When running a successful affiliate program, monitoring your affiliates and ensuring they stick to the affiliate policy you’ve agreed upon and don’t abuse your relationship can be hard and time-consuming. To make the job easier, many affiliate managers use brand protection software such as BrandVerity, which lets them monitor all affiliates from a single workspace and track any instances of potential brand abuse.
While BrandVerity is one of the best brand protection software suites available on the market, its affiliate policy monitoring features are fairly specialized, leaving many affiliate managers wanting more. Fortunately, there are alternative tools that you can use to monitor your affiliates.
What do these BrandVerity alternatives have to offer, and are any of these tools a better choice? Let’s find out!
Table of Contents
What Is BrandVerity and How Does It Work?
Developed in 2008, BrandVerity has been the go-to tool for many brands looking to protect their brand integrity for nearly two decades. Thanks to its paid search monitoring feature, you can automatically find any mentions of your brand online and ensure there’s no brand misuse, copyright infringement, or any damage done to your brand’s reputation.
For affiliate managers, BrandVerity is useful in making sure that any instances of affiliate fraud are noticed and eliminated. For instance, bad actor affiliates may steal your traffic, bid on your brand terms, abuse your brand assets, or do other activities that could harm you.
What Are the Pros and Cons of BrandVerity for Affiliate Policy Monitoring?
BrandVerity successfully justifies its position as one of the top brand protection tools available on the market. It’s easy and intuitive to use, with a highly responsive and skilled support team that can help you with any issues you may come across.
Features meant to safeguard against affiliate fraud, such as trademark infringement detection, are robust and flexible. Additionally, it does a great job at brand protection against third-party threats, making it a fantastic, all-encompassing solution for protecting your brand identity.
However, this focus on fraud protection means that some affiliate monitoring features that are present in some BrandVerity competitors are missing here, such as deep social media monitoring or advanced attribution modeling. False positives are also a common occurrence, according to several users.
The Best BrandVerity Alternatives, at a Glance
The following affiliate policy monitoring and brand protection tools are currently the best alternatives to BrandVerity:
- TUNE: Best for real-time activity monitoring
- Impact: Best for all-in-one affiliate management
- Partnerize: Best AI automation capabilities
- LinkTrust: Best for click-level fraud detection
- Cake by Accelerize: Best for multi-channel tracking
Comparing the 5 Best BrandVerity Alternatives
Now, let’s go over each one of these brand protection solutions and what makes them worth your while.
1. TUNE
Pros
- Exceptional real-time fraud detection: TUNE can monitor affiliate activity in real time and warn about any attempts at foul play.
- Flexible commission structures: Commission structures can automatically adjust in case of any compliance issues.
- Mobile app support: TUNE comes with a robust mobile app, allowing you to monitor affiliate activity while on the move efficiently.
Cons
- Weaker brand protection capabilities: TUNE lacks the broad brand protection features that BrandVerity has.
- Overwhelming interface: The numerous features and settings can make TUNE feel too overwhelming.
- Technically complex: You might need stronger technical expertise to implement advanced tracking configurations.
TUNE is a partner marketing platform that lets affiliate marketing teams control their entire affiliate funnel through a customizable dashboard. This includes affiliate monitoring: the software allows you to monitor your affiliates’ activity in real-time, with alerts in case of any suspicious activity that may break your affiliate policy.
TUNE is one of the best tools at your disposal if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for your affiliate management needs. It also offers essential policy monitoring features with real-time detection. However, these features aren’t as in-depth as those of BrandVerity.
You may also find yourself dazed and confused by the overwhelming amount of features that TUNE offers, so it may not be the best choice if you’re looking for a focused, specialized affiliate monitoring tool with no unnecessary embellishments.
2. Impact
Pros
- Automated enforcement capabilities: You can implement an automated enforcement policy for any breaches detected by Impact.
- Strong discovery marketplace: You can use Impact’s built-in affiliate discovery marketplace to quickly find compliant affiliates in case you need to sever your relationship with non-compliant ones.
- Strong API capabilities: You can easily integrate Impact with other marketing tools.
Cons
- Expensive compliance features: Some advanced compliance features require the highest subscription tier.
- Complex mobile tracking implementation: Impact’s mobile app leaves a lot to be desired, and successfully implementing affiliate tracking requires a fairly complex process.
- Difficult to use: The platform isn’t very user-friendly, and implementing even a basic affiliate program can take a lot of time and effort.
As another comprehensive affiliate management suite, Impact has all the features you will need from an affiliate marketing platform, combined with robust API capabilities that will let you easily integrate with most other marketing tools.
While relatively basic, Impact’s affiliate monitoring offers some useful features, such as automated enforcement policies that can instantly penalize or offboard an affiliate in the case of various breaches. The discovery marketplace can also help you quickly find new affiliates in case you need to offboard multiple ones at the same time.
