◆ Complete guide

Affiliateprograms- A to Z.

What a partner program is, how to design one, which commission models to pick and which networks to start with. Based on 10 years of work on the network, advertiser and publisher side.

What is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is an agreement where you pay third parties (publishers) for real results - a sale, a lead, an install - not for exposure. Performance is the real goal, not just reach.

The model is as old as sales commissions - that's been around since the 19th century. What's changed over the last 20 years is the scale, the tracking technology, and the number of publisher types you can plug into your value chain.

Put simply: affiliate programs are outsourced customer acquisition on a variable-cost model. You pay when you earn.

Publisher types

Publishers aren't one homogeneous group. A healthy program has 4-6 segments, each with a different customer lifecycle, a different cost, and a different expected commission.

Cashback

Last-click conversion, low acquisition cost, low loyalty. Drives transactions, not brand.

Content / SEO

Reviews, comparison sites, niche blogs. Long tail, high quality, long payback period.

Coupons

Cannibalize margin, but bring in volume. You need a floor policy in place.

Influencer

Highest conversion on new customers, hardest to scale, strongest brand fit.

Comparison

Regulated industries: finance, insurance, energy. CPL/CPA, very high volume.

Loyalty / bank apps

A growing player - credit cards, banks, fintechs with built-in miles/points.

Commission models

The choice of model isn't neutral: it shapes which publishers you attract and how they behave.
The three most common:

Commission on sale

You pay a percentage of order value. The e-commerce standard, safest for your margin.

Pay-per-lead

A flat rate per form or registration. The standard in finance, insurance and education. Requires hard lead quality validation.

Pay-per-action

A flat amount per action (install, deposit, first transaction) or a flat rate combined with a percentage. Common in gaming and fintech.

How to design a program?

There's no single "good program" - there's a good program for a specific company. But there are 5 questions you need to answer before your first publisher recruitment push:

What's your gross margin per order, and what percentage can you pay out to a publisher without running at a loss?
What cookie window is fair to both sides - and compatible with your other channels?
Do you pay for assisted conversions or only last-click? How do you deduplicate against brand search?
Which publisher types are off-limits for you (e.g., brand bidding, incentivized)?
Who handles validation, who pays out, who reports?

Tracking and attribution

This is where programs break most often. No pixel on the thank-you page, no deduplication, a poorly chosen cookie window, missing postbacks from the validation system - all of this means you either pay twice or don't pay at all.

Golden rule: if you can't say within 30 seconds what percentage of your affiliate conversions are genuinely "attributed" (the customer actually came through the publisher), you have an attribution problem.

On the costs

An affiliate program runs on a variable-cost model - you pay commission on results. But there are fixed costs too: network fees (1-3% of revenue or a fixed monthly rate), creatives, tools, and the people running operations. In real-world models, affiliate typically costs 8-22% of revenue net, less than most other acquisition channels.

If your affiliate cost exceeds 25% of that channel's revenue, you probably have a cannibalization problem (coupons, last-click cashback) - not a problem with affiliate itself.

What to avoid

Rates pulled "out of thin air," without calculating margin per category.
No validation - all conversions auto-approved after X days.
Publisher brand bidding - bidding on your own brand in Google Ads, stealing conversions you'd have gotten anyway.
No communication with publishers - a monthly newsletter is the bare minimum.