25th September 2026
Not all affiliates do the same job.
Some introduce customers to your brand for the first time.
Some influence a customer while they’re researching a purchase.
Some provide access to audiences you couldn’t otherwise reach.
Others appear much closer to conversion.
Yet many ecommerce affiliate programmes measure all of these partners in essentially the same way:
Revenue. Orders. CPA. ROAS.
That can create a distorted view of which publishers are actually valuable.
A content publisher introducing thousands of new consumers may look less efficient on last-click ROAS than a voucher site appearing seconds before checkout.
A creator may influence a purchase that eventually gets attributed to paid search.
A closed user group might deliver fewer transactions than cashback but give the brand access to an audience it specifically wants to acquire.
The question shouldn’t therefore be:
“Which affiliate type is best?”
It should be:
“What role do we need this publisher to perform — and how should we measure whether they’re doing it?”
This guide breaks down the main affiliate publisher types for ecommerce brands, what they’re good at, where they can go wrong, and how we evaluate their role within an affiliate programme.
An affiliate publisher is a business, website, creator, platform or other partner that promotes a brand through an affiliate relationship and can earn commission when agreed outcomes occur.
Those outcomes are usually sales for ecommerce programmes, although other models are possible.
The term covers an extremely broad ecosystem.
An affiliate could be:
Calling all of these businesses “affiliates” is technically correct.
Commercially, however, they can behave very differently.
That’s why publisher mix matters.
Affiliate publisher mix is the distribution of partners, revenue and activity across different publisher types within an affiliate programme.
For example, two brands might each generate £100,000 per month through affiliate marketing.
Brand A generates:
Brand B generates:
Both programmes report exactly the same affiliate revenue.
But they are fundamentally different programmes.
Neither mix is automatically better.
You would need to understand customer acquisition, margins, incrementality, cost, attribution and the brand’s objectives before making that judgement.
What the example demonstrates is that topline affiliate revenue tells you very little about the structure of the programme underneath it.
There are many ways to categorise affiliates, and the boundaries increasingly overlap.
A national publication might simultaneously be an editorial publisher, deals destination and voucher affiliate.
A creator platform could act as both technology provider and subnetwork.
A loyalty publisher could also operate cashback.
So we don’t believe rigid labels should determine strategy.
They are useful, however, for understanding the different roles partners can perform.
Content and editorial affiliates create articles, reviews, recommendations, buying guides and other content that can influence purchasing decisions.
Examples of the content include:
These publishers can range from specialist independent websites to major national media organisations.
Content publishers can be particularly valuable because they often reach consumers before they have decided exactly what or where to buy.
Someone searching for:
“best bridesmaid dresses UK”
is behaving very differently from someone searching:
“[Brand] discount code”
The first consumer may still be choosing a retailer.
That gives editorial affiliates the potential to create discovery and influence rather than simply capture an existing purchase decision.
Content affiliates can also be undervalued by traditional last-click attribution.
A customer could:
Read article → discover brand → visit website → leave → see paid social ad → return via Google → purchase
The editorial publisher created the introduction but may receive no affiliate commission at all.
This is why we increasingly look at metrics beyond last-click revenue when evaluating content partners.
These can include:
One common mistake is expecting every editorial partnership to operate purely on CPA.
Premium publishers may use:
Affiliate doesn’t eliminate the economics of media buying.
Instead, it can add a measurable performance layer to editorial activity.
Creator affiliate marketing sits at the intersection of influencer marketing, social commerce and traditional affiliate.
A creator promotes products to an audience through channels such as:
and can earn commission when their activity generates sales.
Creators can provide something many traditional affiliates cannot:
A recognisable individual recommending a product to an audience that trusts them.
That can make creator partnerships particularly powerful for:
The two don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
A creator relationship might involve:
Gifting + affiliate commission
or:
Fixed fee + affiliate commission
or:
Performance-only commission
The appropriate model depends on the creator, audience and campaign.
Where affiliate becomes particularly valuable is after the initial campaign.
If a creator demonstrates that their audience buys the product, the relationship can evolve from a one-off sponsored post into an ongoing commercial partnership.
That’s the shift from influencer campaign to creator commerce.
Don’t judge creators purely on follower count.
Look at:
A creator with 20,000 highly relevant followers can be substantially more commercially valuable than one with 500,000 poorly aligned followers.
Cashback publishers return part of the commercial value they receive to the customer as an incentive to purchase.
They can generate substantial volumes for ecommerce brands.
They can also be controversial when incrementality isn’t properly understood.
Cashback can influence:
For some customers, the cashback incentive may genuinely change behaviour.
The important question is not:
“Is cashback incremental?”
It’s:
“How incremental is this particular cashback partnership for our business?”
