Seeking software/.xls template to track affiliate revenue

[amarie]

Hi all, I've done a search through the forums and haven't found an answer.

I joined a few affiliate programs about 3 or 4 months ago and they've brought in a modest amount of revenue but, no checks yet. It's a side business thing so I've kinda done it by the seat of my pants.

I know I have to get organized and find those contracts and figure out when they're supposed to pay me. Also would like to compare these programs and figure out which one is earning me the most money, track how much affiliate revenue in total I'm making per day/month/quarter etc.

Isn't there some sort of affiliate management program (for affiliates, not for merchants) that is set up for this? I can't be the first web site owner who needs to track this info.

After an hour of searching I've only come across one program:
[georgecain.com...]
the program is "PAM: Personal Affiliate Manager."

Has anyone used this program? I can't find any mentions of it on the net other than shareware directories ... it's freeware. It's Windows-only (I'm on a Mac but have a dusty old PC I could use) but would prefer something Mac-based. Not a make-or-break requirement though.

Alternatively, are there Excel templates around for this sort of thing? I have Excel but barely know how to use it.

Thanks in advance for any advice/links.

AM

[limitup]

The problem is that there are so many 1000s of affiliate programs so it would be somewhat tedious to develop a good web-based tool that tracks all your stats, etc. I've seen one or two but they are pretty damn expensive and are for serious affiliates making big bucks.

The other alternative is to do what we did and develop a custom web-based system that automatically grabs your revenue and other stats throughout the day, and presents it to you in a nicely formatted graph, etc. It's actually very easy to create scripts that will login to your account and retrieve your stats, etc. Our system pulls our stats from each of the 8 networks we work with every 2 hours throughout the day and we just go to one page where we can see everything we need, run reports for the past week/month, etc. It might not be practical if it's just a side thing for you, but you could have something like this developed for you relatively inexpensively.

[amarie]

wow, that sounds fantastic. And it sounds like something you could market, too. :-)

I'll have to think about that ... maybe see if I could hire a computer school intern to do something like that for me...

But I do have an office helper (non-programmer) who could spend an hour or two a week downloading stats and importing them into some sort of affiliate tracking program and creating reports. That's kind of what I had in mind.

AM

[amarie]

limitup, how does your script/program deal with a site like LinkShare (one of my affiliates use LinkShare) which requires that you enter an obscured code ... the kind where a few digits/letters appear in a graphic... when you login, along with your login name and password?

AM

[limitup]

Fortunately for us we don't work with any programs that have a challenge system as part of the login process. That would be tough unless you worked something out with them and they gave you special access that didn't involve that.