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Affiliate marketing moves the risk. Instead of buying impressions and hoping, you agree a commission and pay it when a customer actually converts. The difficulty is not the model – it is recruiting partners worth having, tracking honestly, and telling the difference between a partner who found you a customer and one who intercepted a customer you already had.
You give partners a tracked link and a commission rate. They promote you however they choose – a review, a comparison page, a newsletter, a video – and when someone buys through that link, they get paid a percentage. No sale, no cost.
That structure is genuinely attractive, which is why it attracts opportunists as well as good partners. A well-run programme spends most of its effort on two questions: which partners are bringing customers who would not otherwise have arrived, and which are simply positioning themselves at the last click of a purchase that was already happening.
Affiliate sits alongside rather than replacing other channels – see our paid media and SEO work. It complicates attribution for both, which is a problem worth managing rather than ignoring.
Every category below can be valuable and every one can be a liability. The difference is almost always whether the partner creates demand or captures it – and both have a place, at different commission rates.
Editorial sites and blogs writing genuine reviews and guides. The most valuable category, because they reach buyers early – before a brand has been chosen.
Where buyers narrow a shortlist. High intent, high volume, often the single largest revenue source in a mature programme.
Independent testing and ratings. Harder to recruit and worth the effort – their audiences arrive already convinced.
Audience trust that no advert buys. Best on a hybrid of flat fee plus commission – pure commission rarely attracts the good ones.
Newsletters with genuine subscriber relationships. Measurable, contained, and easy to test at small scale first.
Forums, professional groups and niche networks. Low volume, unusually high conversion, fiercely protective of their members.
Real reach and real volume – and the category most likely to be paid for sales that would have happened anyway.
Large audiences and genuine incremental reach on new customers. On repeat buyers they are usually intercepting rather than introducing.
Points and rewards schemes with committed memberships. Useful for reaching demographics other partners miss entirely.
Complementary businesses selling to the same customer at a different moment. Rare, slow to build, and the most durable of all.
Last-click tracking pays whoever was touched most recently. That is easy to administer and frequently wrong – and it is why a programme can report excellent returns while total revenue does not move at all.
We build commission tiers around this distinction from the start – new customer versus returning, first touch versus last, partner type by partner type. It produces a smaller reported number and a more honest one, and it is the difference between a programme that grows revenue and one that redistributes it.
A single flat rate across every partner type is the most common design mistake in affiliate marketing. It overpays the partners capturing existing demand and underpays the ones creating it.
Rates get set against your actual margin and repeat-purchase value, not against what competitors advertise. A programme that pays more than the customer is worth grows quickly and then has to be shut down – we would rather build one you can afford indefinitely.
Affiliate platforms report generously by default – everything last-click, everything approved, nothing separated by customer type. That version of the dashboard always looks good.
We report the same programme split by whether customers were new or returning, which partners appear alongside paid and organic touchpoints, and what was declined at validation. It is a less flattering picture and the only one worth making decisions from.
A commission structure is an incentive, and incentives get gamed. None of the following is unusual – all of it is detectable if somebody is actually looking.
Every partner is reviewed before approval, terms explicitly prohibit the behaviours above, and traffic patterns are monitored monthly. Partners who breach the terms are removed – including profitable ones, because a partner bidding on your brand name is charging you for customers you already had.
Publishing a signup page and waiting produces the partners who apply to everything. The partners worth having already have traffic and are approached individually – which is slower, and the reason most programmes stall at launch.
The drop between recruited and producing is normal and permanent – in most programmes a small number of partners generate the majority of revenue. The work is finding those few, then keeping them engaged while a long tail sits mostly dormant.
Most failed programmes were designed wrong before launch – commission rates set against competitors instead of margin, or every partner type paid the same. Fixing that after partners have signed is considerably harder than getting it right first.
Margins, repeat purchase value, return rates and what a customer is genuinely worth. Without those numbers a commission rate is guesswork.
Which partner types suit your product, what each is worth, cookie windows, exclusions and the terms partners will be held to.
Individual outreach to partners already reaching your buyers – found through competitor backlinks, category search results and network directories.
Network or platform configured, tracking implemented and tested end to end, creative and feeds supplied, terms published.
First placements go live with agreed dates. A small group of engaged partners beats a large group of registered ones.
Weekly early on – validating conversions, checking traffic patterns, catching brand-term bidding and tracking anomalies before they compound.
Rates adjusted on evidence, dormant partners reactivated, top performers given bonuses and better placements, breaches removed.
