Affiliate and partnership marketing

An affiliate programme has three parties and usually a fourth. The merchant sells something and sets the commission. The publisher, who might run a review site, a newsletter, a comparison tool or a social account, sends readers to the merchant through a tracked link. The customer buys. Between them sits the network, a company such as Impact, Awin, Rakuten Advertising or CJ, which hosts programmes, records clicks and sales, and pays publishers on the merchant's behalf. Some large merchants, Amazon among them, run their own programmes without one. Partnership marketing is the broader name the networks now prefer, because the same tracking can pay for customer referrals, business alliances and creator deals as readily as for classic content sites.

The vocabulary of the economics

• Commission model. Paying per sale, as a share of the order or a fixed sum, is the norm; paying per lead rewards sign-ups or enquiries instead.
• Cookie window. How long after the click a purchase still counts. Longer windows favour publishers whose readers research carefully before buying.
• Attribution rule. Most programmes pay the last affiliate click before purchase, so a voucher site that catches a buyer at checkout can take the credit from the review that persuaded them.
• Reversals. Returns, cancellations and fraud are deducted before payout, which is why reported earnings and paid earnings differ.
• Earnings per click. The figure publishers use to compare programmes, since a generous commission on a product nobody buys earns nothing.

Tracking is the fragile part. Links carry a click identifier that the merchant's site must hand back when a sale happens, and browser privacy features, consent banners and broken checkout integrations all lose sales the publisher never learns about. Networks increasingly rely on server-to-server tracking for that reason, the same shift marketing analytics has gone through.

Disclosure, and the traps on each side

Consumer regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union all expect a paid relationship to be disclosed clearly, close to the recommendation and before the reader clicks, not tucked into a footer. Search engines add pressure of their own, since pages that merely wrap tracked links around a manufacturer's description tend to rank poorly. For publishers, the classic first mistake is a site of reviews for products nobody behind it has used: cheap to start and nearly impossible to make trustworthy. For merchants, it is paying commission on sales that would have happened anyway, through voucher and cashback sites or partners bidding on the brand's own name. Publishers draw on SEO and content marketing; merchants draw on analytics. Both should check image rights before reusing product photography, because a merchant's asset terms or a stock licence decide what may appear on the page.