Your affiliate programme is probably your most misunderstood channel.
Affiliate has quietly become one of the most powerful channels in ecommerce. Here’s why that matters for you.
Think about how your customers actually research purchases. From “what’s the best sofa for a small living room?” to “how much cashback can I get if I buy now?”. They’re moving across comparison sites, editorial publishers, loyalty platforms, review content, and AI-generated recommendations before they ever reach your product page.
Affiliate is the commercial infrastructure that powers a huge amount of that journey. It’s how Digital PR becomes measurable. It’s how brand-to-brand collaborations get tracked and scaled. And increasingly, it’s how results from ChatGPT and Gemini recommendations get attributed back to real revenue. Because affiliates provide the commercial model that makes those partnerships viable.
So no, affiliate isn’t just voucher codes. (Though we can do those brilliantly too, when they’re right for your programme.) Done properly, it’s your most versatile, measurable, and frankly underutilised channel.
01 Brand-first, always
02 Full-funnel thinking
03 Honest attribution
04 Built to scale
Jake Newbould - Piglet
Whether you’re launching, stuck, or scaling, we’ll meet you where you are.
We work with ecommerce and retail brands at different stages of their affiliate journey. Some come to us with a programme that’s been running on autopilot for years. Others are starting from scratch. A few want a second opinion on what’s really going on under the bonnet. All of them leave with a clearer picture, and usually a better programme.
Affiliate programme management
Our specialism. We’ll launch a new programme or revive a tired one; handling strategy, partner recruitment, relationship management, compliance, and reporting. You stay focused on your brand. We stay focused on growing the channel.
Consultancy
Got a programme that’s plateaued? With 30+ years of combined affiliate experience across our senior team, we’re well placed to diagnose what’s not working and give you an honest, actionable plan without any obligation to hand everything over to us.
Compliance auditing
Affiliate compliance is one of those things that’s easy to deprioritise, until it isn’t. We audit your programme for compliance risks, manage it on an ongoing basis, and handle the conversations you don’t have time for.
Digital PR and performance editorial
We have strong relationships with editors across key publications and know exactly how to leverage performance PR for measurable results. Think affiliate-tracked editorial placements that drive real traffic not just brand mentions that disappear into the ether.
Don’t just take our word for it.
We work with brands who take their affiliate channel seriously and expect us to do the same. Here’s what two of them have to say:
Angela Ward, General Manager
Redefining affiliate value for a household name
When Dulux came to us, the challenge was clear: prove that the affiliate channel could genuinely earn its place in a sophisticated digital programme, not just sit at the bottom of the funnel collecting last-click credit.
“Choosing to onboard and work with Genie Goals on our affiliate programme has been one of the highlights of our digital programme this year. The team seamlessly became true partners — learning our brand values, products and strategic approach quickly to identify our short and long-term goals. It has established the value the affiliate channel plays in return on investment for Dulux, through direct sales as well as our wider marketing activity.”
— Elizabeth Nierop, UKI Digital & Ecommerce Lead, Dulux / AkzoNobel
Building a premium programme from the ground up
The Diamond Store needed an affiliate programme that reflected the quality of their brand — not a race to the bottom on commission rates. We rebuilt it from scratch with a data-driven, premium-first approach.
“Genie Goals has added extraordinary value to our business over the past eight months. By rebuilding our programme from the ground up with a premium, data-driven approach, they turned affiliates into a powerful new revenue channel that truly reflects our brand. Their strategy didn’t just optimise performance — it accelerated growth far beyond our expectations and created a scalable foundation for 2026 and beyond.”
— Gary Ingram, Co-Founder, The Diamond Store
We’re not just affiliate specialists. We’re ecommerce specialists who happen to be brilliant at affiliates.
There’s a difference and it matters. We sit within Genie Ventures, a £30m+ group that includes Genie Shopping Network (one of the UK’s largest CSS publishers, serving 37 million Google Shopping impressions a day) and Broadband Genie, our own D2C brand. That means we understand ecommerce from the inside out: not just how to manage a channel, but how it fits into a full commercial picture.
We bring that perspective to every affiliate programme we manage. Which is why we’re not just measuring clicks, we’re measuring what actually matters to your business.
- Founding member, Affiliate & Partner Marketing Association (APMA)
- Awin, Impact & Rakuten agency partner
- Performance Marketing Awards winner
- 25+ years combined affiliate experience
Affiliate Marketing FAQ’s
Affiliate marketing is a process whereby a brand promotes its products or services via an aligned partner site (the affiliate). These sites will promote brands in exchange for commercial payment often in the form of a commission when a referred sale from the affiliate has taken place.
Example: An editorial site features a top 10 pendant lights article and features a homeware brand’s lamp, the link from that article clicks through to the homeware brand's site and includes tracking. If a customer purchases a light from that referred click then the brand gets the sales and the affiliate a commission payment.
Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes therefore affiliate marketing is about building a wide network of aligned partner sites driving traffic back to the brand domain.
This is taking a deep dive into affiliate channel activity within the tracking platform. Affiliate programmes can be vast with multiple partners promoting in different ways and using other methods to gain sales. An affiliate audit should assess the health of your affiliate programme, looking for activities that may be non-compliant and also looking for gaps or opportunities.
Affiliate compliance is a really key part of an affiliate programme audit, as it's important to ensure that the promotional methods of all affiliate partners are transparent and add value to a brand's wider marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing relies on tracking to facilitate the partnerships. Therefore affiliates promoting brands need to have tracking on the links they promote to ensure that the customer click is recorded and ultimately any subsequent sales and commissions are tracked back to the affiliate. Affiliate networks in their essence facilitate the tracking, payment and discovery of potential partnerships for both parties.
You can read more and watch our video on the role of the affiliate network here.
One sign of a badly managed affiliate programme could be that it is all vouchercode sites, mainly as there are a lot of code sites in the channel and the majority can get up and running very quickly. The key thing to remember is as a brand you or whoever is managing your affiliate activity should be selective in who you approve. We recommend working with a handful of direct voucher code partners only, and only the main ones in the market. This allows you to monitor codes promoted and also ensure that the partner is representing your brand correctly. You should be striving to build an affiliate programme which leverages partners across the marketing funnel and that focuses on quality, aligned partner sites.
You can read more and watch our video on the incrementality of voucher and cashback sites here
Subnetworks are a collection of affiliate sites tracking under one affiliate ID or name, the subnetwork joins multiple brand programmes giving the sites that track under them access to lots of promotional opportunities without needing to join individual programmes themselves.
Skimlinks is the most popular example of a subnetwork, Skimlinks works with most editorial sites to provide affiliate tracking to the thousands of in-article links they have across their platforms and enables the editorial partner to monetise content at scale. Under Skimlinks you can see tracking for The Telegraph, The Independent, Glamour Magazine, Ideal Home and many more!
Skimlinks are an example of a subnetwork that provides transparency on traffic sources with click refs or by requesting reporting. There are however a lot of other subnetworks besides Skimlinks that do not provide clarity on traffic sources and this can leave them open to less favourable activity. At Genie Goals we recommend keeping subnetwork activity to a minute and believe Skimlinks to be the best partner due to the editorial content. If you work with any subnetworks that are unresponsive or who will not share the source of the traffic we would recommend removing them from your programme.
Think your affiliate programme could be doing more?
We’ll take an honest look at where you are, what’s working, and where the real opportunity lies. No hard sell. No jargon. Just a clear-eyed view from people who know this channel inside out.
Get in touch now