Recruiting affiliates with experience and a track record of success is one of the best ways to scale your affiliate marketing conversions and revenue. But with so many potential partners out there, how do you find the right ones and convince them to join your program?

In this post, we’ll share actionable strategies for recruiting affiliates who deliver value and align with your brand and business goals. We’ll also show how tools like TUNE’s affiliate marketing platform can make recruitment more efficient and effective, while offering additional ideas to build your pipeline and attract quality partners. By the end, you’ll have a roadmap for identifying, engaging, and onboarding affiliates who can help grow your business.

Why High-Performing Affiliates Matter

Not all affiliates are created equal. High-performing affiliates bring your business more than just traffic — they bring engaged audiences, stronger conversion rates, and long-term growth. These affiliates require deliberate recruitment strategies, not a “set it and forget it” approach. Instead, you need a proactive strategy and the right tools to find partners who are serious about success.

With dedicated resources, a clear strategy, and a platform like TUNE, you can streamline the recruitment and management process for your partners and your own team, empowering both sides to focus on what they do best.

Strategies for Recruiting High-Performing Affiliates

1. Provide Specific, Clear Details in Every Offer  

Transparency is one of the best ways to attract serious affiliates. When potential partners know exactly what you expect and what they’ll earn for meeting those expectations, they’re more likely to engage.

To make your program compelling and motivate affiliates out of the gate, every single offer you provide should include three pieces of information:

1. Payout structures and tiers: Clearly define commissions, bonuses, conversion windows, recurring payouts, and any other guidelines for conversions. For example, “Earn $40 per lead with a recurring 10% commission on subscription renewals in the first 12 months.”
2. Historical performance data: Share relevant data like typical conversion rates and average order value (AOV), or a list of your most popular offerings from the past 6 months, to demonstrate transparency and build trust.
3. Program benefits and perks: Let potential partners know how your program will make their job easier. Consider listing perks like professional creative assets, access to marketing tools or analytics dashboards, and a dedicated support team.

A clear, detailed offer signals professionalism, improves response rates, and helps affiliates quickly evaluate whether they can succeed with you.

2. Keep Your Recruitment Pipeline Active

Recruiting affiliates isn’t a one-and-done process. You can’t just post a sign-up link and expect top partners to flock to your program. The best programs maintain an ongoing pipeline, so they can adapt as trends, products, and audiences evolve. That means setting a strategy, executing on it regularly, and adjusting as needed.

Here are a few tips for how to keep your affiliate recruitment pipeline full:

• Regularly reach out through email, LinkedIn, and online communities
• Monitor emerging performance trends using analytics tools in TUNE to identify new opportunities and create content as needed
• Reach out to affiliates via their preferred platform, whether it’s TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, their personal blog, their online shop, or anywhere else
• Diversify your network by including non-traditional affiliates: influencers and creators, streamers, podcast hosts, niche specialists

A consistent, proactive approach will help you keep your program competitive.

3. Use Affiliate and Influencer Discovery Tools

You don’t have to find affiliates manually. Several tools can help you uncover new partners who already reach your target audience. Whether you’re looking for Instagram influencers, TikTok creators, or Twitch streamers, there are numerous apps and platforms created specifically to connect advertisers with affiliate marketers.

Beware any quick-fix solutions or AI-powered tools that promise the moon, however; no matter what they say, there is no one-stop shop to find every partner you need. Reputable solutions can help you find high-potential partners based on real engagement data rather than guesswork.

Based on your goals and industry, start by searching directly in the preferred platform of your ideal partner. Most social media companies now provide native tools for finding and collaborating with affiliates within the platform, such as Meta’s creator marketplace. Some other options:

• Influencer connection platforms like Upfluence, CreatorIQ, Find Your Influencer, and Aspire
• Social media and content analysis tools like SparkToro or BuzzSumo
• TUNE’s built-in partner marketplace and discovery tools

4. Work with Affiliate Marketing Agencies

For larger programs or those entering new markets, an affiliate marketing agency can accelerate the process. Agencies have established relationships with proven affiliates and can handle negotiations, onboarding, and scaling for you.

When researching agencies, look for a shop that has a proven track record of success in three areas: developing program strategy, operationalizing the program, and optimizing the program. The best agencies drive incremental value through tailored support in these phases. If your program is already established, search instead for an agency that specializes in recruitment and onboarding.

Benefits of working with an affiliate agency include:

1. Access to pre-qualified, high-performing affiliates
2. Faster, more efficient negotiations
3. Scalable support for regional or global programs

If you need to scale quickly without adding internal resources, an agency is worth considering.

Additional Ideas for Recruiting Affiliates

Beyond the strategies above, here are a few additional ways you can support your recruitment efforts and attract affiliates to your program.

• Host Webinars and Events: Offer educational webinars or networking events specifically for potential affiliates. Topics like “How to Maximize Affiliate Earnings” or “Trends in [Your Industry] Affiliate Programs” position you as a thought leader and attract motivated partners.
• Create a Referral Program for Current Affiliates: Your current affiliates likely know others in their space. Offer them an incentive to refer new partners, which can help you tap into trusted networks of quality affiliates.
• Build a Content Hub for Prospective Partners: Develop a dedicated page or microsite with resources for potential affiliates. Include case studies, earnings examples, FAQs, and program highlights to make it easy for them to see the value of joining.
• Engage in Industry Communities: Join forums, Slack groups, LinkedIn groups, and other industry communities where affiliates hang out. Participate in discussions, share insights, and build relationships over time to position your program as approachable and credible.

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

Recruiting affiliates who perform well takes more than luck. By combining platforms like TUNE with transparency, ongoing outreach, and creative engagement tactics, you can attract and onboard partners who are aligned with your goals. Remember, recruitment is an ongoing effort. The more you invest in building relationships and maintaining your pipeline, the more successful your program will become.

Ready to start recruiting high-performing affiliates? Request a demo of TUNE to see how the platform’s advanced tools and resources can simplify your workflows and help you build more profitable partnerships.

Not ready for a demo? Download our Influencer-Affiliate Blueprint for even more strategies to attract and retain top-performing partners.

Affiliate marketing can be one of the smartest ways to grow your business when it’s done right. The performance-based model keeps costs predictable and incentives aligned. But there’s a catch: because commissions are at stake, affiliate programs are also a popular target for fraud.

Fraud hurts more than just your budget. It damages relationships with real affiliates, distorts your campaign data, and can even hurt customer trust. In fact, global ad fraud is costing businesses more each year, and is estimated to increase from $84 billion to $172 billion by 2028. Unfortunately, affiliate programs are part of that number.

Fortunately, there are ways for advertisers and businesses to fight back. In this post, we’ll cover what affiliate fraud looks like and what you can do to prevent it.

What Does Affiliate Fraud Look Like?

Affiliate fraud happens when someone manipulates your tracking or payout system to earn commissions they didn’t really earn. These shady tactics take money away from your legitimate partners and waste your marketing spend.

