How to Audit your Affiliate Programme

If you run an affiliate programme or have one being managed for you it can be challenging to know if it is working well. Affiliate programmes operate with lots of different partner types and promotional mechanisms meaning it can be difficult to truly evaluate performance - is my programme “good”?

In this article we outline the key checks anyone can make to their affiliate activity, this could be done even if you don’t have too much technical knowledge of the channel. These checks are things any good affiliate manager should just be doing as standard, not every day, but as a periodic evaluation of the affiliate activity you run.

If you run through this checklist and see you are doing all these things then great! You have really solid foundations to grow. If you are finding your programme is a bit misaligned to where you had hoped to be - don’t worry! Affiliate programmes can be reshaped with time and effort - all is not lost.  

An affiliate audit can be a highly technical process, especially when compliance comes into play. The checks below are intended to be accessible and a way for anyone to ensure that they are sense-checking their activity. Audits are not just about spotting wrong things, they should be a chance to spot opportunities to grow!

5 auditing checks you can make today:

Check 1: Is your affiliate programme meeting and hopefully smashing your KPIs?

We work with retailers who have lots of different KPIs and ways they want the channel to add value. Aligning the affiliate channel to your business goals is a surefire way to build a programme that adds value. If you start by stepping back and assessing what you are doing within your affiliate programme to your business goals, this can frame how you view individual partnerships. 

Examples include:

CPA targets, AOV growth or New customer targets.

These metrics will often result in very different programmes and types of activity if optimised fully. A programme with specified new customer targets can lead to a weighting towards upper funnel activity or CSS partnerships, as we know this kind of activity is aligned with the acquisition. 

It may be for some of these KPIs you don’t have the required data tracking in place via your affiliate platform, you could either upgrade your tracking or use manual data look-ups to your internal CRM to sense check. Upgrading your tracking should always be the preferred method as this enables whoever is running your program access to real-time data. 

Data to evaluate:

• How does your affiliate channel AOV look compared to your other channels? How does this differ from your top 20 partners?
• What is your current new customer rate in the channel? As above look at this by top 20 partners if you can. A low existing customer rate is not necessarily bad, as if that is a loyalty partner they may encourage more purchases than average. 
• As a follow-up to the above you might want to look at loyalty and cashback partners to see if the customers purchase more - this can be more in-depth and take a bit more time but is worth it to devise partner led strategies.   

Check 2: You’re not reliant on one partner or partner type

Diversity is one of the key benefits of the affiliate channel, with a vast ecosystem and mix of publishers available you should be able to build a really strong base of affiliates. If all your sales come from one partner or partner type you leave yourself open to risk.

The reasons relying on one partner type or one larger partner is risky include:

a) If that one affiliate partner stops performing you have lost a vast % of your program and expected results

b) By over-reliance on one partner type, i.e. if you only work with voucher partners, your programme becomes incredibly limited and likely not incremental as a lot of these partners will be engaging the same type of customer. 

c) As a business if you have a strategic change of direction, say for example you move away from the number of brand lead offers you run throughout a year (think 20% site-wide codes) and all your partnerships are offer lead partners this will leave you with very little ways to optimise. 

Data to evaluate:

• How much of your revenue is driven by your top 5 partners also drilling down, how much driven by your top partner? 
• Out of your sale-driving partners, what is the publisher mix? Most affiliates categorise themselves in the network, but we would always recommend sense-checking. It should be easy to do by looking at the site itself, if you can’t work out what a partner does but it drives volume then that in itself is a flag! (More below)

Knowing this data is not about stopping working with these partners, but how you can maintain performance whilst bringing onboard or building partners lower down your sale-driving partner list. In the old days of affiliate marketing, we called this the ‘long tail’. This means spotting someone who is steadily driving sales a month and putting a plan in place to grow this. 

The more quality partners driving sales the more you spread your reliance out and the more opportunities you have to promote. If you diversify who those partners are then even better!

