Affiliate Networks and Tracking Platforms, The Best of 2020. Part 6: TUNE

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Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to a partner platform that believes in “partnering the way you want to.”  In Part 6 of my Best of 2020 series (that has explored LinkConnector, Impact, Awin, ShareASale and PartnerStack so far), we will take a deep dive into the world of TUNE.

PARTNER THE WAY YOU WANT TO

A Brief History of TUNE

The first TUNE product was launched in 2009. They called it HasOffers, because it was a white label solution that allowed anyone to manage their own offers for affiliates and partners to promote. In the following years, hundreds of new and existing companies built their business on the platform, making HasOffers the most adopted SaaS solution for affiliate and publisher networks.

In 2011, TUNE invented and launched Attribution Analytics, the first SaaS solution for measuring the performance of mobile app campaigns. Among other firsts, the team introduced the industry to the concept of app install campaigns, and created the first mobile postbacks for tracking and attribution purposes. By 2013, Attribution Analytics had skyrocketed to become the industry standard, counting hundreds of the world’s largest brands and mobile app advertisers among its users.

Fast forward to 2018, when TUNE’s Attribution Analytics product was acquired by Branch, a Silicon Valley company solving the cross-platform mobile experience. The acquisition reformed TUNE around the core HasOffers product and refocused the team and their efforts on developing the existing platform into a complete partner marketing platform. In 2019, the company retired the HasOffers name to bring them closer to this new mission.

And the market noticed. In 2020, TUNE was acquired by Constellation Software. Constellation’s business strategy is to acquire and hold investments to create sustainable growth and profitability. This change in ownership only furthers TUNE’s promise to enable both advertisers and networks to flexibly manage their marketing partnerships.

Today, TUNE delivers a truly technology-first solution for every business in the partner marketing industry. And they’re not stopping there. TUNE is dedicated to building the world’s best platform for advertisers who want to build their own private networks. The company keeps this as their singular focus for innovation, now and as they look toward the future of performance marketing partnerships.

Key Capabilities and Features

Partner, Manage, and Pay with Ease

Improve return on effort by streamlining your partner marketing activities, from onboarding to payment.

  • Consolidate all of your partners, networks, channels, and campaigns in one place
  • Automate workflows across your program, including payment processing, fraud prevention, performance optimization, and more
  • Increase transparency through granular reporting and intelligent dashboards
  • Build trust with fully integrated accounts payable workflows and international payment processing

Track Every Partnership and Channel

Capitalize on the data and relationships you already have through your mobile and digital measurement partners.

  • Drive growth via mobile and web partners on a single platform
  • Integrate with any mobile network — no additional SDKs needed
  • Leverage robust targeting and server-side tracking capabilities
  • Track cross-channel and optimize performance in real time
  • Customize conversions, goals, payout tiers, and more

Prevent Fraud Proactively

Monitoring campaigns for suspicious traffic and fraudulent activity is a full-time job. So TUNE created the industry’s only built-in fraud protection, which automatically detects and rejects click fraud for all TUNE customers.

Comprehensive Tracking Solutions

  • Server-side Postback Tracking
  • Client-side Pixel Tracking
  • Client-side JavaScript SDK Tracking (ITP-compliant)
  • Clickless Tracking (promo codes)

Real-time Reporting

  • ex: Stats Report, Offers Report, Conversion Status Report, Traffic Fraud Report

Diagnostic Tools and Reports

  • Event Tracer, Conversion Report, Server Logs, Partner Fraud Report

Special Feature Reports

  • Partner Commission Report, Subscriptions Report, Time-to-Action Report, Funnel Metrics

Advanced Commissioning and Publisher Payment

Integrated Partner Ecosystem (TUNE Connect)

Secure Custom Application and Tracking Domains

Data Compliance

  • SOC 1 Type II Accreditation
  • SOC 2 Type II Accreditation
  • GDPR ePrivacy Certification

Robust Data Solutions

  • Powerful Two-way API
  • Specialized APIs (Integrator, Partner, Advertiser)
  • Fully Automated Event Delivery

Workflow Automation

  • Creative and Offer Optimization, Performance Automation, Proactive Fraud Prevention, Payment Workflow

Best-in-Class Platform Reliability (99% system uptime)

SaaS-Based Pricing and Clear Contracts

Extensive Help and Developer Documentation

Onboarding and Program Migration

Personalized Product Training

Award-Winning Customer Support Teams

  • 98% customer satisfaction rate

Advantages and Benefits

The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform is designed to support the unique needs of advertisers as they build their own partner networks. It’s also designed to make it easier for advertisers to work with other publishers, networks, and agencies. Advertisers leverage TUNE’s platform to configure their partnership programs as they see fit.

