15+ Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins for Marketers and Merchants 2021

Are you wondering which are the best WordPress affiliate plugins for 2021? Or maybe you’re confused about what to consider while choosing an affiliate plugin out of many. Then you have come to the right place.

Affiliate marketing is all about earning money online. With affiliate marketing, you can choose products, promote them, and earn a specific amount of commission. The commission is received when people purchase the product from your affiliate link.

So here’s where the affiliate plugin comes in use. The affiliate plugin helps to generate affiliate links, register affiliates, and manage the commission that must be paid to the affiliates.

Here we’re with a list of affiliate plugins for both marketers and merchants, which’ll help make a wise decision when choosing a plugin. In this article, we’ve explained different affiliate plugins with their feature and pricing rate. Keep reading till the end of the article to know more about WordPress affiliate plugin.

What is a WordPress Affiliate Plugin?

Before we get into the WordPress affiliate plugin list, let’s discuss a short concept of affiliate marketing. In brief, affiliate marketing is a process of earning a reward or commission by promoting the products or services of your own company or other business ventures. It is a performance-based reward where you get paid based on sales made.

There are many tools and techniques in the market for successful affiliating marketing. Out of which affiliate plugin is also one of them. Affiliate plugin helps both merchants and affiliates to add, create, and manage the affiliate programs.

Affiliate plugins help to track the affiliate commission and performance. Moreover, from a single dashboard, you can register affiliates, organize payout and payment methods, and a lot more. If you’re a WordPress user and want to launch your affiliate marketing business from a WordPress website, feature-rich affiliate plugins are there to help you out.

Who are Affiliate Marketers and Merchants?

Coming here now, you have an idea of affiliate marketing. Now let’s move on to the concept of affiliate marketers and merchants.

Generally, affiliate marketers are the one who promotes or advertises other company products. They are also known as publishers, distributors, or advertisers. Being an affiliate marketer, you don’t need to own the products. Simply promote the merchant’s product or services and earn a commission. If you want to kick off, you can start a blog and make money online as an affiliate marketer.

Customers are the one who buys the product from affiliate marketers.

Merchants are the product owner or creator. They own the products or services and make them available to the people around them. The products can be anything from physical goods, clothing, software, etc. In fact, merchants pay a certain amount of commission to the marketers for selling their products.

WordPress Affiliate Marketing Plugins (For Marketers)

All the below listed plugins are perfect for those who want to sell other products and earn money. These plugins help to increase conversion and get more affiliate sales.

1. ThirstyAffiliates 

ThirstyAffiliates is one of the powerful affiliate marketing plugins. It helps to add, manage, and insert the affiliate links into the blog posts, pages, and even in comments. It is a most used plugin by marketers who can organize the affiliate link in a single place.

With ThirstyAffiliates, you don’t need to enter the URLs manually in the keyword. It automatically adds the affiliate link to the selected keyword. Moreover, you can create categories and put all the related links under the categories. For e.g., create a theme category and put all the affiliate links related to the theme in the theme category.

Features:

• ThirtyAffiliates lets you add images and banners to the affiliate links.
• The proactive link fixer makes sure that the links are always up to date.
• You can track all your links; check how many times it has been clicked and which of the links is the most popular one.
• It provides a full backup solution with the help of a WordPress backup solution.
• With the in-built link Cloaker feature, you can create small and pretty custom affiliate links.

Pricing:

ThirstyAffiliate comes with both free and premium versions. However, for most of the advanced features, you’ll need to upgrade it to premium versions. It costs around $49-$149 per year, depending on the features used.

2. Pretty Links

Pretty Links is one of the best affiliate WordPress plugins in the market today. From its name, we can assume that the plugin mostly focuses on making the affiliate link pretty. It automatically adds affiliate links to the specified keyword.

The affiliate plugin keeps track of every hit on the URL, manages them, and provides information about the hit. It generally gives info about the number of clicks on the link, unique clicks on the link, and other details such as IP address, OS, referring site, etc. The best part of this plugin is that it gives the option to see which affiliate link is working best for you.

