Affiliate marketing guides

Affiliate marketing is the part of performance marketing where you pay partners only when they deliver something you wanted: a sale, a lead or a sign-up. Those partners might be comparison sites, cashback and voucher sites, bloggers, newsletter owners or creators. Run well, it's one of the most cost-controlled channels a brand can have.

The catch is that it rarely runs itself. You have to pick a network or decide to run the programme in-house, set commission that works with your margins, recruit partners beyond the obvious few and keep an eye on the quality of what comes through. Most of the problems we see come from programmes that were launched and then left alone.

The guides below take those decisions one at a time. If you'd rather talk it through, see how we run affiliate and publisher marketing for advertisers, or the influencer marketing side of partner work.