Check 3: You have a clear understanding of how your sales-driving partners are delivering revenue

Knowing where your sales are coming from and how they are being driven is a sign of a well-managed programme. If you are reviewing your list of partners and you are unable to clearly understand how you are being promoted from the information provided - either in an affiliate profile or by asking that partner - then that should be your sign to investigate further! 

There is so much great activity in the affiliate channel, but there can be partners that maybe are not representing your brand in the right way. Ultimately you want to ensure affiliates are adding to your KPIs and also are an effective use of budget, by growing meaningful partnerships as mentioned above. 

Things to evaluate:

• Look at your top 10 affiliates (at least) over a 6-month period, visit each of their sites and look for your brand. Make sure you check the following:
  
  • Can you easily find the site?
  • Can you find your brand on the site?
  • What is being used to promote your brand? On a code site, this would be the codes displayed. 
  • If it's a browser extension like Honey download the extension, add something to your basket and check what Honey does on the checkout page (Check out our blog post on Honey here)
  • If you have subnetworks like Skimlinks, Digidip, and Yieldkit to name a few) then emailing the partner to provide a list of sites driving traffic to your brand is a great check. 

It's really important you can see how you are promoted, if you can’t then that should be a flag to contact the affiliate to ask for an explanation and screenshots/links to the activity. 

You should evaluate these partnerships for the opportunity to grow and brand alignment, if a partner is not aligned then it's important to understand that you can choose to remove that partner (following best practice) and re-invest in the partner's adding value. 

Check 4: You are engaging new partners and testing

The affiliate industry is not static, partners are growing and entering the space constantly. There should always be an interesting new opportunity to explore or a way of working with a partner to test. Finding new partners comes in lots of ways - programme approvals being a key one but also attending events, network newsletters, and looking at publisher discovery tools to name a few.

The same goes for testing! Great programmes test and establish clear testing criteria, with realistic expectations. For instance, when evaluating a content partnership, immediate revenue shouldn’t be your KPI. In my view, the absence of testing is more detrimental than a failed test. 

Things to try:

• Use your affiliate approvals to spot new opportunities - rather than simply just approving and hoping to reach out to that partner to start the conversation 
• Check the various network publisher discovery tools - these can be a bit clunky! But it's always worth a check. 
• Reach out to your network contact as there may be a distribution list for new publishers or new opportunities you can join
• Ask for gap analysis - this is a tricky one, as depending on SLA it isn’t always included but actually, the fee is minimal often and if it is completed once it can be a reach source of data
• If you are looking at your existing affiliates and don’t know where to start! Have a conversation with them, sometimes this can just result in being sent a media pack, therefore, it's important to lay out what you can do. If you include in your communication some KPIs you have, the commission rates you can offer and if you do have any budget including this as well can help to get a good recommendation! We always recommend going old school and having a call where you can.

Check 5: You have partners that do different things and fulfil different roles in a customer journey 

We love auditing programmes where the top 10 partners are a cashback site, closed user platform (think Blue Light Card), CSS partner, select direct voucher sites (not subnetworks) and content partners. Seeing this mix of partners in the top 10 shows that care has been taken in selecting partners. The channel has so much more to offer than just fake codes or low-quality sites, if we see a list of affiliates across promotional types, we typically know that a programme has been optimised and considered.

Things to evaluate:

• Referring back to check 1 and the KPI-led data we suggested considering, evaluating data around AOV and customer type can ensure you understand the role your affiliate partners play in the funnel. Yes, a cashback partner can be more existing customers but they typically spend more and more frequently, if you see that it can help shape the role you give them on your programme. 
• Ask for demographic data from partners - a student site has a younger audience, do you have the right message to attract that customer? It's really important to align here.

These are our top 5 things to check to ensure affiliate activity is being run well, it's not exhaustive and it's not all you can be doing! But anyone running affiliate activity should be able to use this as a sense check  - how does your affiliate programme measure up?