Here are some of the most common types of affiliate fraud:

• Application fraud: Fake or stolen identities used to join your program.
• Click fraud: Bots or scripts generate fake clicks to inflate metrics.
• Conversion fraud: Fraudsters claim credit for sales or leads that never happened.
• Conversion stealing: Affiliates take credit for sales driven by another channel.
• Click spamming: Repeated irrelevant clicks in hopes of claiming organic sales.
• Cookie stuffing: Dropping cookies without consent to claim unearned credit.

Each of these can lower ROI, throw off your data, and even get you penalized if they violate network or platform rules.

How to Spot and Stop Affiliate Fraud

You don’t have to accept fraud as a cost of doing business. The best programs stay ahead of bad actors by combining good partner management with the right technology. Here are four ways you can do the same.

1. Use Advanced Fraud Prevention Tools

The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform gives you free, built-in tools and integrations designed to catch fraud before it costs you. Use these tools to:

• Screen affiliates before they join your program with our E-HAWK integration.
• Block invalid clicks in real time using Proactive Fraud Prevention.
• Set your own KPIs and performance automation rules to automatically flag unusual traffic patterns.
• Get full transparency with real-time reporting to spot anomalies fast.
• Use advanced tracking methods like postbacks to verify conversions accurately and securely.

2. Manage Affiliates Directly

Strong affiliate relationships go a long way. When you manage partners yourself instead of relying on third parties, it’s easier to enforce policies, verify credentials, and keep communication open. Check out our blog post for a few of the top tips for managing your own program.

3. Monitor the Data

Real-time data can tell you when something doesn’t add up — like a sudden spike in traffic with no conversions. With TUNE’s detailed performance data, including real-time data streaming via TUNE Firehose, you can act fast and minimize losses.

4. Train Your Team

Your team is your first line of defense. Make sure they know how to recognize red flags, use fraud tools effectively, and stay informed about emerging tactics.

Every fake click or false conversion wastes your ad spend and clouds your campaign data. That means worse ROI and poor decision-making. Investing in fraud prevention not only protects your budget, it helps build trust with honest affiliates who deserve to be paid for their real contributions.

Protect Your Program with TUNE

Affiliate fraud isn’t going away. But with the right approach, you can stay ahead of it. TUNE puts powerful, easy-to-use fraud prevention tools right at your fingertips, from advanced partner screening and real-time click blocking, to customizable automation rules that keep you in control 24/7.

Don’t wait until fraud drains your budget. Take control and keep your affiliate program secure today.

Ready to get started? Download our guide to performance automation, or reach out to partnermarketing@tune.com to learn more about fighting fraud on TUNE.

Today’s consumers spend more time on their phones than on any other device, and that includes when they shop, browse, and engage with brands.

If your affiliate program isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re leaving money and opportunities on the table.

In this post, we’ll explain why mobile matters in affiliate marketing, how tracking has evolved to keep up, and what you can do to make your mobile campaigns shine.

Why Mobile Matters More Than Ever

Mobile now makes up more than half of global web traffic, and users spend nearly four hours a day on mobile apps. That means your customers and your partners are already mobile-first.

If your affiliate program is still designed for desktop, you’re missing the biggest share of your audience. Whether it’s driving app installs, in-app purchases, or clicks through mobile web, mobile touchpoints are defining the future of affiliate marketing.

Apps, Web, and Why You Need Both

A strong mobile affiliate marketing strategy includes both apps and mobile web, as each has unique advantages for partner campaigns.

Mobile Apps

Apps create deeper engagement and higher retention than websites. They let affiliates guide users straight to specific products or offers with deep links, creating a seamless path to purchase. Industries like gaming, e-commerce, and fintech have seen huge growth thanks to app-focused campaigns, and affiliates appreciate the stronger conversion rates that apps deliver.

Mobile Web

Mobile web is just as important. It’s flexible, easy to access, and accounts for around 60% of affiliate-driven traffic. That’s why you should:

• Build fast, responsive pages
• Keep navigation simple
• Optimize load times

Together, apps and web create richer customer journeys that desktop-only strategies can’t match.

Tracking Mobile Performance: What’s Changed?

Mobile isn’t just a different screen. Because of the nature of mobile operating systems, this channel requires different tracking methodologies.

Cookies don’t work reliably in mobile environments, which is why modern affiliate programs rely on cookieless postback tracking and mobile measurement partners (MMPs).

Mobile Measurement Partners

Mobile measurement partners, or MMPs, integrate directly with your app, ad networks, and affiliates to deliver accurate attribution. You’ll know exactly which affiliate drove each install, click, or purchase, and you can reward them with confidence.

Server Postbacks

Server-side postback tracking bypasses browsers completely. It ensures you get accurate, real-time data, even when cookies fail.

With MMPs and postback tracking, you can have confidence in your performance data and help future-proof your mobile affiliate marketing program as privacy rules evolve.

How TUNE Helps Marketers Win on Mobile

TUNE was built with mobile in mind, and we continue to innovate within the space. We also have native integrations with the top five mobile measurement partners.

Here’s how our platform helps advertisers and agencies simplify mobile affiliate marketing:

• Seamless integrations with MMPs, apps, ad platforms, and affiliate networks
• Native postback tracking and cookieless tracking that’s easy to implement
• Real-time dashboards to show what’s working and what needs improvement

In other words: The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform makes it easier to measure, optimize, and grow your mobile campaigns.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing Is Mobile

Mobile isn’t just an option anymore — it’s a foundational part of modern affiliate marketing. Brands that embrace mobile-first strategies see better engagement, stronger partnerships, and higher ROI. With TUNE’s tools and expertise, you can connect with customers wherever they are and give your affiliates the transparency and trust they need to succeed.

Want to learn more about how mobile measurement partners can help to power your program? Check out our MMP vs Partner Marketing Platform Cheat Sheet, or download our Ultimate Guide to Mobile Partner Marketing.

Still have questions? Reach out to us at partnermarketing@tune.com with your questions.

How to Recruit Affiliate Marketers

It’s time for Part 8 of the Affiliate Marketing for Your Business blog series. This is your comprehensive resource for everything related to affiliate programs. We began this journey with intro material and have worked our way to more advanced strategies and concepts. Today, we’re covering how to recruit affiliates.

In case you’re just joining, here’s a recap:

• Part 1: Basic concepts for your affiliate marketing program.
• Part 2: A brief introduction to affiliate offers.
• Part 3: Understanding affiliate marketers.
• Part 4: Setting up your affiliate offers.
• Part 5: Variables and parameters for your tracking URLs.
• Part 6: Affiliate planning, research, targeting and traffic.
• Part 7: What can my program offer to attract affiliates?
• Part 8: Ways to recruit affiliates.

As promised, now we’re going to review how to recruit affiliate marketers to grow your program. There are many ways to attract high quality affiliates, and we recommend testing all of these and determining which ones work best.

Before affiliates will consider joining your program, they’ll need basic information you can provide on your sign-up page or through other mediums. Information affiliates will want included: fees, offers, payouts, tracking software, and support, among other areas. See Part 7 for more details on what to feature about your affiliate program.

