Affiliate ⁽²¹⁾

Aaron West

The Performance Marketing Metrics Glossary: CPC, CPM, CPA, CPL, CPS, ROAS, AOV, LTV

Every performance marketing metric answers one of three questions: what does this cost, did it make money, or what is actually happening in between. Sort any acronym you meet into one of those three buckets and the alphabet soup stops being intimidating, CPC, CPM, and…

Aaron West

Product Feeds and Data Structure for Affiliate: The Unsexy Foundation

A product feed is a structured, regularly-updated file containing all your product information, name, price, description, image, link, availability, that your affiliate partners use to promote your products accurately. It is the least glamorous part of an affiliate programme and one of the most consequential,…

Aaron West

Affiliate Program KPIs: The Numbers That Show If It's Actually Working

Most affiliate dashboards proudly display the numbers that mean the least. Total affiliates, total clicks, total revenue: big, reassuring, and almost useless for deciding what to do next. The numbers that actually tell you whether your programme is working, and what to fix, are quieter…

Aaron West

Recruiting and Managing Publishers Like a Sales Team

The single biggest difference between an affiliate programme that scales and one that plateaus is not the commission rate, the network, or the tracking. It is whether the person running it treats their partners like a sales team they actively manage or like a list…

Aaron West

Affiliate Deeplinks and Tracking Parameters: The Mechanics

An affiliate deeplink is a tracking link that sends the shopper to a specific product or category page rather than the merchant's homepage, while still recording which affiliate sent them. It sounds like a small technical detail. It is not. Sending a shopper who clicked…

Aaron West

Why You're Under-Counting: Cookie Loss, ITP, and Tracking Loss

If you run an affiliate programme, you are almost certainly crediting your partners for fewer sales than they actually drove, and the gap is widening every year. The cause is the steady collapse of browser cookie tracking: privacy features like Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, the…

Aaron West

Server-to-Server (S2S) and Postback Tracking, Explained

Server-to-server (S2S) tracking, also called postback tracking, records an affiliate conversion by having the merchant's server send the sale data directly to the affiliate platform's server, with no cookie and no browser involved. That one architectural change, moving the conversion record off the shopper's browser…

Aaron West

Comparison Sites, CSS, and Sub-Networks: The Partners People Forget

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…

Aaron West

Influencers and Creators: How Affiliate Powers Creator Commerce

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…

Aaron West

Content and Editorial Publishers: The Affiliate Partner Last-Click Underrates

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…

Aaron West

Coupon and Deal Sites: Value Driver or Margin Leak?

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…

Aaron West

Cashback and Loyalty Publishers: How They Really Work (and What They Cost You)

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…

Aaron West

Validation and Order Approval: The Step That Protects Your Margin

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…

Aaron West

Attribution for Affiliate: The Last-Click Reality and What's Replacing It

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…

Aaron West

Deduplication: How to Stop Paying Twice for One Sale

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…