Affiliate platforms are companies that intermediate and manage both marketers and advertisers, operating as brokers.
The core of affiliate marketing software is tracking the various aspects of a given action, that are commonly categorized in eight types: Tracking refers to user-client IP detection, browser detection, marketer's affiliate referral and advertiser's completed transaction.
Although affinity marketing refers to marketing to persons sharing the same interests, the derived affiliate networks is closely related to sales channels and sales campaigns paying sales commissions, the reason why a solid and reliable software is required to prevent fraud and provide security and privacy for the parties involved in the transactions.
"In fact, regardless of your marketing activity, tracking a conversion has no real value unless you can attribute it to the traffic source, keyword and campaign that brought the user in the first place.
The attribution model applies a business rule that credits a tracked conversion to the first or last affiliate that referred the visitor to the merchant's website.