Senior E-Commerce Manager & Digital Strategist
Comparison sites and Comparison Shopping Services (CSS) are affiliate-adjacent partners that list your products alongside competitors so shoppers can compare, then send the click your way for a fee or a commission. They are the partner type most programmes barely think about, which is a…
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Influencers and creators are the fastest-growing partner type in affiliate marketing, and the reason is a shift in how they get paid. Traditional influencer marketing meant paying a creator a flat fee upfront for a post, and hoping it worked. Affiliate flipped that: the creator…
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Content and editorial publishers are affiliate partners who earn commission through genuine editorial work, product reviews, buying guides, comparisons, how-to articles, the kind of content people actively seek out when they are trying to decide what to buy. They are the opposite end of the…
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Coupon and deal sites are affiliate partners that promote discount codes and offers, and the honest answer to whether they help or hurt is: both, depending entirely on how well you control them. Run well, with unique codes and clear rules, they bring real volume…
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Cashback and loyalty publishers are affiliate partners that share part of their commission back with the shopper, as cash, points, or perks, so the customer gets rewarded for buying and the publisher earns the rest. They are usually large, high-reach platforms, they are often among…
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Validation is the step where a merchant confirms a tracked affiliate sale is genuine, not returned, cancelled, or fraudulent, before the commission is approved and paid. It is the control that stops you paying for sales that never really stuck, and it works through a…
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Affiliate attribution is the rule that decides which affiliate, and which touchpoint, gets credit for a sale, and for most of the channel's history that rule has been brutally simple: last click wins. Whoever set the last click before purchase takes 100% of the credit…
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Deduplication is the process of making sure only one channel, or one affiliate, gets paid for a single sale, so you do not pay two commissions on one order. If a customer clicks an affiliate link from one network, then later clicks another affiliate's link…
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Affiliate fraud is any attempt to earn commissions for results that were not genuinely driven, faked clicks, faked leads, or stolen attribution, and because the whole channel pays for results, it has always attracted people who try to fake results. The defining shift in 2026…
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Affiliate marketing is full of acronyms and jargon, CPS, EPC, S2S, dedup, postback, cookie window, that can make a simple channel sound impenetrable. This glossary defines the terms that actually matter, in plain English, grouped so you can see how they fit together. Each definition…
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"Affiliate" covers wildly different kinds of partner, content sites, cashback platforms, coupon sites, influencers, comparison engines, and the single most important thing to understand is that they do fundamentally different jobs. Some genuinely introduce new customers to your brand; others mostly intercept customers who were…
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Affiliate tracking is the machinery that connects a click on a partner's link to a purchase that happens later, so the right partner gets paid, and in 2026 it runs on three core methods: the browser cookie (simple but increasingly unreliable), the tracking pixel (fires…
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An affiliate commission model is simply the rule for what you pay a partner and when, and the main ones are CPS (a cut of each sale), CPA (a fixed fee for a defined action), CPL (a fee per qualified lead), and various hybrids and…
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Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model where a business pays external partners (publishers) a commission for the sales or actions they drive, tracked through unique links so each partner gets credit for exactly what they brought in. The business only pays when it gets a…
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Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so it gets selected as the direct answer to a specific question, whether that is a Google featured snippet, a voice-assistant reply, or the answer an AI engine reads out when someone asks it…
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