We might look at:
If a cashback publisher is introducing profitable new customers, that’s very different from a partner predominantly appearing at the end of journeys already created by other channels.
The commission structure should be capable of recognising that difference.
Loyalty publishers reward consumers for purchasing through their platform or ecosystem.
Rewards can include:
There can be overlap with cashback, but the customer proposition isn’t always the same.
A strong loyalty partner can provide access to an established audience with a reason to transact through the partnership.
For ecommerce brands, this can support:
The important consideration is whether the economics of the reward and commission remain commercially attractive to the advertiser.
Closed user groups — often shortened to CUGs — provide offers to defined audiences that are not necessarily available to the general public.
Examples can include:
CUG partnerships allow brands to target particular audiences with controlled commercial offers.
For example, a brand may not want to publicly advertise a 15% discount across its website.
It may, however, be comfortable offering 15% privately to a strategically valuable group.
That can protect wider pricing while still providing a strong acquisition proposition.
Closed-user-group activity still needs commercial evaluation.
Look at:
A large volume of discounted sales isn’t automatically successful if those customers are unprofitable.
Voucher publishers promote discount codes, offers and deals.
They are one of the most established parts of affiliate marketing — and one of the most debated.
The debate is often framed too simplistically.
“Voucher sites are bad.”
or:
“Voucher sites drive huge revenue, so they’re essential.”
Neither tells us enough.
A voucher partner can:
The biggest issue occurs when the affiliate captures demand without materially influencing it.
For example:
Customer decides to buy → reaches checkout → searches for a discount → clicks voucher affiliate → completes purchase
The affiliate may receive full last-click attribution.
But its incremental contribution needs to be understood.
There are also operational risks including:
We don’t believe every voucher publisher should automatically be removed.
Instead, evaluate them.
Understand their behaviour.
Control the codes they can access.
Monitor compliance.
Then set commission based on the value they’re actually creating.
Subnetworks act as an intermediary between the advertiser and a larger number of publishers.
Rather than every individual publisher joining the advertiser’s programme directly, they can access it through the subnetwork.
This can dramatically increase distribution.
Subnetworks can give brands access to:
that might otherwise be difficult to recruit individually.
The critical issue is understanding which underlying publisher generated the transaction.
Without sufficient sub-ID or publisher-level visibility, a programme might simply report:
“Subnetwork A generated £50,000.”
That isn’t enough.
Which partners underneath it generated the sales?
What type of traffic did they use?
Were they compliant?
Were they incremental?
The more transparent the underlying publisher data, the better the commercial decisions you can make.
Comparison publishers help consumers evaluate products, prices or providers.
They can be particularly influential when consumers haven’t yet decided which brand to buy from.
This makes them potentially powerful consideration-stage partners.
Examples can include:
These partners often interact with customers while they are actively evaluating alternatives.
That means the publisher can genuinely influence which brand wins the purchase.
For ecommerce brands with competitive product categories, that can be particularly valuable.
Affiliate technology partners use software or onsite technology to influence customer behaviour.
This can include technologies designed around:
These partnerships can be commercially attractive because the brand can sometimes pay based on performance rather than purchasing the technology through a traditional SaaS model.
As with any affiliate:
What would have happened without the technology?
If a technology partner claims £100,000 of affiliate revenue but most of those customers would have converted anyway, reported revenue may overstate the actual value.
Technology partnerships should therefore be tested and measured rather than assumed to be incremental.
One of the most underused areas of affiliate marketing is direct brand partnerships.
Imagine two non-competing ecommerce brands serving similar audiences.
A premium luggage brand and a travel accessories company.
A wedding fashion brand and a jewellery retailer.
A premium food brand and a wine retailer.
There may be opportunities for:
Affiliate technology provides a mechanism for tracking and rewarding those relationships.
This is where the concept of affiliate marketing starts becoming broader partnership marketing.
And we believe there is significant opportunity here for ecommerce brands.
There isn’t one.
That’s the wrong way to think about publisher strategy.
Instead, ask what the programme needs.
Consider:
Consider:
Consider:
Consider:
The strongest programme may use partners across all four areas.
This is an important distinction.
At Conversion Digital, we increasingly prefer to think about what a publisher does within the customer journey rather than simply the label attached to it.
A useful framework is:
Who introduces new consumers to the brand?
Who helps consumers decide whether the product is right for them?
Who helps turn intent into a transaction?
Who encourages customers to return?
Who turns customers, creators or communities into ongoing brand advocates?
A single publisher can potentially perform several of these roles.
This creates a much more sophisticated affiliate strategy than simply saying:
“We want 20% cashback, 20% content and 10% voucher.”
Percentages alone don’t create a strategy.
