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Affiliate marketing can often be seen as having a reputation problem. Ask most marketing teams what it does, and you'll get some version of the same answer: it swoops in at the last second, nicks the sale that every other channel worked hard for, and takes a commission for the privilege.
The reality? It's left unmanaged and unchecked, yes, you may end up with a programme of voucher partners or browser extentions. But you wouldn’t leave your PPC unchecked or your Meta activity, so why leave affiliates? No channel, if unmanaged, will achieve the results you want by proactively investing in the partnerships you have a real opportunity to tap into a wealth of real opportunities to grow and engage with highly aligned audiences.
Here's a quick example. Search for something you're actively researching - a dehumidifier, a skincare product, a standing desk - and take a proper look at what comes up. Editorial reviews, comparison pieces, YouTube tutorials, cashback sites, influencer roundups. Now count how many of those results have affiliate links woven in.
The answer, in most categories, is a lot. Upwards of 20 plus touchpoints in a single search journey isn't unusual. And the majority of those touchpoints aren't bottom-of-funnel last-click grabs. They're showing up in the research phase, when a customer is still figuring out what they even want to buy.
Affiliate and partner marketing is already embedded in how your customers shop. The question is whether your brand is showing up in those moments, or leaving the space to competitors who are.
The single biggest issue we see when auditing affiliate programmes is brands that don't actually know what's driving their results. When 80% of traffic is coming from a voucher site nobody can name, or commissions are being paid out to partners nobody's spoken to in months, you can't grow the channel; you can only hope it doesn't break.
The brands getting the most from affiliate marketing are the ones who treat it like any other strategic channel: knowing their partners, understanding their audiences, and being deliberate about who sits at which stage of the funnel. Editorial partners surfacing on high-intent research terms. CSS activity delivering efficient, scalable volume. Cashback and closed user groups for the right audience fit - not as a default, but as a considered choice.
Voucher sites aren't inherently bad, but working with ones running fake codes and disrupting journeys is where the channel gets its bad reputation and can also cause quite disruptive consumer journeys.
One of our favourite examples: we worked with Dulux on their annual Colour of the Year campaign. Historically a PR-led moment, it had started to lose some of its organic traction. By integrating affiliate activity alongside the PR push - not replacing it, extending it - we opened up access to editorial placements that weren't happening through PR channels alone. The result is a programme that now has a monthly cross-team call, shared target publications, and genuine collaboration between teams that previously barely spoke.
That kind of integration is where affiliate marketing quietly becomes one of the most powerful tools in your mix. Influencer marketing is a great example of this. The affiliate channel for us isn’t a perfect solution for influencer partners but it does provide a part of a toolset that can be really valuable to internal influencer teams. Think partners like LTK that make monetising influencer content really viable and run fully on an affiliate model, using this tool for tracking and scaling of content secured by brand teams, can encourage repeat posting if an influencer feels they can earn extra commission from LTK product links.
The honest answer is: we don't know everything yet. The shift towards in-platform checkout on LLM’s and AI-driven search results does raise real questions about last-click tracking and how commission models evolve. But affiliate marketing has adapted before, and the publishers and partners worth working with are already thinking about how to own their audiences more directly. The industry is tackling this with multiple platforms coming up with their own solutions, but as of yet, there doesn’t seem to be a universal way that tracking the value drive my AI presence will work. But it feels like it's coming! With Partnerize’s Vantagepoint and Rakuten’s upcoming partnership with Similarweb, the industry is preparing itself to maximise on the opportunity.
If anything, that makes the relationships you build now more valuable, not less. Brands with strong partner programmes, good attribution visibility, and genuine connections to editorial and content partners will be better placed than those who've been quietly underinvesting in the channel for years.
The opportunity is there. It just requires treating affiliates as a strategic channel rather than an afterthought.
Curious what your affiliate programme could be doing? Let's take a look together.
