How to build your own affiliate stats tracker

I’m writing this guide on how to build your own in-house affiliate stats tracker.

Why am I writing this? Perhaps 2 reasons.

1. To let people know that we already have that with StatsDrone

2. For those that are determined to build, I can share what to expect

Getting your affiliate stats sounds easy. I mean you can either build a scraper or just take all of your API keys and pull in all your affiliate sites. 

BTW shoutout to StatsDrone and FTDx for being newsletter sponsors.

I recently did a poll on LinkedIn asking if people thought building an in-house affiliate stats tracking tool is easy, medium or hard and here are the results.

• Easy - 9% [10 votes]

• Medium - 12% [14 votes]

• Hard - 70% [82 votes]

• I don’t know - 9% [11 votes]

Your options are somewhat limited for getting your stats and this is what you essentially have:

1. StatsDrone

2. Don’t track stats at all

3. Use spreadsheets

4. Build an in-house stats app

5. Voonix

6. Routy

7. Nifty Stats

8. Affcollect

So what are the reasons why affiliates decide to build their own affiliate stats tool?

I think there are 2 core reasons for this decision.

1. Data privacy

2. Companies believe it isn’t too difficult

Affiliate stats graveyard

I can’t tell you how many times founders have told me they built an affiliate stats tool and had to shut it down because it wasn’t working. Tagging quote of the week from Lee-Ann Johnstone.

I can relate to this story because from 2018 to 2020, we had our first stats tool which was a desktop app. It was a complete failure. 

The real pain for us was spending the time, money and effort to make this app happen and that money could have been used towards growing our affiliate sites.

We had a decision on our hands: give up and continue as affiliates or try one more time. 

Obviously we tried once more and we got things right. 

Over the years, I’ve received countless messages of people saying they tried to build this and it didn’t work where some had intentions of turning it into a SaaS app for the market. 

Simply put, people keep thinking they can pull this off.

I know very few people that have had success building these apps and of those 2 people, I trust they could replicate their success. 

I asked for their estimates to have to rebuild from scratch, how many people would it take and how long for them to build it up. Their answers:

• 3 years and 3 developers

• 2 years and 2 developers

That is still a lot of work.

Data privacy

Data privacy is always a key point of discussion and I believe is one of the driving forces behind companies wanting to own everything start to finish. 

This is why we have built our on-prem version of StatsDrone to let people know we take data privacy very seriously.

Technical consulting

So would we actually help a company build their own in-house stats?

We actually don’t know the answer to this because we obviously want customers. We are open to discussions but I just don’t have a complete answer. 

I think the same applies on the other side of the fence for operators. Do you think a company like MyAffiliates is going to help a company build their in-house affiliate program? Probably not but you can bet they would want all the proprietary software affiliate programs to switch.

Companies like StatsDrone , Routy and VOONIX.NET have years of experience in not just building our apps but advancing them. 

This is no different than the experience you would get in dealing with affiliate software platforms like Affilka by SOFTSWISS, RavenTrack, MyAffiliates, Affnook, PartnerMatrix, ReferOn, Income Access, A Paysafe Experience, Aff.tech by GR8 Tech, Scaleo, Intelitics Software and many more. 

So why is building an in-house affiliates stats tool difficult?

You know I’m not going to give out the secret sauce but let me explain some nuances of things you’ll run into.

Getting help from programs and software

Not all affiliate programs or software companies will be helpful. This includes the affiliate programs that have proprietary affiliate software. 

Inaccuracies in data

At StatsDrone, we pride ourselves on data accuracy but we are only as accurate as the feedback we get from customers. If you see something that is inaccurate, we will work with you to fix it. 

So why or how do inaccuracies happen in the first place?

I’ll give you one example but let me tell you, there are hundreds of examples like this that we have dealt with over the years.

Say the affiliate program updates the reports but NOT the API reports. 

If your team is good, they might realize this has happened and report it back to the affiliate program to let them know their updates were not applied and tested throughout their whole ecosystem.

Maintaining libraries

If you need to monitor say 100 affiliate programs, that isn’t as challenging. If you have to do it for 500+ and deal with 40+ different affiliate platforms, then you are dealing with real pain.

Changes happen all the time from affiliate programs so you just gotta deal with it.

The reason why we are so on top of the changes have a lot of customers that give us feedback. If something doesn’t look right or a platform becomes unresponsive, they tell us and we fix it usually within hours. 

Programmers & managers

I can just hire a programmer to do this right?

That is exactly what I thought when building the first version of StatsDrone. The reason why we got good at doing this job.

Our initial failure taught us a great deal.

It gave my co-founder Darrell Helyar an insane amount of experience as he started working with all of our developers directly. I am sometimes embarrassed that he knows the app way better than me but that is also my fortune. 

Our developers today are people that built our affiliate sites so they already had experience.

Oh, one more reason why I think companies are failing at this task

Actually I’ll give you 2 reasons.

Are you a tech company, or are you an affiliate marketing company? Another great quote from Cristian Florin Ionescu from CatStats and Witanalytica.

Being an affiliate is challenging because you're expected to wear both hats. We sold our affiliate sites so we could be the best stats app we could possibly be. 

This affiliate stats tracking stuff looks easy but once you get stuck in, it’s the deep end.

The 2nd reason why I think companies are also failing is that their tech teams are doing more than just building an in-house stats tool.

They are also managing their adtech, link management and CMS. I believe some of these tech people are spending a fraction of the time needed which means the little problems don’t get solved properly. 

If you are genuinely wanting help then reach out. I can’t promise anything but my pitch is always the same.

I'll leave you with one last quote from Pavlos Sideris from Double Up Media.

Use StatsDrone for the programs not supported or use us until you get your platform stable. Visit statsdrone.com.