Awin vs Rakuten LinkShare

Awin connects brands with more than one million partners for partnership marketing. Its directory, recommendations, and campaign marketplace help advertisers discover publishers and promotional opportunities. Reporting covers campaign results, customer journeys, and publisher, product, and creative performance. Advertisers can create commission groups using product, customer status, coupon code, campaign, publisher, and transaction-date criteria; Advanced adds further rules. Tracking records basket value, product count and type, customer status, coupon use, and click-to-sale delay. Ecommerce plugins and a Conversion API support tracking integrations, while Awin lists more than 80 technology partners. Automated payouts, fraud prevention, last-click attribution, and API access are included capabilities. Security information includes ISO 27001 certification, regular penetration testing, and GDPR measures. Self-managed advertisers maintain and test their tracking, with paid integration help available. The publisher app supports link creation, partner discovery, storefronts, offer filtering, earnings, and performance insights. Access costs £99 a month plus VAT and a 3.5% transaction fee; Accelerate costs £199.00 GBP plus VAT and a 2.5% fee.

Rakuten LinkShare is an affiliate marketing network for brands seeking customers and publisher partnerships. Advertisers can use partner recommendations, campaign planning, custom promotions, commission rules and performance reports. Partnership Discovery applies AI and machine learning to recommend publishers from product categories and plain-language searches. Advertisers can choose first-touch, last-touch and other attribution or commissioning models. Audience Engine uses existing brand data for partner-based audience segmentation, targeting and personalised offers. Rakuten Advertising says its network has more than 150,000 top-tier partners and launch takes less than one month. The service includes a partner portal and API access and is listed for Android, iOS, web and API. Pricing is on request. Publisher network access is listed at free, though inactivity fees may apply after 12 consecutive months without commissionable activity.