An affiliate management resource you select should be able to handle multiple tasks like recruiting affiliates, communicating with subsidiaries, developing, tracking and reporting, improving affiliate curriculum, and monitoring your competition.

1. Once you are convinced that an affiliate management agency that you have chosen is competent enough, you can rest assured that you can deal with most complexities of the process without any hassle. There are a host of networks that you can manage an affiliate account to participate in different merchant programs.Convenience of operations, excellent service support and on-time, accurate payments to affiliate members should be the criteria before choosing one. You should check reviews, users’ feedback and the network’s track record. Once you are an active member, you can access the services. Affiliates can browse by a particular type of program (Per-Lead, Per-Click, Pay-Per-Sale etc), or by checking a category (Sports, Fashion, Health etc).
2. The task of handling your affiliate and merchant responsibilities should be left to an expert manager who will begin with basics like site address, a valid e-mail ID, a top-level-domain name, and a catchy description of your motive to join a network to aspects like checking reports on your earnings.
3. They make use of cookies for tracking leads & sales through affiliate’s sites. Upon a specific lead or a sale, the networks determine the commission accrued to the affiliate, and the affiliate responsible for that event. Each link first will redirect to the network servers and to the Merchant’s website, to tally a sale or lead with the affiliate.
4. Crosscheck that the network uses cookies only to offer an affiliate management solution, and it does not profile customers, or aggregate any data of personal nature. It should only use generic data about a customer.
5. Another thing to be validated is fraud prevention solutions on the network. It should have automated tools to avert possible fraud and monitors merchant and affiliate activities; to ensure there’s no suspicious or fraudulent activity; and to ban miscreants. Each check should be reviewed before getting dispatched.
6. Payments are usually issued via Direct Deposit or check on a fixed day of each month for your generated sales and leads. The payments are made after an affiliate has reached a certain threshold amount. Each and every transaction is mapped on to the network servers for a detailed review. Aggregate stats on the total number of hits, paid clicks, leads, sales, etc are also kept.
7. Also find out about the types of banners or ads are available. Banners come in different shapes & sizes. Each individual merchant can upload as many types for affiliates to pick from. widgets, videos, dynamic HTML email creatives and other types of media depending on the specific program are also there.