Brand bidding: the most common leak
Incrementality: the question that matters
Partners: quality over quantity

Affiliate Marketing

A well-run affiliate programme is efficient acquisition. A badly run one pays commission on sales you would have made anyway, frequently to affiliates bidding on your own brand name.

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Digital Marketing

Channels that surround search, measured on one model instead of six.

Core issue: Are you buying sales or paying for them twice?

The incrementality question

The uncomfortable question in affiliate marketing is how much of your affiliate revenue is incremental. A coupon site appearing at checkout, or an affiliate bidding on your brand name, frequently intercepts a customer who had already decided to buy. You pay commission for a sale you were getting.

This is measurable, and most programmes never measure it. Establishing which partner types genuinely introduce new customers, and restructuring commission so those partners earn more than the interceptors, is usually where the recoverable money sits.

7 areas: One body of work, not a menu.

All services

What’s included

Programme design

Commission structure, cookie windows and terms built to reward genuine introduction rather than last-click interception.

Partner recruitment

Finding content publishers and review sites with real audiences in your category, rather than accepting whoever applies.

Brand bidding enforcement

Monitoring and policing affiliates bidding on your trademark terms, which is the most common and most expensive leak.

Incrementality analysis

Establishing which partner types genuinely add customers, so budget shifts toward them.

Network and platform selection

Choosing and configuring the right platform, or advising when running direct is better economics.

Fraud monitoring

Cookie stuffing, forced clicks and attribution manipulation, which are more common than most brands assume.

Partner enablement

Giving good affiliates the assets, data and product information they need to actually sell.

Common questions: Asked on most first calls.

Questions

Should we allow affiliates to bid on our brand terms?

Almost never. You end up paying commission plus a higher CPC for traffic that was already yours. It is the single most common way affiliate programmes destroy value.

Which network should we use?

Depends on your category and geography. For some brands running direct is better economics once volume justifies the operational overhead. We will assess rather than default.

How do we know if affiliate revenue is incremental?

Analysis of partner type, customer overlap and holdout testing where volume allows. Most programmes have never done this, and the result is frequently uncomfortable.

What commission should we pay?

It should vary by partner type and by whether the customer is new. A flat rate across all affiliates overpays interceptors and underpays genuine introducers.

Can this work for B2B or services?

Sometimes, though it fits ecommerce considerably better. For B2B, partner and referral arrangements usually work better than a conventional affiliate programme.

Related: Often scoped alongside this.

Next step: We look at your site before the call.

Start with a free audit

An automated crawl plus a 30-minute walkthrough of what we can see from outside your site. If what you need isn’t something we do well, we’ll tell you.

Get a free audit How engagements run