Let’s jump right in and start learning about the different ways to find affiliate marketers.

Affiliate Sign-Up Page

The most important (and easiest) way to recruit affiliates is on your website sign-up page. It should be easily accessible throughout your site and featured in the footer, and maybe even in the header. Your sign-up page should clearly and concisely describe your affiliate program, providing high level details and how to join. It should be customized to your branding and colors, creating a seamless user experience from website to sign up. Unless you are a major brand, affiliates won’t waste their time searching for information and steps to sign up. Present this information right away, and you’ll expedite the sign-up and approval process to allow affiliates to begin quickly.

Your tracking software should automatically deploy an email confirmation once an affiliate is approved for your program. Soon thereafter, be sure to send a welcome email and describe the benefits of your program, their affiliate manager’s contact information, how to reach support, featured offers, and any key information they should keep in mind.

Affiliate Referrals

To build a more successful affiliate program, it’s recommended to offer an affiliate referral program. Referral programs reward existing affiliates for recruiting new ones. Incentivizing your affiliates to do this requires a proper commission structure. Your affiliate tracking software should provide the option of compensating referrals as a single payout (CPA on the successful sign up) or as an ongoing percentage of revenue, generated by the referred affiliate (the referring affiliate gets x% of the revenue the referred affiliate receives for sales, over x period of time).

As you can imagine, this provides a great incentive for affiliates to help you recruit new affiliates with relevant traffic sources.

Affiliate Directories

Listing your program and offers on various directory sites is a great way for affiliates to get visibility into your program. Affiliate directories like OfferVault and oDigger connect affiliates with programs and offers. Affiliates search these sites for offers and sign up for programs to get access to their offers.

Recruiting or Industry Trade Shows

Attending affiliate-related trade shows is a great way to get intimate access to affiliates. Trade shows connect affiliates, advertisers, and publishers with affiliate programs and networks. These gatherings make it easy to display your program’s offers by setting up a booth and participating in lectures and events. Because many affiliate trade shows draw in such a large crowds, it’s very easy to meet new and existing affiliates to create or grow your partnerships.

Email Communication

Emailing your existing affiliates and notifying them of updates such as new offers or payouts can really get them excited about your program. Affiliates network together, post in forums and blogs, review programs, comment on offers, and share, share, share. Reminding them of your referral program can get them talking and promoting your program to their affiliate friends. Check out this post for more information on communicating with affiliates.

Study Your Competition

The ideal candidate is likely already an affiliate of your competitors. Researching and studying your competition is nothing new, and it can be extremely helpful in finding new, high-converting affiliates for your program.

Study what your competitors are doing to recruit and retain affiliates. Research forums, articles, and blog content for recruiting strategies. You might even consider commenting in your competitor’s threads and replying to posts to get the attention of their existing or potential affiliates, but be prepared for reciprocation. Sometimes even a simple Google search for your competitors’ names will reveal affiliate sites that promote the competition. Feel free to contact these sites directly and negotiate a payout.

Pay-Per-Click

Leverage search engines to advertise your affiliate program’s ads to trigger based on search queries. Finding inexpensive and targeted search terms to bid on is key when building your affiliate base. Great PPC sources for targeting affiliates include Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads, Bidvertiser, and more.

Target your audience and potential affiliate base using relevant keywords and demographic information. To start, this might take some research, or begin broad and narrow in until you find the best keywords and phrases.

Social Networks

As social networks take over communication and marketing efforts, use this popularity and momentum to promote your program. Share information and link to your affiliate sign-up page. Test different types of messaging and see which renders the highest engagement levels. Remember to encourage others to share your message to increase visibility.

Posting on social bookmarking and message board sites such as Reddit is another great way to recruit affiliates, so try to spread your message across platforms beyond Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Look to podcasting networks, online communities, streaming services, messaging apps like Discord, and beyond.

Article Marketing

Online article marketing is one of the easiest ways to recruit affiliates. Begin by writing a content-rich article emphasizing the products or services your program offers. Remember to hyperlink key phrases and words back to your sign-up page, offers, or information pages. The advantage of this method is that you’re attracting only affiliates who are legitimately interested in your offers and program, and who happen to be searching for related offers.

Reviews and Forums

Reviews are a great way to attract affiliates by providing information and featuring your program’s strongest qualities. Contact existing customers, clients, partners, or affiliates and request (or incentivize) them to provide a review. Ask to focus on the benefits and advantages of your products, offers, or features. Lastly, have someone in your organization write a comparison article, comparing and contrasting your program to others. Reviews provide valuable information and have a strong influence on readers, and can help make a name for your program and its offers.

Creating a forum is a quick way to get readers to post comments and encourage the community to talk about your program. This can spur interest with potential affiliates and get them thinking about your program. Use these forums to post benefits, advantages and opinions about your program, and provide a link and/or clear call-to-action for interested affiliates to easily sign up.

Before you begin placing links, make sure they’re working and tracking properly. Your reputation will be tarnished if an affiliate clicks on your link and is sent to an error page.

Now that I know how to recruit affiliates for my program, what’s next?

Now that you know how to recruit the affiliates you want, we’re going to look into how you retain them and build those relationships to promote growth and retention. Stay tuned as you’ll learn how to help, engage, reward and communicate with your affiliates.

Ready to get started with your own affiliate program? Request a demo of TUNE, the platform of choice for marketers who require true flexibility and control of their data and affiliate program.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2012 and has been updated with new information and links.

Influencer marketing has been increasing in popularity for years, as more brands discover influencers to be some of their most effective marketing partners. But influencers can also be one of the most difficult partners to measure, since they work across multiple channels and platforms. Luckily for performance marketers, there’s a simple solution: clickless tracking via promo codes.

In this article, we’ll explain how clickless tracking works, where promo codes fit in, and why you should start using promo codes to measure your influencer campaigns. 

What Is Clickless Tracking?

Clickless tracking is a way to attribute conversions without requiring the customer to click on a tracking link. 

One of the most common examples of clickless tracking is the promo code. Promo codes, which are also known as vanity codes, discount codes, and referral codes, are perfect for measuring campaigns where tracking links are ineffective or impossible to use. 

For example, let’s say you want to promote your subscription meal delivery service on a podcast about cooking. Listeners who are interested in your service can’t click on an affiliate tracking link. Instead, the podcast host reads your ad, directs users to your website or app, and tells them to enter a special promo code at checkout. Whenever a listener uses that promo code to sign up for your service, the podcast partner gets credit for the conversion. 

With clickless tracking, the promo code acts like an affiliate tracking link, letting the advertiser know exactly which influencer drove which conversion. And because promo codes are not restricted to a specific link on a website or app, they offer advertisers valuable access to scale. 

Promo Code Basics

While popular with marketers for measuring influencer campaigns, promo codes can be used virtually anywhere that advertising exists (given you have the technology to implement them). This includes online platforms, offline media, and anything in between. That makes promo codes infinitely adaptable, and allows them to open up additional marketing channels for any advertiser or affiliate program. 

