Retail & commerce · also called Affiliate advertising, performance partnerships
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based arrangement where partners, such as publishers, bloggers, coupon or cashback sites and influencers, earn commission for sales or leads they refer to a merchant.
Instead of paying for ad space, a merchant pays affiliates only when they deliver results. An affiliate places a tracked link, and when a visitor clicks and buys, the affiliate gets a commission, often a percentage of the sale. Affiliate networks and platforms manage tracking, payments and partner recruitment.
Affiliates range from review sites and publishers' shopping sections to coupon and cashback sites, comparison sites, email marketers and influencers. It is a major channel for e-commerce, travel, finance and subscriptions, and increasingly a revenue line for publishers.
Attribution is typically last click within a cookie window, which creates vulnerabilities: Cookie stuffing, coupon sites intercepting shoppers at checkout, fake leads (lead generation fraud) and brand-keyword bidding by affiliates. Merchants protect themselves with clear programme rules, incrementality testing and fraud monitoring. In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides require affiliates to disclose clearly that they earn commissions; similar rules exist in the UK, EU and India.
Think of it like this
Affiliate marketing is like a shop paying a friend a finder's fee every time someone they sent actually buys something.
An example
A travel site in India pays a 5% commission on bookings from affiliates; a travel blog earns ₹40,000 in a month on ₹8 lakh of bookings referred through its tracked links.
Related terms
Cookie stuffing
Cookie stuffing is secretly placing affiliate or tracking cookies on a person's browser without a real click or referral, so a fraudster gets commission if that person later buys something.
Last-click attribution
Last-click attribution gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final ad a customer clicked before converting, ignoring every earlier ad or touchpoint.
Lead generation fraud
Lead generation fraud is submitting fake, stolen or incentivized form fills, such as sign-ups, quote requests or demo bookings, so that advertisers pay for leads that are not genuine prospects.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is paying or partnering with social media creators to promote products to their followers through posts, videos or livestreams, which must be disclosed as advertising.
CPA (cost per acquisition)
CPA (cost per acquisition) is the average advertising cost of getting one desired action, such as a sale, sign-up or app install, and also a model paying only for those actions.