Understanding the job each partner performs does.
This is where many programmes go wrong.
If different publisher types perform different jobs, it doesn’t make sense to evaluate all of them using exactly the same metrics.
| Publisher Role | Useful Measures |
|---|---|
| Discovery | New customers, first touch, reach, referral traffic |
| Consideration | Assisted conversions, engagement, product interaction |
| Conversion | Conversion rate, revenue, CPA, incrementality |
| Loyalty | Repeat purchase, customer value, frequency |
| Strategic | Revenue plus wider audience, content and brand value |
Revenue remains important across all of them.
But the supporting metrics help explain how that revenue was created.
If you already have an affiliate programme, start by exporting publisher-level performance.
Then classify every meaningful partner.
Look at:
Then ask five questions.
Would losing two or three publishers materially damage the programme?
Do you have plenty of conversion partners but very little discovery?
Identify the publishers consistently expanding the customer base.
Investigate behaviour rather than assuming based on publisher category.
Which publishers promote competitors but not you?
That final question should feed directly into your recruitment strategy.
Consider an ecommerce brand generating £250,000 per month through affiliate.
The initial report looks excellent.
But analysis reveals:
That means 77% of affiliate revenue is concentrated in cashback and voucher activity.
The growth strategy shouldn’t necessarily be to remove those partners.
Doing so could destroy profitable revenue.
Instead, we’d ask:
Why is discovery so underrepresented?
The recruitment strategy could then focus on:
while continuing to optimise the existing conversion partners.
That is what we mean by rebalancing publisher mix.
Growth doesn’t always require replacing what already works.
Sometimes it requires building what is missing.
There is no universal benchmark.
And we’d be cautious of anyone claiming there is.
The appropriate mix depends on:
A gifting business in Q4 can behave very differently from a fashion retailer in summer.
A subscription business has different economics from a one-time-purchase retailer.
A premium brand may have a different appetite for discounting from a mass-market retailer.
So rather than copying someone else’s publisher percentages, build your programme around your commercial objectives.
When we take over or audit an affiliate programme, we don’t begin by deciding that one publisher category is good and another is bad.
We start with the business.
What does the brand want affiliate to achieve?
Where is existing revenue coming from?
Which customers are affiliates acquiring?
Which partners are driving incremental value?
Where is the programme overly concentrated?
Where are competitors stronger?
Which audiences aren’t currently being reached?
From there, we can build a publisher strategy around six areas:
1. Audit & Strategy
Understand the existing programme and identify the gaps.
2. Partner Recruitment
Target publishers capable of filling those gaps.
3. Programme Optimisation
Improve existing relationships, commercials and activity.
4. Revenue Scaling
Invest further in the partnerships demonstrating value.
5. Attribution & Reporting
Measure how different partners contribute rather than relying solely on last-click revenue.
6. Continuous Testing
Keep testing publisher models, commission structures and new partnership opportunities.
The objective isn’t to create the biggest affiliate programme.
It’s to create the right affiliate ecosystem for the brand.
Common affiliate publisher types include content and editorial publishers, influencers and creators, cashback, loyalty, closed user groups, voucher sites, subnetworks, comparison publishers, technology partners and direct brand partnerships.
There is no universal answer. Revenue contribution varies by brand, category, customer and programme structure. Cashback and voucher partners can generate substantial last-click volume, while content and creator partners may contribute more heavily to discovery and customer acquisition.
Affiliate publisher mix describes the distribution of partners, activity and revenue across different affiliate categories within a programme. Analysing publisher mix helps brands understand concentration, gaps and opportunities for diversification.
Cashback publishers can create incremental value, but this varies by partner and customer behaviour. Brands should assess factors including new customer percentage, journey position, cross-channel overlap and customer value rather than judging the entire category uniformly.
Not necessarily. Voucher publishers can distribute promotions and influence price-sensitive customers. However, brands should monitor incrementality, code leakage, compliance and journey position and set commission accordingly.
Closed user groups provide offers to defined audiences such as students, employees, NHS workers or members of particular organisations. They allow ecommerce brands to target specific customer groups with controlled promotions.
Start by auditing existing revenue and publisher concentration. Identify underrepresented stages of the customer journey, analyse where competitors have stronger publisher relationships and proactively recruit partners capable of filling those gaps.
A programme can generate strong revenue while still having significant untapped potential.
If most affiliate sales come from a handful of cashback, voucher or existing conversion partners, the next stage of growth may come from expanding the ecosystem rather than simply pushing existing partners harder.
Conversion Digital works with ecommerce brands to audit publisher mix, identify gaps, recruit new partners and build a more diversified affiliate strategy around incremental growth.
Speak to Conversion Digital about your affiliate programme. Contact us.
