanning tracking links automatically. The problems they’ve encountered is what we’ve tried to address in Checker, namely: speed, accessibility (especially when dealing with bulk) and the quality of results. If you’re more of a hands-on person, just try our Checker for free and compare it to other verification tools to see the difference. If you’re into my writing style and reading as a whole, kindly continue at your own risk! Speed. Orangear.Checker may not be the first solution for links verification. It is, however, fast and efficient enough to be in TOP 3. If you’re still not feeling like testing it yourself, take a look at our video comparison to measure the difference. Needless to say that high speed is a vital quality when you’re working with large numbers of offers. Nothing shows off the speed better than the video, but let’s count really quick: Let’s imagine you have 300 offers a day. Then, every +3 seconds to the waiting time into more than 91 hours a year. More than 3 days of waiting for your results. And Orangear Checker is more than 3 seconds faster, as you’ve seen on the video. Accessibility. For the new players and those who want to check our Checker (pun intended), we’ve come up with a Free plan, where you get 25 checks a day following a simple process of registration (we are GDPR compliant so don’t wait on unexpected emails from us). We’re also offering various plans that can fit both your needs and budgets. It’s been an interesting journey for both our partners and Orangear team to see how some of them have grown from tiny numbers of requests to bulk in the blink of an eye. Working with bulk. As our partners’ needs grew, we’ve come up with an API integration idea, to ensure that some automation can be achieved. Our point was in making it both fast and agile, thus as you receive the raw data on links and redirects in a form of API responses, it can be converted and displayed in the most preferable way within your own software. Working with bigger numbers of offers also inspired us to add the autocheck feature to our product. You can check the stability of an offer over time, thanks to the saved history, and make the data-based decision within your partnerships. The quality of the result. The market grows and the rebrokering chains get longer. This results in higher chances of various errors to occur on the way from the direct publisher to the direct advertiser. That’s why we wanted to get as far and deep as possible into that chain. The problem was solved with the dynamic nature of our Checker, as it allows to run past some common obstacles (e.g. JS) as well as to predict, which part of the page contains the necessary redirect. It helps to find a right end of the link. We also wanted to be able to provide a more detailed response than other solutions are offering. Let's have a quick look. One of the great tools to check your links offers this sort of response to the check request. And this is what our tool provides. And the "show request information" button holds these parameters: As a result, you get a clearer view of the chain: accurate data on the error (if occurred) – seeing the number of an error allows you to contact the providing party with a specific request, allowing them to take action to correct it; thorough information on the chain lets you gain access to the sources of your offer that are closer to or, in many cases, is a direct advertiser. This is a whole new level of possibilities for your business. There are obviously a couple of ways you can check your links to make sure the offer is active. And at the end of the day, choose the route that serves your needs and preferences. We just wanted to give you a choice. Update:  Just one month after the official release of Checker, we are presenting it’s first major update! It’s 10 times faster, and its API version received a couple of prominent features: Blacklist — get notified if one of the undesired domains pops up in your offers;  Express Check — check offers in bulk in under 60 seconds; Test Drive — test how our API version performs by connecting and running 25 free checks. Read on to find out more.

Сreating an app that is successful among users, engages them and increases your income is every developer’s goal. It’s also quite a challenge. No matter how good you are at understanding your potential clients’ needs, at best, you can make an educated guess about what will make them install, buy, and use your product times and times again. But why guess, when you can find out? While we can say that measuring everything is important to understand the whole picture. To make further decisions about improving your app, you need to gather data on: engagement (how, when, and where customers use your app and in which ways they connect with it); retention (the number of users that return after a certain period of time); monetization (Lifetime Value (LTV), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Return On Investment (ROI). This is where a mobile analytics tool could be really handy to provide you with all the data you need. There’s a number of tools on the market that provide most of the necessary features to help you understand your clients better. Looking for a perfect one, we came up with the list of the TOP 5 most popular and, as it seems, most convenient and effective mobile analytics tools that could aid you in achieving your goals. Researching the topic, we’ve discovered that some tools feature both performance and app marketing analysis, while others concentrate on one of those. Be aware that for this list we’ve decided to leave out mobile marketing tools. Take a look at our picks for the TOP 5 app performance analytics solutions.  