The commission model you choose determines how your affiliates get paid, what behavior you incentivize, and how much risk you carry as the advertiser. Pick the wrong one and you either overpay for traffic that never converts, or you underpay for results that should have earned your partners more. Either way, the program underperforms because
KEEP READINGAn affiliate program that has never been audited is a program with unknown risks. Maybe every affiliate is disclosing properly, following your brand guidelines, and driving clean traffic. Or maybe three partners are bidding on your brand name in paid search, two are making product claims you never approved, and one has been inactive for
KEEP READINGIf any of your affiliates promote to people in Europe, GDPR applies to your program. It does not matter where your company is based. It does not matter that your affiliates are independent contractors. The moment a visitor from the EU clicks an affiliate tracking link and a cookie lands on their browser, you are
KEEP READINGIf you run an affiliate program, you are responsible for what your affiliates say about your product. Not just morally responsible. Legally responsible. The FTC has made this clear: businesses that use affiliate marketing must ensure their partners disclose the financial relationship, make honest claims, and do not mislead consumers. When an affiliate breaks these
KEEP READINGClick fraud is the most common and most overlooked form of affiliate fraud. Unlike fake sales that eventually get flagged through refunds or chargebacks, fraudulent clicks can run for months without triggering any alarm because clicks alone do not cost you money in most affiliate programs. The damage shows up indirectly: corrupted analytics data, inflated
KEEP READINGAffiliate fraud is not a hypothetical risk. It is a statistical certainty once your program reaches a certain size. Run a program with 50 affiliates for a year and you might never encounter it. Scale to 200 or 300 partners and some percentage of them will test your boundaries. Fake clicks, self-referrals, cookie stuffing, unauthorized
KEEP READINGA customer reads a blog review from one of your affiliates. They click through, look at your pricing page, and leave. Two weeks later they see a social media post from a different affiliate, click again, and sign up for a free trial. A week after that, they receive your onboarding email sequence, upgrade to
KEEP READINGA visitor clicks your affiliate’s link on a Monday, browses your product page for a few minutes, and leaves without buying. On Thursday, they come back directly, add the product to their cart, and complete the purchase. Does the affiliate get credit for that sale? The answer depends entirely on your cookie duration. If your
KEEP READINGRunning an affiliate program without regular reporting is like driving without a dashboard. You might get where you are going, but you will not know how fast, how efficiently, or whether something is about to break until it already has. Reports turn raw tracking data into decisions. They tell you which affiliates to invest in,
KEEP READINGYour affiliate tracking platform tells you which affiliate drove a sale. Google Analytics tells you how visitors behave on your site. UTM parameters are the bridge between the two. Without them, your analytics data shows affiliate traffic as a single blob with no way to distinguish which affiliate, which campaign, or which piece of content
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