afflr vs georiot for iTunes affiliate program with USA and EU traffic

Great question.

I've added a few notes below but in the interest of full disclosure, I'm the co-founder and CEO of GeoRiot so I'm obviously a bit biased.

A few of the biggest items to compare are:

Affiliating vs. localizing a link.
Afflr claims to "...transparently forwards your request and doesn't check the validity of your links."

With GeoRiot we rebuild every link that comes through us to ensure that 1.) it works and 2.) affiliates correctly for a user's local store.

Only paying attention to the affiliation piece, we believe, is only half the story of earning commissions internationally. Correctly affiliating a bad link still doesn't do you much good as the conversions will be horrible.

iTunes and App Store links are based on IDs that are unique for a piece of content. Having the same product use different IDs in different stores is less of an issue for apps (we see approximately 8-12% of the links for top apps not working internationally), a big issue for music (65 - 80% of top links not working internationally) and a massive problem for TVs and Movies (up to 99% of links don't work when comparing two countries with different native languages).

So, depending on what type of media you are affiliating, paying attention the link could range from being important to absolutely crucial.

Platform vs. Service
As far as I can tell, the Afflr service stops with a tool to help you build a link. The GeoRiot service however, is a full unified linking platform.

This means that we offer everything you need -- a dashboard that includes multiple tools to easily create links, DB to save your affiliate tracking parameters, and most importantly, a plethora of reports that you can't find elsewhere.

Our reports, in particular, give a global overview of your affiliate links. They include click and geographical trend graphs as well as reports detailing an aggregation of all your sales and commission data from each of the affiliate networks.

Attention to details
Maybe it's our OCD for everything affiliate or maybe it's the nearly four years of running the service and the ~700M clicks that we've served but we've got a keen eye for details.

A few things that I noticed when poking around the Afflr service were:

• No support for the remaining affiliate programs in Latin America (3 public, 6 private, managed by TradeDoubler).
• TradeDoubler actually requires two variables, one for the site ID as they mention but also the ID of the affiliate program you've been approved into is essential (there are 29 in Europe).
• No ability to use "tracking tags" (eg. Signature or EPI tracking) for finer granularity in your reporting.

Free vs. Paid
You get what you pay for. It's not cheap to manage a world wide network of servers, or pay for the monitoring and global fail over services to ensure perfect uptime. You also get top notch support and a dedicated engineering team committed to making GeoRiot the best possible service.

However, GeoRiot will never cost you anything out of pocket. We use a "Pay with Clicks" model that is completely transparent (due to all our reporting), is totally passive (so you never have to give us a credit card number), and aligns our goals with yours (maximize commissions by providing the best possible user experience).

Ping us at contact at georiot dot com and we'd be happy to speak further to some of these items, answer any questions you might have, and get you set up for a free trial of the service.
-Jesse

That's a really great post, even if bias! Thank you. I was persuaded by the free price but that 15% cut may be worth is for all the tracking features..

If anyone from Afflr or anyone used them could give their say would be interesting to hear!

Disclaimer: I co-created afflr.com, I may be a bit biased as well

Afflr and GeoRiot are two different beasts. Jesse describes it well in his Affiliating vs. localizing a link paragraph. GeoRiot keeps a database of localized links that allows them to translate any location-specific iTunes link into another link for another location. On top of that, it dispatches the traffic to the proper affiliate network.

Afflr just does the latter part. That is, redirecting your traffic to the appropriate affiliate program. Why would we skip the link localization part? Because we're mainly targeting app developers and you don't need any link localization if you're linking to your own apps (and more 99% of other apps in our tests, indeed some apps such as some EA games have localized links). The process is much simpler and easier to maintain so our costs are kept low.

Are you linking to apps? Use Afflr and keep 100% of your affiliate traffic profit. It's lightweight and can't be easier to setup, you don't even have to sign up.

Are you linking to songs, movies or would like more reporting options than the affiliate networks already give you and don't mind giving up 15% for this service? By all means, use GeoRiot.

About the free is never really free part: if you don't have an affiliate ID for one of the iTunes affiliate programs (let's say Japan for example), we'll put our own Japanese ID instead, as specified in our FAQ. Most people are only part of the US, European and Australian programs so in that case we get a share of their traffic. However you're more than welcome to use afflr even if you're affiliated to all programs.

Don't hesitate to contact us at support at afflr.com or here if you have any more questions!

Wow, the two giants respond! Thanks Mr Afflr!

I'm still looking into options. One thing is for sure, a login with some sort of basic (possibly google analytics tracking?) would be good as it is difficult to trust clicks, if you have no feedback. I have no reason to distrust Afflr but the tracking, looking at projection, times people click or buy to inform when to send out mails, etc are helpful.

Just want to update; Georiot is amazing!! support is fantastic and not only do they do iTunes but Amazon. Georiot is going to be massive so I really recommend getting on board now.