Examples of channels where promo codes can be used to track conversions: 

• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Twitch
• podcasts
• brick-and-mortar stores
• billboards
• magazines
• radio
• TV

Influencers in particular are fans of promo codes because they are platform agnostic, making them perfect for cross-channel promotion. An influencer can use the same promo code in an Instagram feed, an email blast, and a YouTube video, and easily track conversions across each of those channels, despite the difference in how their fans consume each medium and message.

To make clickless tracking work across these channels, advertisers need to have a certain level of control over their shopping cart functionality and tracking capabilities. Specifically, you need to be able to add a promo code field to your website or app checkout page. You also need to be able to pass checkout data in a conversion link (i.e., identify what code is used at checkout and send that information back to a tracking platform like TUNE). You can learn more about how the TUNE platform handles promo codes in this help article.

All this sounds great, right? However, it is important to remember that promo codes are a niche solution, not a way of life. If you are an advertiser with an affiliate program, and you have the ability to use link-based tracking, use it — as long as you’re using postback tracking, not pixel tracking. Pixel tracking is an inherently risky attribution method to use, with browsers like Safari fully blocking the use of third-party cookies for marketing purposes and others like Chrome constantly changing their stance and technology for handling them. 

To future-proof your tracking, we suggest adopting server-to-server tracking methods like postback tracking as soon as possible. (Check out this help article to learn more.)

Final Thoughts

Promo codes are a great way for advertisers to diversify their partnerships beyond traditional web-based affiliate marketing. And because clickless tracking does not require cookies to work, promo codes will remain in use for the foreseeable future, even as other tracking methods become obsolete or fall out of favor.

If you’d like to learn more about how to track promo codes in a platform like TUNE, visit our Promo Codes help article. Still have questions? Email us at partnermarketing@tune.com. 

This article was originally published on PerformanceIn.com and has been updated with new data and insights.

At TUNE, we know there’s nothing more fundamental to affiliate marketing than paying your partners.  Paying partners is something that should be seamless. Instead, the process is often plagued by additional costs, risk, and disagreements.  Partners are located all over the world with payment needs that are not easily met by most affiliate technology solutions.  Paying everyone on time with the correct amount per your own tracking and reconciliation can be an exercise in frustration not just for you, but also for your accounts payable team and your partners.  And that’s all before you see how much you’re getting charged by your bank and payment providers to make it all happen.

That’s why we introduced the affiliate world to TUNE Pay.  With TUNE Pay, you pay your partners via the same great technology platform you’re already using to track and manage your relationships.  And when you use TUNE Pay, you’re paying your partners through the most secure, flexible, and cost-effective payment processors on the market. You can optimize for process simplicity or customization — your choice. We encourage you to pay your way.     

Many of the largest advertiser programs and networks are already using TUNE Pay to manage the balances, invoices, and payments for their partnerships. We’re confident it will work seamlessly in your world, too.  

“TUNE Pay was a deciding factor in choosing TUNE as our affiliate technology partner. TUNE Pay makes generating invoices and paying partners simple, and on time! It streamlined payments from a manual, tedious process to an easy approval process with automatic payments. We also love the ability to customize payment amounts if needed.”

— Shari Mirkin, CFO, Trade Ideas

How will TUNE Pay make your life easier?

• Pay using the best and latest technology.  TUNE Pay supports payments through both TransferWise and PayPal — best-in-class systems that reflect how partners expect to get paid in today’s market.
• Pay anywhere in the world.  TUNE Pay supports payments to 50 different countries across 46 different currencies.
• Pay cheaply.  TUNE Pay’s integrations offer the lowest payment fees on the market.  Save thousands of dollars each month that can go back into your program.
• Pay your influencers.  Generate pre-payments and flat-rate payments for your influencers that still reconcile with your tracking data.
• Reconcile in real time.  TUNE Pay syncs with your TUNE account to ensure that changes in tracking data are automatically reflected in invoices, saving your accounts payable team from hours of reconciling conversions.
• Empower your partners.  Partners can check their balances, update their payment method, and pull new campaign data right within the same experience within TUNE.
• Manage tax documents. Allow TUNE Pay to house and manage partner tax documents, including approval of W-9’s and 1099 distribution.
• Control your payment experience.  TUNE Pay gives you full control over your invoices, including payout terms, custom templates, invoicing strategies, custom legal entities, and everything else you need to pay exactly the way you want.

If you’re running a network, TUNE Pay can also automatically generate your invoices to your advertising partners. It can even measure your cash flow to ensure that what you’re paying out to your partners is already covered by revenue you’ve received from your customers.

“With TUNE Pay, our customers can focus their efforts on maximizing their program potential, rather than reconciling conversion data and managing invoicing processes,” says Cynthia Sener, President of TUNE. “Using TUNE Pay provides our customers and their partners with confidence that payments will be accurate and on time. And we’re able to do it at a fraction of the cost of other systems.”

Whether you are an advertiser who is looking for a hands-off process, or a network that requires flexibility and customization, you can select the TUNE Pay plan that best works for you. 

Ready to get started? Reach out to your customer success manager for more information or email support@tune.com to learn more.

This blog post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated with new information and links.

The third-party cookie has been on quite the roller coaster over the last few years. In 2017, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), a WebKit feature designed to reduce cross-site tracking. A year later, ITP 2.0 killed the third-party cookie in Safari, leaving anyone who still relied on client-side tracking scrambling for a solution. And in 2020, Apple started to block all third-party cookies in Safari and iOS by default.

While all this was going on, Google, Mozilla, and other major browsers made their own promises and plans to phase out the third-party cookie. But in 2024, Google did what no other browser had done before: a u-turn on their third-party cookie plans. They announced that they were giving up on eliminating the third-party tracking cookie in Chrome, shocking the affiliate marketing industry and raising even more questions about the future of privacy and tracking.

The saga above is just one reason we’ve always said to “cut out the cookies” in resources like our tracking guide. Third-party cookies are bad for your health — your tracking health, that is. In the context affiliate marketing, what this means is third-party tracking cookies will compromise your campaigns. First-party tracking cookies aren’t great for them, either, but there are important differences between the two.

In this post, we’re crumbling the tracking cookie to show you what it’s really made of, addressing the differences between first- and third-party cookies, and reviewing why relying only on cookie-based tracking will only hurt you in the end. 

Browser Cookies: A Bite-Sized History

While the internet has been around in some form since the 1960s, it didn’t evolve into the World Wide Web we know today until 1991. The first websites were basic, clunky, and far from user friendly, but their commercial potential was obvious. 

However, unlike brick and mortar businesses, websites had no way of knowing who was walking in the door, so to speak. Every user was anonymous, so websites offered every user the same experience — a poor one.

That all changed in 1994, when Lou Montulli invented the HTTP cookie.

An employee of Netscape, Montulli had been tasked to find a way to store incomplete transaction information in a user’s computer, rather than a business’s servers. His solution was a browser-based “cookie,” or a piece of data that could be stored by a web browser on a user’s computer. (He borrowed the term from “magic cookie,” a data file used in programming.) 

