AvantLink Affiliate Network Review
Using affiliate marketing as a way of diversifying your online income or even as the main way of making money these days is definitely something that beginning bloggers and website owners should look into.
In today’s article, we’re looking at the AvantLink network. We’ve written about other affiliate networks before, and for this one, too, we’ll specify everything you need to know about it, from its features to its pros and cons and a bottom line on whether it makes sense for you to become an AvantLink affiliate.
AvantLink Review
What is AvantLink?
Unlike others out there, this network largely focuses on cost-per-sale marketing. This means that each time someone clicks on one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase, you then get paid a percentage of that product’s value.
This aspect automatically makes this platform a bit different since others also give commissions on clicks or on other actions that referral users might take.
For now, the network is available in the United States, Canada, and Australia, which does make it an international option, but there are plenty of other countries that could have been included in their offers (including the United Kingdom, another very large market).
Off the bat, what we’d like to note with regard to AvantLink is that there are many well-known brands that you can promote thanks to it — REI and Backcountry.com are some big names, but there are lots of others that you will come across after creating an account.
Signup Process
This is perhaps the most significant con that we came across while browsing through various affiliates’ AvantLink reviews. The signup process can be challenging, and they do tend to ask for a lot of information in the beginning.
Getting approved per se doesn’t take a lot of time and usually happens in under one week. However, what does make it a bit challenging afterward is that for each and every affiliate program you find on the platform and would be interested in promoting, there’s an additional signup process you have to go through.
For example, if you are in the outdoor niche, it might make more sense to devote an entire day or even several to searching for programs in your specific domain and then signing up for all of them. Otherwise, you’re going to waste some time every time you log in and search for a category of products to promote.
Naturally, this detail might show up if you try other affiliate networks, too. However, in most cases, the affiliate managers of those individual programs are going to receive the information you’ve initially specified in the network approval process and then accept or reject you depending on that.
What we mean by this is that on AvantLink, you have to manually add the info every time. And as you can imagine, that is not something that busy affiliates really appreciate.
Commission rates and cookie lengths
These two depend on every program, so we can’t give you a fixed percentage in general. Unfortunately, we also can’t specify a figure in particular with regard to the cookie duration.
While that of some programs might be 7 days, you might find that others allow you to register commission for a period of 30 days. In any case, we would like to note that most cookie lengths tend to be better than what Amazon Associates would have to offer, meaning just 24 hours.
Payments
From what we were able to find about this aspect, it seems that the network pays its affiliates automatically on the 25th of every month.
They work with a third-party payment partner called Tipalti, where they send out the payment information on the 23rd of each month and it can take anything between one to four working days for the payout to be processed.
You have to earn at least $25 for the platform to be able to send you your earnings. While this is a default threshold, you can actually change it in your dashboard (according to the site, you have to go to Menu->Payment Settings->Payment & Tax), but the minimum one is still going to be $25.
As for the payout methods currently used by the affiliate network, you’ll be happy to know that you can be paid through Paypal and ACH/Direct deposits.
The company has somewhat fixed requirements with regard to bank transfers in that if you’re based in Canada, and you’re using the Canadian version of AvantLink, you will have to specify your Canadian account, even if you also have a US one. The same goes for affiliates in Australia and the United States — the country seems to be quite important in terms of payouts.
Also, there’s a waiting period of 30 days from when you’ve earned a commission to when you’re actually going to be paid that commission. For example, if you made $50 in January, you’ll be sent that amount on March 25th, not on February 25th.
Merchants and products
Probably the best thing about this platform is that you do not have to worry about having to recommend your blog readership brands that they might not have heard about in their lives.
AvantLink works with large and medium-sized companies to bring you some of the best affiliate programs. There are so many of them available that it’s actually difficult to point to one in particular.
Also in terms of publisher categories, you’ll find that the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can pick. The categories range from anything like home decor and apparel to collectibles, cooking, or health and fitness. They have several different categories for outdoor products, too.
What we do have to note is that most of the products are physical, which means that compared to other networks (like Clickbank or JVZoo, for example), you’re not going to come across heaps of digital products in this case.
How’s the user experience?
This is another detail that seems to leave a lot of room for improvement. The network is huge (without any exaggeration), but the dashboard can be very challenging to make something out of.
For example, when you go and search for affiliate programs, you’ll basically visualize a table with all the information you need, but you might need a very large screen to be able to look at all the data and not lose any of the rows or columns.