Unfortunately, Impact suffers from a fairly user-unfriendly interface that may take a lot of time to learn and get used to. Also, some compliance features remain stuck behind the highest subscription tier, which may not be worth the money, especially for smaller businesses.
3. Partnerize
Pros
- Strong AI automation capabilities: Partnerize masterfully uses artificial intelligence to help you create sophisticated automated workflows.
- Sophisticated commissioning rules: You can integrate compliance metrics into commissioning rules, rewarding consistently compliant affiliates while penalizing non-compliant ones.
- Global payment infrastructure: The tool supports 60+ global currencies, with payouts that can be automatically adjusted to follow commission metrics.
Cons
- Bad integration capabilities: Integrating Partnerize with many third-party tools is challenging to complete successfully.
- Difficult reporting customization: While reporting in Partnerize is fairly customizable, the customization tools have a severe learning curve.
- Non-responsive support team: Many users report difficulties with the support team, which can take a long time to respond.
Automation is the key to building an efficient affiliate program, and the team behind Partnerize is aware of that. This platform has some of the best AI-powered automation capabilities among its competitors, making it easier than ever to build and maintain efficient workflows.
This extends to the software’s affiliate monitoring features, too—you can build a sleek yet elaborate workflow that includes custom commissioning rules tied to compliance metrics and an automated system of rewards and penalties that integrates with them.
Still, a significant yet surmountable issue with Partnerize comes down to the fact that reporting customization is unintuitive and has a steeper learning curve than most of the competition.
4. LinkTrust
Pros
- Click-level fraud detection: LinkTrust boasts a simple yet effective fraud detection system with detailed pattern analysis.
- Strong tracking reliability: Multiple redundancy systems guarantee strong tracking reliability, minimizing any errors.
- Effective onboarding tools: Onboarding tools for affiliates include built-in compliance education materials.
Cons
- Dated interface: The interface feels dated compared to the competition and is in desperate need of a facelift.
- Reporting system requires manual tweaking: A significant degree of manual effort is required to get the reporting system to work the way you need it to.
- Limited discovery tools: LinkTrust includes built-in discovery tools, but their limitations leave a lot to be desired.
While LinkTrust is primarily a performance-tracking tool, fraud detection is one of its main focus points, with a robust click-level detection system that’s one of the best in the industry. This is thanks to its detailed pattern analysis algorithms that leave no loose ends while simultaneously avoiding false positives.
A particularly nifty feature is LinkTrust’s library of compliance education materials, meant to help educate any new affiliates who come on board, making sure that they’re fully aware of their rights, duties, and limitations.
A large drawback to LinkTrust is its dated interface, which looks like it belonged in 2010. However, this is a small price to pay for all the benefits that this software offers.
5. CAKE by Accelerize
Pros
- Multi-channel compliance monitoring: CAKE has fantastic multi-channel compliance monitoring capabilities across web, mobile, and app environments.
- Optional server-side tracking: If you have the resources, enabling server-side tracking increases security and compliance while also improving overall reliability.
- Customizable alerts and notifications: A customizable alert system helps you immediately detect any potential compliance breaches.
Cons
- Difficult setup and implementation: CAKE appears to be mainly optimized for servers, and successfully setting it up requires a greater deal of technical knowledge.
- Advanced compliance features require extra configuration: Advanced features may require even more effort in setting them up.
- Limited built-in recruitment tools: CAKE also includes built-in discovery and recruitment tools, but they fade in comparison to platforms such as Impact.
CAKE is a powerful marketing environment that excels in creating an infrastructure for multi-channel marketing ventures. This also applies to multi-channel compliance monitoring, which works perfectly across all environments, providing detailed visibility into partner activities.
The suite comes with a whole collection of features designed to improve your overall marketing performance, such as Intelligent Lead Routing, which distributes leads within your organization in order to optimize acquisition efforts.
Since it’s optimized for server environments, CAKE can be difficult to configure for everyday users and likely needs to be set up by someone with a solid level of technical know-how.
Make Your Affiliate Marketing Game Stand Out with Vivian Agency
Choosing the right monitoring tool can make all the difference between a successful program and one plagued by compliance issues. While BrandVerity has solidly established itself as the market leader in this niche, it’s evident that there are compelling alternatives that may better suit your specific affiliate monitoring needs.
Affiliate policy monitoring shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Consider your team’s technical expertise, budget, and most pressing compliance concerns when choosing. Carefully weighing all the options against your specific requirements will help you find a solution that will strengthen your affiliate relationships and drive growth.
Still not sure what the right option is for you and your organization? Contact us with a specific question, and we’ll do everything we can to answer you as promptly as possible.
