Digital Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Performance-based is not the same as free. The risk simply moves from wasted spend to paying twice for the same sale.
Affiliate marketing pays partners commission on sales they produce, which sounds risk-free and is not. The Nexclick runs the recruitment, the commission structure and — most importantly — the policing, because an unmanaged programme pays voucher sites handsomely for customers who were already buying.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You have a programme on a network and have not looked at it in a year.
- A handful of voucher sites take most of the commission.
- Affiliate sales rose sharply and total revenue did not move with them.
- You are considering a programme because somebody described it as risk-free.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Decide whether a programme is worth running at all
- It needs margin to pay commission out of, a reasonable order value, and something affiliates can actually sell. Below that, network fees and management time exceed the incremental revenue.
- Set commission by partner type
- Content and review sites that create demand earn more than voucher sites intercepting it at checkout. A single flat rate quietly overpays the least valuable partners in the programme.
- Write terms that genuinely restrict
- Brand bidding on paid search, cashback stacking, toolbar behaviour and last-click hijacking. Terms nobody enforces are decoration, so enforcement is part of the work rather than an escalation.
- Recruit the partners who create demand
- Review sites, comparison sites and niche publishers in your sector, approached individually. Slow manual work, and the place almost all of a programme’s real value comes from.
- Police attribution and incrementality
- Checking whether affiliate-attributed sales were genuinely additional. The uncomfortable finding in most audits is that a meaningful share of them were not.
- Give partners something to work with
- Product feeds, imagery, current offers and enough notice to plan. Affiliates promote whoever makes it easiest, which is both the smallest reason and the easiest to fix.
- Review and prune quarterly
- Removing partners contributing nothing, adjusting rates, and checking that your top ten are not all doing the same thing in the same place at the same moment.
Decision tree
Should you run an affiliate programme at all?
It is pitched as free money because you only pay on a sale. Work through this first — several branches land on exactly where that money is being paid for sales you would have made anyway.
01Your gross margin is under about 30%
No. After commission, network fees and management time there is nothing left. Affiliate needs margin to pay out of, and no commission structure fixes an absent one.
02You sell a considered product people research before buying
Yes. Review and comparison sites genuinely create demand in this situation, and that is the version of this channel actually worth having.
03Most of your sales already come from branded search
Be careful. Voucher sites will attach themselves to those sales at the checkout step, and you will pay commission on customers who had already decided to buy from you.
04You want to launch it and leave it running
Do not start. An unmanaged programme drifts to voucher and cashback partners within months, because those are the ones who join automatically and never need chasing.
05You are a service business with no online checkout
Probably not. Affiliate tracking depends on an attributable online conversion, and lead-based programmes attract low-quality volume that is tedious and expensive to dispute.
06Your sector has strong niche publishers
Yes, and recruit them by hand. Ten good content partners are worth more than four hundred names pulled from a network directory.
07You already run one and voucher sites take most of the commission
Restructure rather than close it. Tiered commission by partner type, plus terms on code-listing, shifts the mix inside a quarter without losing the good partners.
08You cannot check whether a sale was incremental
Fix the tracking first. Without order-level data you cannot distinguish a new customer from one who paused at checkout to search for a discount code.
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
Viability and structure
Margin, order value and commission modelling. Ends with a recommendation, which is sometimes not to run a programme at all.
- 02Week 2–4
Programme setup
Network or in-house platform, tracking, terms, and commission tiers set by partner type rather than one rate for everybody.
- 03Ongoing, from week 4
Recruitment
Manual outreach to the partners worth having. The network’s own directory produces volume; it does not produce quality.
- 04Ongoing, monthly
Manage and police
Payments, disputes, brand bidding monitoring, incrementality checks and the quarterly prune.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A commission structure paying demand creation more than checkout interception.
- Terms covering brand bidding, cashback stacking and cookie-dropping — and enforcement of them.
- An incrementality check, so you know what share of affiliate sales you would have had anyway.
- Manual recruitment of content and review partners, not just a network directory listing.
- A quarterly prune with partners removed and the reason recorded.
Tools and platforms
- Awin, Impact or an in-house platform
- Product feed management
- Brand bidding monitoring
- Order-level data for incrementality checks
- Cross-channel deduplication rules
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Four weeks to set up, after which recruitment is a permanent activity rather than a phase. A programme takes six to twelve months to reach a useful mix of partners, and the first three are dominated by voucher and cashback sites because they join everything automatically. That is normal, and it is also the trap: if nobody rebalances the commission structure, those partners become the programme, and you end up paying five per cent on customers who typed your name into Google. Affiliate marketing is called risk-free because you only pay on a sale. The genuine risk is paying for sales you already had.
Pricing model
Project, then retainer
Fixed setup fee, monthly management retainer, plus network fees and commission paid to partners. We do not take a percentage of affiliate revenue, because that would give us an interest in a larger programme rather than a more incremental one.
Questions
Affiliate Marketing questions
Is affiliate marketing really risk-free?
No. You only pay on a sale, which removes the risk of wasted media spend and introduces a different one — paying commission on sales you would have made anyway. An unpoliced programme is a slow leak on your best customers rather than an obvious loss.
Should we allow voucher and cashback sites at all?
Usually yes, at a lower rate, with rules. They do bring some genuinely new customers and they capture people who would otherwise abandon looking for a code. Paying them the same rate as a publisher who wrote a thousand-word review is the mistake, not their presence.
What commission rate should we set?
Whatever your margin genuinely supports after network fees, tiered by partner type. The number matters less than the tiering. A single flat rate across content sites and voucher sites guarantees you overpay one of them, and it is never the one creating demand.
Which network should we use, or should we run it in-house?
A network for reach and for handling payments to hundreds of partners; in-house where you have a small number of significant partners and want to avoid the fees. Most businesses under a certain scale are better off with a handful of direct arrangements than a network they never log into.
What is brand bidding and why does it matter?
An affiliate bidding on your own brand name in paid search, so they appear above you, take the click, and claim commission on a customer who was searching for you specifically. Terms should prohibit it and somebody should be monitoring for it, because it is the most direct form of paying twice.
How do we tell whether an affiliate sale was incremental?
By looking at order-level data: new versus returning customer, the path before the affiliate click, and whether the click happened at the checkout step. A pattern of affiliate clicks landing seconds before purchase, from voucher domains, on returning customers, is not incremental revenue.
How long before a programme is worth having?
Six to twelve months to build a partner mix that is not dominated by voucher sites. The first quarter usually looks encouraging and is misleading — early volume comes from partners who joined automatically, and the recruitment that produces genuine value is slow manual work.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.