Suddenly, cookies made it relatively easy for a website to collect, store, and monetize visitor data. So, naturally, every website started using them. 

Different Types of Cookies

Cookies improve user experience. They make it possible for websites to remember user preferences, store items in shopping carts, and do a thousand other useful things. Cookies also perform essential functions on the web, such as authentication. Some of these jobs are more sensitive than others, or require specialized functionality, so different “types” of cookies exist to handle different tasks. 

(We say “types” in quotation marks because, technically, every cookie is the same type of file. They can contain the same information and functionality. What’s different is how they are created and used.)

Some types of cookies include:

• Session cookies
• Persistent cookies
• Secure cookies
• HTTP-only cookies
• SameSite cookies (of Google Chrome 80 fame)
• First-party cookies
• Third-party cookies

If you’re a digital marketer, you’ll recognize the persistent cookie, just maybe not by name. 

A persistent cookie is simply a cookie that expires after a specific date or time frame. Until it expires, a persistent cookie will share its information every time the user interacts with the domain it belongs to. This interaction can be on the website where the cookie was created, or via a resource belonging to the original website that is hosted by a different publisher, like a banner ad. 

For this reason, persistent cookies are also called tracking cookies. 

Tracking Cookies: First-Party vs Third-Party

Tracking cookies come in two flavors: first-party and third-party. The “party” in both terms refers to the website that sets the cookie. 

First-Party Cookies

First-party cookies are set directly by the website you’re on, either by the publisher’s web server or JavaScript loaded on the website, and only the same domain can access them. The domain of a first-party cookie will be the same as the domain in your browser’s address bar.

As first-party cookies come from a trusted source — the website you’re actively visiting — browsers allow them by default. That’s generally a good thing, because these cookies enable much of the functionality you’re used to when browsing the web. 

If first-party cookies were blocked, you would have to log in to your favorite website every time you visited. You wouldn’t be able to purchase multiple items while shopping online, because your cart would reset with every item you add to it. And so on.

You can still choose to disable first-party cookies in any browser, or delete them at will — just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are not set by the website you’re on. Instead, they are set by an external server (e.g., a tracking platform) via a piece of code loaded on the website you are visiting. These cookies can then be accessed on any website that loads the code from the same third-party server. Since they share information across websites, third-party cookies are also known as cross-site cookies.

Third-party cookies are used in online advertising because they make it easy for marketers to collect data about consumers and use it to serve relevant ads across the internet. Unfortunately, many websites use third-party cookies to collect this data without the consumer’s knowledge, mine unnecessary personal and behavioral information, and track users wherever they go online. These practices have led to increased global scrutiny and mistrust of the digital advertising industry and driven new legislation to protect consumer privacy and data security.

Browser support for third-party tracking cookies is rapidly declining. Many major browsers now block them by default, and others have announced plans to phase them out entirely:

• In Safari and iOS, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) blocks all third-party tracking cookies by default. (Remember ITP 2.0? It started the shift towards cookie blocking in late 2018.)
• In Firefox, Mozilla’s Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks all third-party tracking cookies by default.
• Google announced in January 2020 plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years, while Chrome’s Incognito mode now blocks all third-party cookies by default.

Should You Use Cookies in Performance Marketing?

We admit it — not all cookies are bad. The internet as we know it couldn’t work without first-party cookies. Tracking cookies, however, are a different story.

When we tell you to cut out the cookies in our white paper, we mean tracking cookies in general, and third-party tracking cookies in particular. But even first-party cookies, when used for digital tracking purposes, have limitations and drawbacks. 

Third-Party Cookies and Pixel Tracking

Third-party cookies and web browsers power pixel tracking, also called client-side tracking or cookie-based tracking. Cookies are simple, and web browsers do all the work of storing and sending information in pixel tracking, so it’s easy to implement and use. Unfortunately, cookies are also easy for browsers to block, users to delete, and bad actors to leverage, leaving marketers and their campaigns at risk. Not to mention, pixel tracking works only on desktop web.

Pros: Easy to set up and share data. 

Cons: Inaccurate, unreliable, prone to fraud, doesn’t work on mobile, doesn’t work in browsers where third-party tracking cookies are blocked (i.e. Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, and soon Google’s Chrome).

First-Party Cookies and JavaScript SDK Tracking

First-party cookies can be used as third-party tracking cookies in certain situations. This can bypass some browser restrictions, but it’s not a panacea for pixel tracking.

TUNE’s version of this tracking method is called JavaScript SDK tracking. It uses a JavaScript code snippet and first-party cookies, and still makes the browser do all the work. Therefore, it’s still susceptible to some of the same risks and limitations as pixel tracking. For example, Safari deletes all first-party cookies (and other script-writable storage) after 7 days without user interaction. If you use this tracking method, then your conversion windows on any Apple device are capped at one week. We go into more detail on the effects of Apple’s anti-tracking measures here.

Pros: Works on desktop web and mobile web, more reliable than pixel tracking, less sensitive to browser restrictions.

Cons: Implementation is more complex than pixel tracking, browser and cookie restrictions still apply, cannot track cross-channel, difficult to troubleshoot.

Conclusion: Cut Out the Cookies, Pivot to Postbacks

We stand by our point: All tracking cookies, whether first-party or third-party, will hurt your tracking health in the end. When superior solutions like postbacks are available, there’s no need to risk your campaign health with either one. 

Postback tracking, unlike pixel and JavaScript SDK tracking, does not rely on web browsers to work. Also called server-side tracking or server-to-server tracking, postback tracking uses direct server communication instead. This frees marketers from cookie-based browser restrictions and provides complete control over campaign tracking. Even better? It works cross-channel on desktop web, mobile web, and mobile apps. 

For the short list of pros and cons, plus how postbacks compare to cookie-based tracking, read “Pixels vs. Postbacks: Which Tracking Method Should You Be Using?”

For a more in-depth look at all of these tracking methods, download our white paper: How to Become a Track Star: Your Guide to Tracking for Performance Marketing Campaigns. 

Performance marketers who continue to rely on the dying third-party cookie do so at their own risk. Whether the same fate awaits first-party tracking cookies is unknown, but we don’t suggest waiting around to find out.

TUNE has completed another successful audit of its system and organization controls, assuring the availability, processing integrity, security, confidentiality, and privacy of customer data. This latest audit marks another year that TUNE has earned both SOC 2 Type 2 certification and SOC 1 Type 2 certification. 

What Is a SOC 2 Audit? 

SOC stands for System and Organization Controls, a suite of services provided as part of the reporting platform of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). 

Essentially, a SOC 2 audit examines and evaluates the operational controls of a business. This audit requires a company to document and adhere to comprehensive information security policies and procedures, among other responsibilities. The resulting report gives interested parties, such as prospects and customers, additional information and insight to make a decision about working with that business.  †

What Is a SOC 1 Audit? 