A Partner Marketing Platform, Not a Network

Every advertiser could benefit from better technology to manage marketing partnerships. Yet to date, there have been few truly technology-based solutions available in the market. Most solutions that claim to be platforms are really networks in disguise. They hit advertisers with fees and expand their own marketplace of partnerships thanks to advertisers’ hard work. And as networks, they tend to compete with their advertisers’ other networks.

As an unbiased third-party SaaS provider, TUNE’s pricing is based solely on software access — there are no hidden service or media fees. Its open, technology-first foundation is why its platform has never been in competition with the network model. Instead, TUNE strives to open new opportunities for all of their customers to connect, integrate, and customize their partner marketing relationships.

Tracking That Captures All Conversions

TUNE’s technology is partner- and network-agnostic, meaning the platform works in concert with any partner and network to help advertisers scale. It also works across channels, allowing advertisers to earn more conversions on app, mobile web, and desktop with best-in-class tracking and attribution. Whether you’re deep linking into apps, working with influencers, or measuring offline and call-based campaigns, TUNE offers integrations with leading mobile measurement partners and technology solutions to suit your needs.

TUNE also helps advertisers stay ahead of the game with a variety of tracking solutions made to protect campaigns from third-party cookie restrictions and evolving privacy regulations. Server-side postbacks, ITP-compliant client-side tracking, and SEO-friendly direct linking are all available as you need to make sure every conversion is counted.

Fully Own Your Partner Program

With TUNE, advertisers are able to build their own partner networks using TUNE’s platform as the foundation. TUNE provides the advanced tools, partner integrations, and automation that advertisers need to run a program their way. Advertisers can extend their branding to the partner channel with ease, automate key workflows like payment and fraud protection, and manage it all within one platform.

TUNE’s true technology platform provides advertisers with more control over their partnerships and their program than any other platform on the market.

Industry and Category Focus

While TUNE works across industries, many advertisers find that the platform excels at meeting their unique needs and business goals in the following verticals.

Financial Services

Financial services companies operate under strict regulations and consumer protection laws, making them particularly well-suited to TUNE’s Partner Marketing Platform, which offers more program control and direct partner management than networks. Many financial services offerings these days are viewed as disruptive, as they appeal to the cord-cutting generation. The partnerships that support these companies also need to be disruptive; often, working with disruptive partners (like influencers and streamers) requires specialized or custom solutions. Luckily, TUNE’s platform is built to handle disruptive partnerships.

In addition to the capabilities and features already listed, TUNE offers the following capabilities that benefit financial services companies in particular:

  • Two-way APIs for real-time data streaming, traffic monitoring, and campaign optimization
  • Development-friendly technology for building/integrating custom tools and features
  • High standards in data and privacy practices, including SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 Type II certification, and GDPR ePrivacy certification

Clients: Assurance, Credit Sesame, Unison, Suncorp, Personal Capital, The Penny Hoarder

Direct-to-Consumer E-Commerce

Increasingly, direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brands are seeking to build proprietary relationships with partners. Given the market niches these companies operate in, it is critical that they are able to quickly build competitive advantage. The most effective partner marketing solution for DTC brands is one that enables them to capitalize on key relationships before others do. Discovering and recruiting partners should benefit the brand putting in the work, not the network the brand’s program is on.

For direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands, TUNE’s platform provides a strategic mix of features and affordability:

  • Partner-agnostic technology to track and optimize any partnership — content publishers, influencers, deal and loyalty partners, affiliate networks, and anyone else
  • Granular, cross-channel attribution
  • Promo codes (clickless tracking)
  • Flexible commissions to dynamically pay out by SKU, category, partner, and more

Clients: Thrive Market, Tonal, Hooked on Phonics, TataCliq

Subscription Services

For companies selling a subscription through a unique set of products and partners, TUNE’s platform provides everything needed to track and optimize partnerships, at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. In addition, TUNE offers far more freedom when it comes to program control, customization, integrations, development, and partner choice. This is important for companies that maximize customer lifetime value using custom tools or features, and for brands that work with different kinds of partners than what a network has to offer.

