More than 90% of e-commerce expected to run affiliate programmes by the end of the year, 5W research finds.
The affiliate landscape is one of the industries with the highest return on investment within digital marketing, with an average of $12 to $15 for every $1 invested, but new research is showing instances where affiliate programmes are leaving performance on the table.
A huge 90% of e-commerce businesses are expected to run affiliate programmes by the end of this year. Affiliate marketing spend has skyrocketed from $6.8bn in 2019 to $13.2bn in 2026 in the US, with the global affiliate market projected to reach $20bn this year, according to 5W research.
Affiliates contribute to roughly 16% of all US e-commerce sales, but only 7% of marketing managers see affiliate marketing as a top budget priority, which the research identifies as a gap in opportunity.
Influencer-driven affiliate conversions have risen 37% year-on-year (YoY), with top-tier publications offering 10% commissions.
Brand analysis in North America showed a shift in buyer behaviour, with affiliate click volume rising 2% YoY, conversions falling 5% and conversion rates dropping 6%.
The shift comes from consumers using affiliate content for comparison and research early on in the purchasing journey, converting to other channels later on when they are closer to purchase.
This leads last-click attribution models to “undercount the contribution of high-quality content partners and over-credit coupon and cashback affiliates that capture demand already decided”, the report stated.
High-quality content
Affiliate programmes are often built by performance agencies, which use cold outreach, generic recruitment, and commission incentives. This then leads to affiliate rosters with coupon aggregators, low-authority publishers, and traffic sources which dismantle brand credibility.
Matt Caiola, chief executive of 5W, said: “The performance of an affiliate programme is almost entirely determined by the quality of the publishers, creators, and media properties in it. And partner quality is almost entirely determined by how those partners were recruited.”
Partner quality is integral to the success of the affiliate programme. Publishers that rely on cold outreach and network browsing produce volume, not quality.
Those that rely on high-authority editorial content, trusted review publications, niche content creators, and top-tier influencers are more likely to be successful, but they have “more partnership requests than they can fulfill”, so can’t be cold-recruited, they have to be earnt.
To do this, agencies must build brand credibility with earned media coverage, which will attract higher-quality affiliate partners with better content, higher conversion rates, that drive more earned media coverage.
