The Ultimate Guide on Monitoring Your Affiliate Marketing

Investing in brand monitoring is a smart option for your affiliate program. It can provide you with information on how effectively your affiliate program is performing as well as how your rivals are promoting their products.

Here are some pointers to get you started if you want to use this kind of monitoring to strengthen your affiliate program.

What Is Brand Monitoring, and Why Is It So Important?

The phrase "brand monitoring" encompasses several monitoring procedures that you may employ to find out how many people are mentioning your brand. Additionally, it might help you understand why people are talking about you and what they think of your brand as a whole.

You may better grasp the advantages of your numerous marketing initiatives with the aid of brand monitoring. Since internet monitoring is the main way that affiliate marketing is done, it can also help you determine how often affiliates are creating material and what proportion of your mentions are sponsored vs earned.

Why Should You Be Monitoring Your Competitors?

Brand monitoring is not limited to using it for your own company. It's also typical for businesses to keep an eye on the brands of their rivals. In this manner, you can compare your statistics to those of your most notable rivals.

Additionally, you can observe if your rivals have begun experimenting with new marketing techniques and whether those techniques appear to be effective. Knowing the tactics used by your rivals is crucial to knowing how to use your own.

Top Free Brand Monitoring Tools

If you’re just getting started with brand monitoring, then you probably don’t need any especially robust tools. You need tools that are good enough to help you develop a brand monitoring strategy. Here are a few free tools that can help you start understanding your brand’s identity online.

Mention

Mention is a great way to start looking into real-time search and generalized brand content, especially if your company is fairly small and you’re just starting to discover brand monitoring. It offers up to 1,000 mentions per month for free, with monitored websites including Twitter, Instagram, and many content publishing sites.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is unique because it’s Twitter-specific. It’s an official Twitter tool, allowing you to follow your notifications, account feed, and mentions all at once. It’s also easy to set up a search stream that will allow you to see all mentions of any keyword, which may be your webpage or your brand name, and you can even choose to see tweets with a specific number of engagements or sent from a specific location. As an official Twitter tool, it’s also free forever.

Social Searcher

Social Searcher gives you access to specific information about brand mentions, including an analytical breakdown of mentions by source, time posted, and general sentiment. The free plan allows you to track these keywords manually, with paid plans available to set up email alerts and consistent general monitoring. It also tracks many different sources, like Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube, among others.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a tool that allows you to get email alerts when new web content shows up for a specific topic. That topic can be as wide as the term “Google” or as narrow as your brand’s specific hashtag. If you don’t mind hand-sifting through whatever information Google’s very wide net catches, then this can be a great starting point for brand monitoring.

Top Paid Brand Monitoring Tools

If you’re interested in taking your brand monitoring to the next level, then you’re going to need to opt for paid brand monitoring tools eventually. Here are a few of the top paid tools to consider.

Brandwatch (Previously Falcon.io)

Brandwatch has been around since 2010, which means it has quite a track record. It’s especially great for large brands with a multinational audience, as it allows you to track conversations about your brand in multiple languages. You can also identify the common hashtags and topics used in these conversations. With over 600 metrics available for tracking and unlimited search inquiries, it’s not hard to see why Brandwatch is so popular.

Brand24

Brand24 is another older brand monitoring tool, founded in 2011. It allows you to access brand mentions in podcasts, social media, blogs, forums, and videos and can segment those mentions into positive, negative, and neutral discussions, with instant notifications when it identifies a negative review. Plus, the pricing is great for an entry-level company.

Hootsuite

If you’re currently using Hootsuite for your social media management, then Hootsuite Insights can be a great add-on to quickly get information about your brand. Plus, if you’re already paying for Hootsuite, the Hootsuite Insights add-on can be an extremely cost-effective option to help you kick-start your brand monitoring system.

Semrush

Although its main function is to track SEO data, Semrush can also offer you brand monitoring capabilities. Although it mostly watches websites connected to content, it can also monitor Twitter and Instagram. It can quantify traffic from online mentions that contain links. You might not need to upgrade to access brand monitoring if you currently use Semrush for SEO management, despite the fact that the cost can be somewhat costly.

The Final WordThrough brand monitoring, you may transform unprocessed online data into useful insights that let you adjust your marketing campaigns. But, you must first have marketing campaigns that you can modify if you want to leverage that data. To ensure that the data from your brand monitoring program can be connected to your affiliate marketing campaign, make sure you're using Refersion.