On top of everything else, the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform offers several features that especially benefit subscription-based services:

  • Customizable dynamic payouts (multi-action, partner-specific)
  • Real-time reporting and data sharing
  • Sophisticated tools and integrations for optimizing programs with influencers, affiliate networks, agencies, and any other partner

Clients: NordVPN, ButcherBox, FloSports, Grammarly, MyGreenFills

Publisher Relationships

Connect: TUNE’s Integrated Partner Ecosystem

TUNE wants to see brands and all of their diverse partnerships succeed. Affiliates, content publishers, influencers, mobile app makers, agencies, performance networks, tech providers, business development relationships — advertisers can find and work with them all through Connect, TUNE’s partner ecosystem.

In Connect, you can browse a curated collection of high-quality media, agency, and technology partnerships to grow your business, all without leaving the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform. The best part? TUNE is an unbiased, third-party SaaS provider, so they don’t take any cuts from revenue earned or commissions paid out. That leaves advertisers with more money in their pockets, and publishers with higher earning potential and payouts.

Featured Publishers:

  • Honey
  • Skimlinks
  • Ziff Media Group
  • Prodege
  • Sovrn / VigLink
  • Fluent
  • Madrivo
  • Aragon Advertising
  • CNN Digital
  • BrandCycle

Attribution Capabilities

TUNE has led the industry in innovations in digital and mobile tracking and attribution since the company’s founding in 2009. Combine that experience with TUNE’s deep ties to industry leaders in fields such as mobile measurement, analytics, and lead gen, and advertisers have a recipe for success for just about any campaign they want to run.

In addition to multiple options for traditional pixel-based (client-side) tracking, the TUNE platform offers native server-side postback tracking capabilities. TUNE actually invented the postback, which eventually became the standard for tracking mobile app campaigns (since tracking cookies do not work in apps or on mobile web), and the gold standard for tracking campaigns on desktop web. Server-side tracking via postbacks is completely independent from a user’s web browser, which means this method is immune to the problems encountered with traditional client-side tracking. As such, postback tracking has been TUNE’s recommended tracking method since its invention.

As an early advocate of cookieless tracking, TUNE has developed tools that allow advertisers to bypass the cookie-based restrictions found in most modern browsers. TUNE’s JavaScript SDK, for example, is a privacy-compliant tracking method that can track events and conversions across desktop and mobile web. This method works in browsers where traditional pixel tracking has been restricted or eliminated, including Apple’s Safari browser with Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), Mozilla’s Firefox browser with Enhanced Tracking Protection, and Google’s Chrome browser with SameSite cookie requirements (default third-party cookie blocking).

TUNE also offers specialized solutions for tracking across specific channels, including clickless tracking via promo codes and SEO-friendly direct linking. These methods can be used in a variety of situations — to track conversions in a podcast campaign, for example, or across social media platforms such as Instagram or Twitch.

More Great Information About TUNE

Case Studies

Click here to see all case studies.

Client Testimonials

“TUNE is built for performance marketers. They understand the importance of real-time data and operate at a massive scale. TUNE gives us great control of our campaigns.” – John Lorge, CMO – Assurance

“A decade after first partnering with TUNE, I continue to be impressed by their unfading passion and dedication to evolving the platform. Their consistent product updates with outstanding API drives scalability and innovation for our business that no other platform can. If you want to drive growth and profitability, TUNE is your answer.” – Andrew Kilday, Founder & CEO – CLOUTA

“TUNE is a very advanced platform — supporting any type of performance business — whether you’re an affiliate, advertiser or a network. TUNE is extremely easy to set up and configure, and the pricing is very affordable.” – Dan Ben-Zikry, VP of eCommerce – Travel Holdings, Inc.

Awards and Accolades

G2

  • Fall 2020 – Leader, Affiliate Marketing
  • Fall 2020 – Leader, Attribution
  • Fall 2020 – Most Implementable | Mid-Market
  • Fall 2020 – Highest User Adoption | Mid-Market
  • Fall 2020 – Fastest Implementation | Mid-Market
  • Fall 2020 – Best Est. ROI | Mid-Market

Free Resources