Features:

• The plugin helps to shorten the affiliate links with your domain name.
• It helps to insert the links on the forums and comments on other blogs that help reach your site to many customers/audiences.
• It has a cookie-based system to track the visitor’s activity after they click on the affiliate link.
• The link tracking feature can be turned on/off upon the requirements.
• It gives the tracking report of every click per day on the WordPress admin dashboard.

Pricing:

Pretty Link is available on both free and premium plans. Premium price ranges from $149/year.

3. AdSanity

AdSanity is one of the best ad management WordPress affiliate plugins. It mainly focuses on promoting products from advertisements and managing them. Not only ads, but this plugin also helps to manage your affiliate campaigns.

With the help of widgets, shortcodes and templates tag it displays the ads anywhere on your WordPress site. It also categories the ads based on a single ad, group ad, and schedule ad. The plugin has ready-to-use addons for extending more functionality.

Features:

• It is a beginner-friendly and lightweight WordPress affiliate plugin.
• It gives the performance reports in graphical statistics. 
• You can set the start and end of your campaign and also overview its performance.
• You can insert self-hosted direct ads and network ads like Google AdSense on your WordPress site.
• At present, AdSanity offers two publishing options for ads, i.e., infinite or date-based.

Pricing:

AdSanity is a premium plugin. Its price range starts from $49/year – $489 for a lifetime.

4. Amazon Auto Links

Amazon Auto Links is one of the easiest to use affiliate plugins for managing the affiliate link. At first, it gives the option to choose the categories that best describe your site. After that, it automatically generates the affiliate link of the products that fall under the category.

You must sign up for Amazon Associates at the beginning to use the Amazon Auto Link. Also, all the generated links are tagged with your Amazon Associated ID. Moreover, you can also design your custom templates using HTML, CSS, PHP. For this, you must have good coding knowledge.

Features:

• It supports 18 Amazon locales and also works on a JavaScript disabled browser.
• Amazon Auto Link allows the automatic insertion of affiliate links on your site page and posts.
• You can filter your site’s product, which you don’t want to display them out.
• For making more clicks, you can create custom buttons and insert the affiliate link inside the button.
• You can set the image size up to 500 pixels and also shuffle your product list time and often. This doesn’t bore the visitors and display new products.

Pricing:

Amazon Auto Link is a freemium (Free and Premium) plugin. Premium price ranges from $57.98 for a single site.

5. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is one of the powerful Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. But it also tracks the performance of the affiliate links of your website. For this, you can simply enable the affiliate tracking feature to gain your affiliate marketing campaigns’ report.

With the MonsterInsights affiliate plugin, you’ll be able to identify the page that has the highest sales. Moreover, you’ll get advanced tracking options like outbound link tracking, affiliate link tracking, and SEO score tracking. Also, the reports can be viewed directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Features:

• It automatically tracks your affiliate link and ads on your site. No need for a complex setup.
• It gives an idea for creating new keywords to attract visitors to your site.
• The plugin is the GPDR (General Data Protection Regulation). It also offers a custom dimension setting to track authors, tags, categories, etc.
• After it tracks your affiliate link, you can collect the data and then optimize the affiliate link.
• MonsterInsights is compatible with eCommerce tools and other affiliate plugins like ThirstyAffiliates, PrettyLinks, and more.

Pricing:

MonsterInsights is a free WordPress plugin. It also has a premium version where pricing starts from $199/year to $399/year.

6. Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro is a referral software that manages and maintains your growing affiliate network. The software is designed especially for online stores and eCommerce websites to track and monitor the affiliate network. Moreover, it helps to reach out to many customers and make a huge amount of sales.

As an affiliate, you’ll get a custom ID that can be shared anywhere. It supports multiple unique tracking methods, so it’s considered as an accurate affiliate tracking software on the market. Similarly, it comes with an excellent customization feature. These features help you create unique affiliate campaigns, manage affiliate’s and track affiliate sales and commission rate.

Features:

• It gives different types of banners for promoting the products. They are banner rotators, discount coupons, flash banners, HTML banners, etc.
• It provides multilingual support to 36 languages at the moment.
• Post Affiliate Pro is compatible with other plugins like MemberPress, MarketPress, etc.
• It supports various affiliate link styles. You can choose a suitable affiliate link style according to the need.
• It offers a 24/7 support system if you have any problem regarding the plugin.