app Localytics.com Mixpanel.com AppSee.com Amplitude.com Flurry.com demo yes yes yes yes  yes trial yes n/a yes  n/a  n/a Prices start from $/month 200 free n/a you have to request pricings free free deployment Cloud, SaaS, Web PC - Windows Mobile - Android Native Mobile - iOS Native Cloud, SaaS, Web Mobile - Android Native Mobile - iOS Native Cloud, SaaS, Web Mobile - Android Native Mobile - iOS Native Cloud, SaaS, Web Web Mobile - Android Native Mobile - iOS Native WatchOS support Online Business Hours Online Business Hours Online Business Hours Online Online metrics user segmentation yes yes yes yes yes action cohorts no yes yes yes yes MAU, WAU, DAU yes yes yes no no session lengths yes no yes no no session frequency yes no yes no no retention yes yes yes yes yes time in-app yes no yes no no screen flow yes yes yes yes yes acquisition yes no yes yes yes churn rate no no no no no drop off points no no no no no LTV yes yes no yes no real-time analytics yes yes yes yes yes data visualization yes yes yes yes yes integrations Marketo, Optimizely, Databox, Klipfolio, Improvado, Xplenty, Rakuten Aquafadas, Alooma, Etleap 59 apps including Marketo, Optimizely, Bitium, Salesforce, Zendesk Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce, Optimizely, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Crashlytics, Decibel Slack, Optimizely, Workato, Segment, Convertize, Outbound, Astronomer Asana, Basecamp, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Jira software, G suite, MailChimp, QuickBooks Online, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Shopify, Slack, Trello, Wrike, Xero, Zendesk, Zoho CRM a/b testing yes yes yes yes no API yes yes yes yes yes activity dashboard no yes yes no yes automatic notifications no yes yes no no behaviour tracking no yes yes no yes campaign analysis yes yes yes no no campaign management no yes yes no no conversion tracking yes yes no yes yes   Before you choose any app, make sure you’ve determined your goals, budget, required platforms and volume of traffic you’re counting on. Consider each column carefully in regards to chosen parameters to make an unbiased decision.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, both affiliate networks and publishers can benefit from VPN software. VPN, as in Virtual Private Network, is a tool that enables users to access websites and applications bypassing all geographic restrictions. Choosing one among more than 400 may be confusing and time-consuming. Our team had spent quite a while comparing different apps and that’s how this article was born. VPN can become handy when you need to check the availability of your offer with targeting for a specific, and definitely not yours, location. However, dealing with different types of offers, you will see that VPN has a limited usage for some, while others won’t benefit from these services whatsoever. Let’s make a quick detour to clear this out. CPI offers Both networks and publishers require VPN to test the installation process for the targeted GEO to make sure the process can go through and that every such event will count correctly in the system. However, if you need to check the installation from a specific device, you’ll have to get your hands on it first. There is another problem that may occur. Almost all the public IP-addresses are included to the fraud lists and it means that the installation may work just fine, but it would not be counted. CPM offers As no specific action needed from the user here, this model is the one that can almost fully benefit from the perks of VPN tools. Although, as most offers of this type come with a long rebrokering chain, you can’t hope for much more than 50% of certainty that what you see is what every targeted user will. The main problem is that no VPN app will show you neither the whole chain nor the problem that user may encounter (as in one of the retargeting links is broken, you’ll never be able to see which one that was). CPA offers If your main income comes from CPA offers, you can stop reading. As all VPN tools have very limited features when it comes to targeting, none will be able to provide you results you’re looking for. For those of you who work with CPI and CPM offers, here’s our pick for top 5 VPN services for affiliate marketing. name VyprVPN TunnelBear NordVPN IPVanishVPN StrongVPN # of IP adressess 200.000+ n/a n/a 40.000+ n/a # of servers 700+ ~1,000 4000+ 1000+ 40+ # of server locations 70+ 20+ 80+ 60+ 20+ internet kill switch yes no yes yes yes Dynamic server switching n/a n/a yes yes n/a # of simultaneous connections n/a 5 6 5 2 DNS leak protection yes n/a yes yes n/a protocols OpenVPN, L2TP/IPsec, PPTP and Chameleon OpenVPN IKEv2 PSec n/a PPTP, L2TP, OpenVPN ( TCP, UDP), IPSec and IKEv2 for IOS SOCKS5 web proxy PPTP, L2TP/IPSec, SSTP, or OpenVPN + VPN cloaking easy-to-use transparent policies optional dedicated IP addresses encrypted proxy extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers SmartPlay feature unlimited P2P traffic a no logs policy no data cap various customization options (from MTU size to HMAC authentication) - logging of connection data (connection times, IP addresses) configuration options are very limited can’t specify server city/province some servers don't connect poor customer support some locations that are on the list don't connect mobile apps for iOS, Android yes yes yes yes yes accepts cryptocurrency no yes yes yes n/a accepts PayPal n/a n/a yes yes n/a bandwidth unlimited n/a unlimited n/a unlimited free trial 3 days 7 days 3 days no, but they have 7-day money-back guarantee no, but they have 5-day money-back guarantee pricing 12 month plan (basic) - $5 per month 12 month plan (premium) - $6.67 per month 1 month plan - $9.95 Free service available 12 month plan - $4.99 per month 1 month plan - $9.99 24 month plan - $3.29 per month 12 month plan - $5.75 per month 1 month plan - $11.95 12 months - $6.49 per month 3 months - $8.99 per month 1 month - $10 12 month plan - $5.83 per month 1 month - $10   As you can see, all of the mentioned tools have quite similar standard features and the fee for 1 month is pretty much the same. So, before you choose TunnelBear for its cute bear-ish visuals, make sure to lay out your needs and priorities.  If you’re looking for a more detailed testing method, you might consider adding Orangear Checker to your platform to get: a list of all the rebrokering links; review of obstacles & problems along the way; 25% more reliable verification results due to the dynamic testing.