SOC 1 audits focus on user entities, testing their relevant internal controls over financial reporting system design and operating effectiveness. We view SOC 1 audits and other periodic third-party reviews as a valuable resource to help enhance our current product and operations, especially when they address both the TUNE platform and TUNE Pay, our payments system. 

What Is a Type 2 Report?

To earn a Type 2 report, a company must undergo testing over an extended period of time. Type 1 reports, on the other hand, test only a single moment in time. TUNE’s usual audit period for SOC 2 and SOC 1 covers 12 months, demonstrating our ongoing effort to uphold the Trust Services Principles. 

TUNE has always voluntarily pursued the more demanding and comprehensive Type 2 report rather than the Type 1 report. Type 2 reports for both audits signal that our customers can expect high standards across TUNE’s operational, data security, and privacy practices, as well as stringent change management controls throughout our software development life cycle.

Our Commitment to Our Customers

Using an independent third-party to audit these controls is an investment companies do not take lightly. A SOC audit is, by design, an intrusive, time-consuming process designed to test a company on a variety of levels, necessitating active employee engagement and diligence across a broad swath of the organization. It’s a difficult process with a valuable payoff for our customers, and therefore one we are proud to undertake. 

As with our prior SOC audits, TUNE’s auditors determined that our controls were effectively designed and followed throughout the audit period. We intend to sustain our investments in customer-centric compliance in the years to come to protect both our business and the businesses of our customers.

Relevant portions of both reports are available upon request to security@tune.com for TUNE customers as well as prospects under a current non-disclosure agreement. 

Photo by Nesa by Makers

When it comes to performance marketing, one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself (or your advertiser) is what kind of conversion tracking protocol you want to use: pixel tracking (client-side) or postback tracking (server-side). There are benefits and disadvantages to each, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you wish to be successful. So, let’s break it down.

First — definitions:

Pixel Tracking

Also called client-side, cookie-based, in-browser tracking. This method relies on the user’s browser to track conversions by placing a cookie on the click that is called again on conversion to authenticate the session and attribute the conversion to the correct affiliate. Pixel-based offers use cookies to track because they can store the session values in the cookie, and with the way pixels are designed to track, can extract this information from the browser easily. As a result, setting up an offer to track using pixels is very simple and only involves placing the HTML offer pixel on the conversion page.

Use pixel tracking when:

TUNE’s general recommendation is to use pixel tracking as little as possible, as pixel tracking only works for non-mobile web traffic where cookies can be stored. Additionally, major browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are moving away from allowing tracking-related cookies even for first parties.

As the last resort, use pixel tracking if the following are true:

The offer’s advertiser is unable to send server-side conversion notifications.
The offer does not involve mobile app installs.
The offer’s desired end users are on browsers that support tracking-related cookies.

For more information, check out this TUNE support article explaining implementation of pixel tracking.

Postback Tracking

Also known as server-side, server call, server 2 server (or server-to-server), s2s and, mistakenly, server pixel tracking, relies on the advertiser’s servers to track sessions generated on clicks to attribute conversions.  The servers record and then pass the transaction ID back to TUNE. This method is independent of the user’s browser. Postback tracking can be thought of as two separate processes: what happens when a user clicks on an offer and what happens upon conversion.

Leading up to the conversion:

1. User sees an offer.
2. User clicks on the offer.
3. Click goes to a TUNE server. The server records the click, then generates and records the ID for that session (in most cases the transaction ID).
4. TUNE immediately directs the user to the offer’s landing page, including ID for that session in the offer URL.
5. User sees offer’s page on advertiser’s site. Advertiser’s site handles recording that session’s ID however it deems fit, such as storing it as a variable in an e-commerce site or SDK in a mobile app.

When the user converts on that offer:

1. The advertiser’s server sends a signal to TUNE (a.k.a. fires a postback) that includes the ID TUNE initially supplied. The user is not directed back to TUNE in any way.
2. TUNE records the conversion for that session.

TUNE has another great support article explaining postback tracking.

Use postback tracking when:

You have the technical resources available to implement the server-side calls (see below for details on implementation).

Pros and Cons of Pixel Tracking

Pros:

• Pixel tracking is extremely easy to implement. Because it’s just copying and pasting code into the HTML of your website, you don’t need to be a developer to set up tracking. Along the same lines, the learning curve for implementation is not as steep.

Cons:

• Pixel tracking doesn’t work if the conversion occurs on a mobile device. That means conversions on mobile web, in the app stores, and in apps will not register. (Mobile devices and smartphones usually have cookies blocked as a default setting, so a cookie will never be placed on mobile in the first place.)
• Pixel tracking is much more prone to fraud. As you can imagine, because the tracking is done in the browser, it would be fairly easy for a tech-savvy affiliate to fire pixels without an actual conversion occurring.  
• Sometimes, pixels just don’t fire and you won’t know why. A possible reason for this could be that the user cleared their cache between click and conversion, but occasionally the reason is unknown. Reporting will be of little help for troubleshooting, because you won’t have server logs to utilize.
• For all of these reasons (and others), pixel tracking is highly inaccurate.

Pros and Cons of Postback Tracking

Pros:

• Much more reliable because all tracking is done server-side, so you’re leaving a lot less up to chance.
• Much easier to troubleshoot, using TUNE’s server logs.
• Less prone to fraud, and many more options available to mitigate fraud, like adding an offer whitelist, advertiser security token, or hashing the postback URL. Read more about preventing postback fraud.
• You have the option to set up a global postback (on a per advertiser basis), where a single postback implementation can register a conversion for all offers for that advertiser. Pixels don’t have that option.
• In general, postback tracking will allow more options for conversion firing beyond when the user is on the webpage. Instead of being limited to a simple page load, you can have your advertiser send back the conversion URL whenever they please. This will become helpful if your advertiser doesn’t want to register conversions until after an order has shipped, or a lead has been qualified, for example.
• Postback tracking works on mobile devices! Remember, pixel tracking will not work on a smartphone or mobile device.

Cons:

• Postback tracking is harder to implement. It requires direct communication between the network and the advertiser to make sure that the ID is passed into the correct parameter, and then it requires technical implementation on behalf of the advertiser to store and pass back the value. The advertiser will need to have someone with server-side HTTP experience in order to code the requests.
• Implementation time varies widely. Postback tracking could be set up in a matter of minutes, but for some advertisers, it could take an entire day to code the database to store the IDs.

Want more information? Check out our blog series on digital tracking methods, or download the full e-book: How to Become a Track Star: Your Guide to Tracking for Performance Marketing Campaigns.

This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated with new links and information.

There’s no denying it: artificial intelligence is here to stay. And it’s disrupting almost every area of marketing you could think of, including the world of influencer marketing. As social media platforms and trends shift, the content creation process shifts with them. This change is nudging digital marketers to investigate AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney to expedite and optimize their daily tasks. We’ve been investigating ourselves, with mixed results — so if you’re determined to add AI to your influencer marketing strategy, just know it’s not a plug-and-play solution. It takes time, testing, and a clear idea of the relevant tactics and desired outcomes to succeed.

Sound good? Great! Let’s dive in.