Pricing:

Post Affiliate Pro is a freemium (free and Premium) plugin. Premium price ranges from $97/month to $477/month.

7. Auto Affiliate Links 

Auto Affiliate Link is one of the amazing WordPress affiliate plugins that automatically adds affiliate links into your content. You can manually set the affiliate links and keywords where they should be placed in the content. The links can be extracted from Amazon, ClickBank, eBay, Shareasale, etc., and any other affiliate network.

When adding the links automatically, the content won’t be modified in any way. The best part is that the plugin’ll give you the most used keywords from your content where you can add the affiliate link. Also, you can limit the number of an affiliate link that is displayed in your content pages.

Features:

• It gives the option to make the link nofollow or dofollow, to open in a new tab or in the same tab.
• The plugin can set the frequency range of the link from very low to a very high level. At a low level, only 1 link is displayed, and at a high-level maximum of 5 links will be added to your content.
• It offers the option to set links to be cloaked or not.
• Auto affiliate link gives the most used 100 keywords from your content to add the affiliate link.
• It connects your newly created links to affiliate programs automatically.

Pricing:

Auto affiliate link comes with both free and premium versions. Premium version starts from $29/month to $499 for 5 years.

8. EasyAzon

EasyAzon is one of the best affiliate plugins for Amazon affiliates. It quickly creates Amazon affiliate links from your WordPress content editor. This is perfect for marketers who want to promote Amazon products from their websites.

With EasyAzon, you’ll get several link management tools. Rather than manually creating links from the Amazon.com website, you can create affiliate links direct to any product available for sale. Now you can use this affiliate link to share among others and recommend them to buy it.

Features:

• The plugin can create unique buttons for giving your site a professional look.
• The automatic link localization automatically converts the affiliate link to match the location of your website.
• It displays the product via a popup box on mouse hover.
• When a user clicks on the product, it automatically adds the product to the cart. This will increase the cookie length and give more time to earn a commission.
• It saves a lot of time since you can search/add products directly from the WordPress editor rather than logging into an Amazon account.

Pricing:

EasyAzon comes with both free and premium versions. The Premium version starts from $47 – $67. 

WordPress Affiliate Program Plugins (For Merchants)

1. Affiliate Royale

Affiliate Royale is the easiest affiliate management plugin. Designed especially for business owners, the learning curve is simple and requires a few minutes to set-up. The plugin mostly focuses on increasing traffic rate, attention, sales, and a lot more.

The plugin Affiliate Royale lets you create your own affiliate program. Once the affiliate program is successfully launched with Affiliate Royale, you’ll be able to see the performance of your affiliates. These include the number of clicks, sales they are making, and even the amount to pay the affiliates at the end of each month.

Features:

• It creates an affiliate program within a minute and manages the affiliate link from the dashboard.
• Affiliate Royale is easily integrated with MemberPress, WooCommerce, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more.
• For marketing banners, you can upload images and GIFs of any size.
• It also provides an offline sales tracking system.
• It also allows affiliates to monitor their performance, sales, and commissions.

Pricing:

Affiliate Royale is a premium plugin. Its pricing starts from $85 for merchants and $165 for developers.

2. AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is one of the best and fully-featured WordPress affiliate plugins for merchants. With this plugin, you’re able to manage the affiliates, track referrals, commission to affiliates, and many more. In general, AffiliateWP provides a real-time report of everything related to affiliates.

The built-in link generator features let your affiliate marketers create the affiliate links from the affiliate areas. Moreover, with the AffiliateWP plugin, you can manage your store products or services that are used by affiliate marketers. Also, the plugin is integrated with WordPress eCommerce, Contact Form 7, and the membership plugin.

Features:

• The dedicated payout system helps to pay the affiliates directly to their bank accounts.
• To add custom features, the plugin has several hooks and templates.
• As a merchant, you’ll be able to track the top affiliates, best-selling products, and also referrals.
• It has an affiliate coupon tracking system that rewards high-performing affiliates with personal coupon codes.
• It automatically creates the affiliate account for the users who have their WordPress website for affiliate marketing.

