How to choose affiliates for your affiliate program

An affiliate program does not get better with more affiliates – it gets better with the right ones. Five partners who know your audience and actually move sales beat 500 random sign-ups that either sit idle or send traffic you do not want. Here we go through the types of affiliate, what each type does to your brand and your margin, the warning signs you should react to – and a concrete checklist for assessing each partner.

The guide is for you if you already run a program or are about to start one. If you are missing the foundation itself – commission, terms and tracking – start with our guide to starting an affiliate program and come back here when the first affiliates sign up. The whole plan, from commission to recruitment, is in affiliate marketing strategy for web shops.

Quality beats volume – the maths behind it#

At first glance many affiliates look free: in a CPS model you only pay on sales, so what do 500 passive sign-ups cost? More than you would think. Every active affiliate represents your brand to their audience, and you answer for the impression – whether it is a thorough product test or a spammy coupon page. Then there is the time: sales have to be approved or rejected, questions answered and suspicious patterns investigated. The more partners you do not know, the more of your program is noise.

The decisive metric is not the number of affiliates but incrementality: does the affiliate create sales that would not have happened without them? A commission is a good deal when the answer is yes. When the answer is no, you are paying for your own customers. So choosing affiliates is in practice choosing where in the buying journey you want to pay to be present – and you should make that choice deliberately, not let random sign-ups make it for you.

The 5 types of affiliate – and what they do to your margin#

Affiliates fall roughly into five types that behave very differently. The glossary explains each type in depth – here is the overview, focused on what the type means for your brand and your bottom line: content sites, niche sites, coupon sites, cashback sites and influencers.

Content and niche sites typically create demand: they reach customers who are researching a purchase and have not chosen a store yet. Coupon and cashback sites, on the other hand, often catch customers who already have the item in their basket and quickly google a discount code before paying. That can still make sense – a coupon site can save a purchase that would otherwise have been abandoned – but it is a different product you are buying, and it should be priced accordingly. Influencers sit somewhere in between: they can create demand that did not exist at all, but rarely deliver an even stream of sales month after month.

Warning signs – before and during the partnership#

A warning sign does not automatically mean fraud. It means questions you need answered before you work together – and patterns you need to react to if they show up in the numbers:

• Incentivised traffic: visitors are rewarded for clicking or buying. The traffic looks active, but the loyalty lies with the reward – not with your brand.
• Self-referral: the affiliate buys through their own link and in effect pays themselves a discount you never gave.
• Brand bidding: the affiliate advertises on your brand name and intercepts customers who were on their way to you anyway – you pay commission on top of a more expensive ad auction on your own keywords.
• Cookie stuffing: clicks are recorded without the visitor actually clicking, so the affiliate takes credit for later purchases they had nothing to do with.
• Vague answers about traffic sources: a serious affiliate can show where their traffic comes from. Vague answers are an answer in themselves.
• Many clicks, no sales: a persistent mismatch between clicks and conversions can be a poor match – or click fraud.

How the platform backs up your choices#

Your requirements for affiliates have to be enforceable – otherwise they are just intentions. With us, control sits in the program terms and in the approval flow:

• Channel restrictions are part of your program terms and are shown to the affiliate before the partnership starts. Nobody can say they did not know the rules.
• You choose the cookie window yourself, between 14 and 90 days – a short window for impulse purchases, a long one for considered purchases.
• Every sale is created as pending. You have the program's approval period (30–90 days) to reject it with a reason – after that it is approved automatically. See how approval of sales works.
• If an order from the WooCommerce plugin or a Stripe payment is refunded, the commission is rejected automatically. A refunded Shopify order is something you reject yourself within the approval period.
• Every tracking event is stored in an event log, so you can see what actually happened when something looks odd.

Enforcement works both ways, and that is an advantage for you: the commission is locked the moment someone clicks, and the rate can only be lowered once every 30 days – enforced by the database, not by a promise. Serious affiliates choose programs they can trust, so the rules that protect them are also what attracts the partners you want. Why the rules are built this way is explained in our manifesto on numbers you can verify. Read more about the whole flow under affiliate tracking.

Checklist: assess an affiliate in 6 steps#

Use the checklist both on new affiliates and on partners who are already active in your program. It takes 15–20 minutes per affiliate – and can save you months of cleaning up.

Assessment does not stop at sign-up#

With us, joining a program is open by default – the control lies in what happens afterwards. Every sale starts as pending and goes through your approval, a rejection needs a reason, and a block shuts off all earning. Curating your program is therefore not a one-off task but an ongoing process: look at the numbers monthly, have the conversation with the affiliates who disappoint, and block the few who actively do harm.

You rarely find the right five affiliates by waiting for them – you find them by reaching out yourself to the sites and profiles your audience already trusts. See how other stores present their terms in the program directory, and if you are unsure where to start, get in touch – these are the conversations we prefer to have early.