How to Use ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude for Influencer Marketing

AI is on the rise across the board. Influencer marketing is no exception:

• According to a recent report by Influencer Marketing Hub, 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget in the next year, with AI tools being a key area of investment.
• In the same report, respondents identified three main uses for AI in influencer marketing: influencer identification (64%), content discovery and distribution (13.3%), and fraud identification (5.6%).

Here are a few ways that you use AI tools in your influencer marketing today.

Use ChatGPT to Identify Influencers

Identifying the right influencers to partner with is a critical component of any successful influencer marketing campaign. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist in various aspects of partner discovery and recruitment for influencer marketing. Because it has access to the internet (unlike some AI models), ChatGPT can search relevant sites and social media platforms for you, saving hours in your search for the right partners.

Try using ChatGPT and similar AI-powered tools to search the internet for influencers who fit your ideal profile. Provide your marketing guidelines or website, then ask to identify the influencers that align with your brand’s values, target audience, and marketing objectives. You can also ask ChatGPT analyze large datasets of social media activity, content performance, and audience demographics. Or ask it how best to ask it to find influencers; starting with the right prompt is key, so why not prompt it to provide the right prompt? The options are only as limited as your creativity!

Keep in mind that any data you give to ChatGPT could be shared with OpenAI or others. If you routinely work with sensitive data, consider using the paid version or a different model.

Use Midjourney to Generate Content and Ideas

Influencer marketing is not just about finding the right partners; it’s also about creating engaging, high-quality content that resonates with their followers. AI tools like Midjourney, an image generator, can be used to generate and iterate stunning visuals, while ChatGPT and Claude can help craft captions, scripts, and even entire content strategies.

A few examples of how AI can help in the content process:

• Design Inspiration: Prompt Midjourney with the subject, tone, look, and feel you’re going for in a campaign and let it brainstorm visual directions for you.
• Asset Creation: Generate graphics, banners, and other assets that influencers can use in their content. (Watch out, though: AI tools are still getting the hang of letters, and they often can’t spell worth a lick. Check your images for any text that’s generated, or create images without text and add it in post. There’s nothing worse than an AI-generated ad that spells words wrong or includes letters that don’t exist.)
• Scriptwriting: Use ChatGPT or Claude to generate scripts or script ideas for influencer videos and podcasts that resonate with a specified target audience.
• Social Media Posts: Create on-brand captions and posts that influencers can use across their platforms.

By automating these creative tasks, you can free up your influencers to focus on what they do best: building authentic connections with their audience.

Use Claude to Analyze and Optimize Campaigns

Measuring the success of your influencer marketing efforts is crucial for making informed decisions and optimizing future campaigns. AI-powered analytics tools can provide in-depth insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as reach, engagement, conversions, and return on investment (ROI).

Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, is designed to assist in complex decision-making processes. Unlike ChatGPT, though, Claude is designed to be self-contained, which means it won’t access the internet when forming a response. You’ll have to provide it with any relevant data you want to analyze. Luckily, this is as easy as uploading documents or images directly in your chat.

If you have large datasets you want to analyze, Claude is your go-to tool. Here are a few ideas on how to get started:

• Influencer Selection: Analyze engagement metrics, audience demographics, and content relevance to select the most effective influencers.
• Performance Tracking: Monitor influencer content performance over time, identifying which messages, formats, or topics are driving the most engagement and conversions.
• Sentiment Analysis: Claude can analyze audience sentiment towards influencer content, helping you refine your strategy for better results.

By leveraging these advanced data analysis capabilities, you can gain a deeper understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and how to fine-tune your approach for maximum impact.

How to Navigate the Ethics of AI in Influencer Marketing

Ensure Transparency and Authenticity

The rise of AI in influencer marketing has raised important questions about transparency and authenticity. As you explore these tools, it’s crucial to maintain clear communication with your influencer partners and their audiences about the use of AI in content creation or campaign management. Not everyone is on the AI train, and that’s OK. Transparency will help build trust and preserve the integrity of your influencer marketing efforts.

Address Bias and Fairness in AI-Driven Decisions

AI algorithms can sometimes perpetuate or amplify existing biases, which can have significant implications for your influencer selection and campaign management. It’s essential to actively monitor your AI-driven processes for potential biases, and to take steps to ensure that your influencer marketing strategies are fair, inclusive, and representative of your target audience.

Stay Informed About Evolving Regulations and Best Practices

The use of AI in influencer marketing — and digital marketing as a whole — is a rapidly evolving landscape. New regulations and best practices emerging regularly. As you incorporate AI into your strategies, stay informed about industry guidelines, legal requirements, and emerging ethical standards to maintain compliance and build trust with your stakeholders.

Your AI-Powered Future Is Waiting

In influencer marketing and so many other areas, AI can help you unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and performance. From identifying the right influencers to automating collaboration workflows and optimizing campaign strategies, the integration of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude can help you deliver exceptional results. Just remember to prioritize transparency, fairness, and ethical best practices to maintain the trust and loyalty of your influencer partners and their audiences.

Successful influencer marketing is all about building genuine, long-lasting relationships. AI can assist in this process, but it can’t totally replace the human component. Focus on how you can use AI to enhance your relationships with influencers, not automate them, and you’ll go far.

Want more info on making the most out of your influencer marketing efforts? Download the Influencer-Affiliate Blueprint e-book, our in-depth guide on how to build high-ROI creator communities.

It’s no secret that financial services affiliate marketing is on the rise. From 2011 to 2017, affiliate marketing spend by the big four banks rose from 11.7% of overall digital ad spend to 14.1%. And overall spend on affiliate marketing is expected to reach nearly $12 billion in 2025 — and that’s just in the United States. Even with regulations that slow progress in the financial industry, fintech brands are catching up to the times. They’re launching and acquiring apps, leveraging influencer marketing, and starting loyalty programs. And it couldn’t be a better time to do so.

In this blog post, we outline how financial services companies can use affiliate marketing to acquire customers, reach new audiences, and grow affiliate programs.

Best Partners for Financial Services Affiliate Marketing

In essence, affiliate marketing for financial services is about leveraging different kinds of partners — publishers, bloggers, influencers, content creators, TikTok stars, Twitch streamers, and so on — to promote a product, service, or company to their audiences. As a model based on performance, affiliate marketing can be a sound investment for financial services and fintech companies. But that doesn’t mean brands should be careless with marketing budgets or throw anything at the affiliate wall just to see what sticks.

Done right, financial services affiliate marketing can bring in big benefits:

• Open untapped audiences for incremental growth
• Access high-quality, engaged, and/or niche customers
• Improve ROI versus traditional (non-performance-based) advertising
• Target and pay only for desired results

Before you can reap the rewards, however, you have to find the right finance-minded affiliate partners to bring them in. Below, we present five of the best kinds of partners to help financial services companies raise the bottom line.