Pricing :

AffiliateWP is a premium plugin. Its price range starts from $149 for the personal sites- $299 for professional sites.

3. Affiliates

Affiliates is a full-featured and popular affiliate marketing plugins. The merchants mostly use it to manage unlimited affiliates, commission, analyze the traffic statistics, and many more. Moreover, adding affiliates for selling your products or services is also super easy and straightforward.

The best part of the Affiliates plugin is that it is integrated with various kinds of platforms. It includes eCommerce, memberships, lead generation, and more. Besides that, it has plenty of affiliate management tools that provide your affiliates with a great user experience. Likewise, it offers a flexible template-based dashboard that helps customize the design and features of your affiliates.

Features:

• It offers automatic affiliates registration where affiliates can directly sign up with or without a user account.
• Affiliates come with a flexible dashboard, shortcodes, blocks, etc.
• The commission distribution feature is in-built, so you don’t need to manage them.
• The referrals and affiliate link statistics are recorded and are available immediately as soon as the transaction proceeds.
• Records browseable traffic statistics with source and landing page, user agent, and related referrals per affiliate.

Pricing:

Affiliates is a free plugin. It also has a premium version for advanced features where the price range starts from $49- $149 per year.

4. Affiliates Manager

Affiliates Manager is the cost-effective WordPress affiliate plugins out of the list. The plugin can be used with a WordPress website to manage an affiliate marketing program. It helps to register new affiliates and also organize the overall process from start to end.

Generally, the Affiliates Manager plugin tracks the referrals sent by the affiliate to your site. After that, then it generates the report of the sales and traffic made. It can handle an unlimited number of affiliates and manage them. Moreover, the plugin is a translation-ready plugin and can be used worldwide.

Features:

• The plugin offers easy affiliate recruitment, registration, login, and overall affiliate management.
• It lets you create banner ads, creatives for affiliates and also is integrated with the MailChimp plugin.
• You can set your affiliates rate and reward your affiliates using the Paypal payment method.
• It displays a real-time report of your affiliate traffic and sales and shows them immediately.
• Affiliate Manager helps expand the affiliate management system by integrating with popular eCommerce solutions. They are WooCommerce, Simple Shopping Cart, iThemes Exchange, etc.

Pricing :

Affiliates Manager is a free plugin. However, you can upgrade it to the premium version, where the price starts from $39–$97.

5. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce

ReferralCandy is a powerful and awesome WordPress affiliate plugins. It is a reward type affiliation plugin where it rewards customers when they refer people to your store. The plugin gives a unique personal reward link that can be shared among friends.

With ReferralCandy, everyone can be your affiliate. It offers various types of rewards, like cash, coupon discounts, gifts, etc. Upon a successful referral, the rewards will be sent directly to customers. Within the ReferralCandy dashboard, you can track the successful referrals, sales made, revenue, etc., made from referrals in real-time.

Features:

• The successful referrals process is Automatically detected.
• It has a strong fraud protection system that automatically bands the self-referrals or unverified referral sales.
• It has good integration with popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
• ReferralCandy provides 24/7 live chat support so that you get help at any time.
• It allows connecting with any eCommerce and marketing platform in a single click.

Pricing:

ReferralCandy is a free WordPress affiliate plugin with a 30 days trial period. After that, the pricing starts from $49/month to $3999/month.

6. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates

YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is feature-riched and awesome affiliate plugins. It is designed especially to create its own affiliate program for WooCommerce shop owners. Moreover, the affiliate registration process is simple, and as merchants, you can approve or deny the request of new affiliates coming.

Every time a visitor lands or makes a purchase from the affiliate link, the plugin saves the affiliate ID of that particular affiliate link and pays accordingly. Based on the performance and revenue generated, you can set a commission rate for various affiliates. Moreover, every affiliate connected to your store’ll get a separate dashboard to view their performance and sales.

Features:

• It has shortcodes for the affiliate registration process and also generates links.
• The assigned commission is automatically deducted if the customers return the product.
• For more sales generation, you can design various discounts and coupons for your affiliates.
• Since it stores the affiliate ID, the affiliate link can be used for future referrals, too, and upon purchasing the product, it’ll be credited to that affiliate.
• With the premium version, you’ll get features like ban affiliates partners, advanced reporting, time-lapse for visits, etc.