There’s also the option of you manually searching for a brand that you might already have in mind, but if you do not discover it, it’s probably not available on AvantLink, so you will have to look at the entire category to find something similar.
Overall, it seems that the user experience is considerably affected by the fact that you have an additional signup process for each affiliate program.
Marketing tools available on AvantLink
Now that we’ve tackled most of the basic information you might want to know about becoming an AvantLink affiliate, let’s look at what they have to offer in terms of promotional tools.
There are two main things that you have to know in this respect, and it’s the way you can create links and the fact that there is a paid placement tool available. For example, if you also want to sell space on your blog pages to promote a brand, you can do that thanks to this second tool. Merchants will effectively bid against one another so that you get the best commissions.
An affiliate link encoder is available for the easy creation of links – it is a feature somewhat similar to what you’d see with Skimlinks and other such platforms. Every link to a merchant’s website becomes an affiliate link once you copy the code on your website.
However, you will have to have signed up for that program — otherwise, you are not going to earn any commissions.
AvantLink also has its own API, so if you have a team of developers and they set up a plugin for you, you can also use it to pull products and everything else you might need right from the network. If you create your own tool, you even get bigger commissions.
Pros and cons
You have a lot to gain if you become an AvantLink affiliate, and the first advantage that we will note here is that they work with truly big brands. Think Whirlpool and Booking.com, for example, but there are many others that you will discover after signing up.
The number of tools that the company offers for promotional purposes is pretty decent, although some affiliates feel like they would work better with an AvantLink plugin for WordPress rather than making their own.
The platform is updated on a regular basis, which is convenient, to say the least, since that means you’ll know about deals and everything else in a timely fashion.
Finally, the tracking codes allow you to get a good grasp of how your campaigns are working and what their performance is. The detailed analytics are also worth writing home about, and you can use them to better your affiliate journey on the whole, including your content.
When it comes to the drawbacks, you really have no way of knowing how much you will make beforehand. Your income can vary depending on your traffic, content quality, site SEO, and everything else, so you have to be an experienced affiliate to get all the benefits and make several thousand dollars per month with this network.
We’d also like to note that some AvantLink reviews underline that the customer service is not as good as that of other affiliate networks. At the time we’re writing this article, the customer support was only available through web messages – there was no option of affiliates getting in touch with a representative through phone calls, for example.
How does AvantLink compare to other affiliate networks?
AvantLink vs. ShareASale
One of the biggest differences between these two is that while AvantLink is fairly new to the affiliate game, ShareASale has been around for more than two decades. During that time, the second platform has had a lot of time to perfect the user experience, and the company has also started to work with a lot of well-known brands.
In terms of payments, ShareASale does not have a Paypal option, while AvantLink does.
On the other hand, ShareASale doesn’t have three different networks for three different countries, and there are no limits in terms of affiliate locations. You can be based in Thailand and have a blog audience based in the US — that does not matter when using ShareASale.
ShareASale seems to have fewer modern marketing tools compared to AvantLink, but we recommend doing a bit more research in this sense.
AvantLink vs. Commission Junction
CJ Affiliate (previously known as Commission Junction) is clearly better known compared to AvantLink. Like ShareASale, CJ Affiliate does not offer Paypal payments, which are in turn available on AvantLink.
There aren’t too many differences to note here since both networks heavily rely on merchants that sell physical products.
AvantLink vs. ClickBank
This comparison is indeed completely different. Comparing AvantLink to ClickBank is like comparing the universe to the moon, not only in terms of what brands and offers can be found by affiliates but also in terms of user experience.
Read more: Best ClickBank alternatives
As much as some affiliates complain about the UX on AvantLink, it’s still better than what you’d find on ClickBank. The platform could be improved in many ways, and they don’t excel when it comes to customer support, either.
To top it all off, ClickBank has a myriad of digital products available, while AvantLink’s offers mostly focus on physical ones.
Finally, there are a lot of spammy products and a lot of shady merchants available on Clickbank, and that is simply not something you’d have to deal with as an AvantLink affiliate. Overall, we’d say that AvantLink is better in many ways compared to ClickBank, so we recommend considering it.
Conclusion
Although it might not be as well-known as some of the other affiliate networks, we’d say that AvantLink is still worth joining. You get access to many brands, the commissions are more than decent, and besides the fact that you have to individually sign up to affiliate programs on the platform, there truly are not a lot of cons.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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