New versus returning customers, partner-level contribution, declines and the overlap with paid and organic. Monthly, in plain terms.
Expanding into adjacent partner categories once the core is stable, and deepening relationships with the few partners driving most of the revenue.
You know your maximum acquisition cost before a single sale happens, because you set it. Budget cannot overrun the way it does on media buying.
Partners have spent years earning the trust of people you are trying to reach. You rent that credibility rather than replicating it.
A review from a source someone already follows converts differently from an advert, because it does not read as one.
Adding partners does not require adding budget in advance. The cost arrives with the revenue.
Comparison and review sites often occupy the search results you cannot rank for. Partnering puts you on the page anyway.
A review published this year still sends customers in three. Paid media stops the moment the budget does.
New territories, categories and audiences can be tested through partners without committing to a media budget.
A partner who has promoted you successfully will do it again, and usually more prominently.
Any affiliate dashboard can be made to look impressive – count every last-click conversion, approve everything, and separate nothing. We report new customers separately from returning ones, which usually reduces the headline figure and always improves the decisions made from it.
We ask for unit economics before proposing a commission structure. A rate that looks competitive but exceeds what a customer is worth builds a programme you have to dismantle later.
Every partner approached individually and reviewed before approval. No open signup collecting whoever applies to everything.
Brand-term bidding, cookie stuffing and extension hijacking checked routinely – and partners removed for breaches even when they are producing revenue.
Affiliate sits on top of paid and organic and will happily take credit for both. We report the overlap rather than pretending it does not exist.
Dormant partners get reactivated, good ones get bonuses and better placements. Most programmes lose more to neglect than to fraud.
Results depend on your product, pricing and margins as much as our work. We commit to the programme design, the recruitment and the monitoring.
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Reliable process, clear communication.
We're here when you need us.
Tailored to your business goa
Reliable process, clear communication.
We're here when you need us.
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Everything businesses ask us before starting affiliate marketing.
A performance-based arrangement where partners promote your business using tracked links and earn a commission when someone converts. You set the rate and the terms; the partner carries the cost of promotion. No conversion means no cost, which is what makes the model attractive – and why it needs active management to stay honest.
A partner sends a visitor to your site through a tracked link. A cookie records the referral for an agreed window – often 30 days. If that visitor converts within the window, the sale is attributed to the partner and commission becomes payable, usually after a validation period that allows for returns and cancellations.
It works best where the product is understandable without a sales conversation, margins can absorb a commission, and there are publishers already reaching your buyers. It is a poor fit for very low margins, highly bespoke services, or categories with no meaningful publisher ecosystem. We will tell you which of those applies to you before proposing anything.
Against your unit economics – margin, repeat purchase value and return rate – rather than against what competitors advertise. Rates then vary by partner type and often by whether the customer is new or returning. A single flat rate across every partner is the most common design mistake in the channel.
Individually. We identify who already reaches your buyers – through competitor backlink analysis, category search results and network directories – then approach them directly with terms that make sense for their audience. Open signup forms mostly attract partners who apply to everything and produce nothing.
We are platform-agnostic and recommend based on your model, market and budget rather than on any commercial relationship. For some businesses a network is right; for others an in-house or self-hosted setup costs less and gives better data. We will explain the trade-offs either way.
Through tracked links and cookies, validated against your order data at month end. The important part is not the tracking itself but how it is read – we separate new from returning customers and report where affiliate overlaps with paid and organic, because last-click reporting alone overstates the channel.
Programme setup and tracking takes a few weeks. Recruiting partners worth having takes months – good publishers are selective and slow to commit. Meaningful revenue typically appears from month three to six, and a mature programme takes a year or more to build.
Yes, and managing the overlap is part of the job. Affiliate sits at the end of journeys that other channels started, so without de-duplication you can pay twice for one customer. Partner terms also need to prohibit bidding on your brand terms, or you end up paying commission on traffic your own name earned.
Manual vetting before approval, explicit terms prohibiting cookie stuffing, brand-term bidding and trademark misuse, and monthly monitoring of traffic patterns and conversion anomalies. Partners who breach the terms are removed even when they are producing revenue – a partner intercepting customers you already had is a cost, not a channel.
Everything businesses ask us before starting affiliate marketing.
Send us your business and your numbers. We will model what you can afford to pay, shortlist the partners already reaching your buyers, and tell you honestly whether affiliate is the right channel – including when it is not.
The businesses that win aren’t just found – they’re found first. We make that happen, from local search to your entire digital presence.