Pricing:

YITH WooCommerce Affiliate comes with both free and premium plans. Premium plans range from € 99,99 for single-site and € 299,99 for 6 sites.

7. Ultimate Affiliate Pro

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is one of the newest and featured-rich WordPress affiliate plugins. It helps in running an affiliate program from your website, adding your website visitors as affiliates. With the help of this affiliate plugin, you can promote your website products and services and increase search engine.

With this plugin, you can set-up a multi-level marketing strategy which leads affiliates to create their campaign. You can also classify or give rank to the affiliates based on their performance and pay the commission accordingly. It has different templates design for login, register, account page, etc.

Features:

• It has a frontend affiliate dashboard with reports of affiliate performance, traffic, sales, etc.
• You can choose a variety of metrics for paying affiliates. These include lead, click, action, mile, etc.
• It makes special rewards for affiliates upon completing specific actions. They are: making a fixed amount of sale, bringing the fixed number of views, and more.
• Ultimate Affiliate Pro has an in-built wallet that allows affiliates to get payments directly in their wallet on the website.
• You, as a merchant, can provide a custom slug to each of your affiliates. This helps the affiliates hide their default ID and use custom slog as their identity.

Pricing:

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is a premium plugin where pricing starts from $69 with 6-month support and updates.

8. Affiliate for WooCommerce 

Affiliate for WooCommerce is one of the simplest plugins that help setting up own WooCommerce affiliate program. It is designed with a single page UI (User Interface). This helps in tracking everything from a single place, and you don’t need to spend time browsing into different tabs.

You can track referrals, commission, sales performance reports, and a lot more from the dashboard. Also, it provides real-time, accurate, and advanced tracking reports. Like other WordPress affiliate plugins, affiliates can register into your affiliate program easily and quickly. Being a merchant, you can accept or deny the request.

Features:

• It can accept an unlimited number of affiliate partners, affiliate links, and many more.
• It automatically turns the customer into affiliates. An affiliate can register, generate links, and also track the commission themselves.
• The plugin uses coupons to track the referrals and support Paypal for the payment method.
• It has the ability to set a storewide affiliate commission rate.
• Since it is made with a single page UI that helps to load the site faster.

Pricing:

Affiliate for WooCommerce is a premium plugin where prices range from $129/year.

What Things to be Considered When Installing WordPress Affiliate Plugins?

Choosing a WordPress affiliate plugin for affiliate marketing is not an easy task. There are a lot of affiliate plugins both for affiliates and merchants. All of the plugins have their own pros and cons. So how do you go about choosing the right one for you?

All of the above-discussed plugins has something to offer. However, if you’re not sure what things to look for in the affiliate plugin when installing them. Here’re a few suggestions that you can use.

1. Real-time report – Report lets you see your affiliate system’s overall performance, whether you’re a merchant or affiliate. So, when selecting an affiliate plugin, make sure it gives you a real-time report.
2. Short and pretty affiliate links – Affiliate links play a vital role in affiliate marketing. This is where your customers come to your site. The best plugin is the one that generates short and pretty affiliate links.
3. Automatic affiliates registration – As a merchant, it’s your responsibility to register the new affiliate who want to start their affiliate marketing. In this case, it’s better to choose the plugin that can register the affiliate automatically.

Conclusion 

Well, there you have it.

Affiliate marketing is an area that’s best for earning income for any kind of people, from beginners to large companies. For growing your business and commission rate, affiliate plugins play a vital role. From managing affiliates to affiliate links, these plugins, once installed on your site it’ll help you become successful in the field of marketing.

As discussed earlier, all these plugins possess a unique character in them. As an affiliate, if you want to focus more on affiliate links making it pretty and easy, Pretty Link is the one. Similarly, if you want to promote Amazon products, you can use the EasyAzon plugin. Likewise, Affiliate Royale is the best one for a merchant as its learning curve is also simple. Also, it manages affiliate and their commission automatically.

Also, check it out: Why do you need a website? 12 reasons to have a site.

You can also comment below if you have any queries related to this article.

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