Comparison Sites

Comparison sites like Credit Sesame, Policygenius, Finder, FinanceBuzz, and Bankrate help consumers sift through a variety of financial products to identify which are right for them. These products can include credit cards, mortgage rates, loan options, and insurance companies. As the name implies, comparison sites compare different interest rates, annual fees, and incentives to open new accounts, and link directly to these resources when a consumer finds an option they like. Comparison partners are one of the most common financial services affiliate sites you’ll see.

Community and Content Publishers

With over 200 million ad blockers installed across browsers everywhere, consumers are more resistant than ever to in-your-face advertising. Luckily, publishers and blogs lend themselves nicely to content that consumers actively seek out, looking for everything from expert information to personal recommendations. Personal finance affiliate sites like The Penny Hoarder, Money Crashers, Business.com, The College Investor, Finance Girl, and personal blogs provide articles, reviews, offers, and recommendations about financial products and services.

Content affiliates are incentivized to promote financial services companies in exchange for commissions. Depending on budget and offering, there is a wide range of how banks and other finance institutions pay bloggers. Bank of America, for example, reportedly offers $120 per credit card approval; Discover pays $115, and TurboTax gives 15% commission per sale.

Influencer Affiliates

They say 2021 was the year of influencer marketing. While it might take some time to find the right affiliate influencer, financial services companies can also capitalize on the trend. Research your industry to find famous gurus, or niche experts, who might be willing to promote your brand on social media. Check specialty websites that rank influencers by vertical, engagement, location, and cost. Find out which affiliates your competitors are working with, and how other fintech brands grew their influencer relationships. Or just find an agency that specializes in influencer marketing, and have them do it all for you.

Remember: Word of mouth is still one of the most potent forms of marketing. Customers who follow a specific influencer will be more likely to trust their recommendations over any review site full of strangers.

Deal and Coupon Partners

Deal and coupon sites like The Smart Wallet, RetailMeNot, and Brad’s Deals incentivize readers with coupons and discounts. These can be applied when opening new personal banking accounts, enrolling in new financial courses, and taking advantage of credit card offers, for example.

Deals and coupons are growing increasingly popular for financial services affiliate marketing.

Loyalty and Rewards Affiliates

Loyalty and rewards affiliates offer cash back, points, or other types of rewards for using a product or service. Companies like Rakuten (formerly Ebates), TopCashback.com, and Swagbucks offer paid gift cards and points for taking surveys, signing up for new subscriptions, or watching videos. Like deal and coupon partners, loyalty affiliates are an excellent option for financial services companies to keep in mind. After all, physical and digital rewards have been found to increase brand exposure and conversions by more than 400%.

How to Start Financial Services Affiliate Marketing

Finding the right partners is only one step in successful financial services affiliate marketing. Finance and fintech brands must also determine goals and budgets, set metrics, document marketing policies, implement compliance controls, and manage technology to pull it all together. 

If you’re ready to launch a financial services affiliate program, download our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing for a step-by-step breakdown that will put you on the path to success. Or, if you’re not ready to jump in just yet, get an introduction to the industry and vertical-specific tools with our two-page Financial Services Playbook.

What other affiliate partners do you work with as a financial services or fintech brand? Let us know in the comments!

This article was originally published on PerformanceIn.com in January 2020 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Earnings per click is the be-all end-all performance metric to affiliates.

This key performance metric is your average revenue for each individual click you are driving to an advertiser. And if you don’t think this is the one affiliate marketing metric to keep your eyes on, allow me to explain.

But first, ask yourself a few key questions. Are you studying the metric? Do you know how it is calculated? Are you using it to strategically influence business decisions?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, you are leaving money on the table. And if that isn’t enough to persuade you, let’s cover a few other reasons why this metric matters.

Earnings Per Click Is Your Most Valuable Metric

Earnings per click is an agnostic statistic.

[bctt tweet=”At the end of the day, affiliates want to maximize their profit.” username=”tune”]

The metric doesn’t care how high your conversion rate is. It doesn’t care that exclusive partner payout you may have or the sheer number of clicks you generated. Earnings per click cuts through the clutter and gives you the exact amount of money you can expect to receive for every click you purchase based on historic performance. With that knowledge, it is just up to the affiliate to get their cost per click under their earnings per click to be profitable.

The true potential of the earnings per click metric is fully unlocked when utilized in a paid supply side cost per click or cost per thousand impressions environment. If you can extrapolate a cost per click for every click you drive to your paid advertisements, then you can directly compare this against the earnings per click that is calculated in your tracking software. If you subtract your cost per click from your earnings per click, you get your net profit per click.

(Calculating it looks like this: Net profit per click = earnings per click – cost per click.)

This is key. This is what affiliates thrive on when it comes down to it. Forget conversion rates. Forget click-through rates. Forget payouts. If your earnings per click is higher than your cost per click, you are making money. It’s as simple as that.

Most supply-side advertising platforms will provide you your cost per click, or a way to calculate your cost per click per ad by default. For instance, during my college years, I was operating as a high volume social media affiliate. The self-serve media buying platform I was pushing clicks through offered line-by-line reporting for each of my advertisements and their respective cost per clicks. To harmonize with this, my tracking platform offered earnings per click breakouts by sub ID. This meant that as long as I passed in the creative ID into a sub ID in the tracking links behind my ads, I could directly determine profit for each over any period. Split-testing on easy mode.

How to Calculate Earnings Per Click

Earnings per click is calculated by taking the total earnings you have generated over a period, and then dividing that by the number of clicks you have generated for that same period. This gives you an estimation of what you can expect each individual click you are generating to produce in earnings. This is a figure that is invaluable in a cost per click environment.

(Earnings of an individual click is calculated as total earnings over period “x” over the number of clicks over period “x”.)

3 Tips for Earnings Per Click Campaigns

1. Shop smarter. Let’s say a network approaches you with the same offer you are currently running, but with a higher payout. An attractive offer, right? In reality, this actually means nothing. Sure, the payout is higher — but what if the conversion rate is much lower? You could actually be losing money by running with this new network. This is where earnings per click becomes vitally important. If your EPC is higher on this new network than the old, you are now making more money. The conversion rate doesn’t matter. The payout doesn’t matter.

2. Test quicker. Having one metric to use as a baseline to measure performance makes split-testing a breeze. You now have the ability to juggle multiple networks, or constantly swap out links, while only having to focus on the earnings per click of those campaigns. In such a fluid, fast flowing industry, time is your most valuable asset. Calculating earnings per click gives you back time you were spending performing tedious calculations.

3. Feel safer. Fraud is, and will always be, a nagging, frustrating problem in the performance marketing world.

[bctt tweet=”Monitoring earnings per click as your anchor point facilitates a simple sense of security and control.” username=”tune”]

It is a trivial task to record and chart trends by hour, day, month, when you are only relying on a single key metric that pulls from both your gross spend and earnings. Effortless trend monitoring breeds obvious trend outliers. This empowers you, as a marketer, to focus your time on what’s critically important — performance.

A Final Thought

Running as an affiliate business means spending a lot of time looking for and testing offers. If your main goal is to make as much profit as possible, you need to optimize where you spend your time. Getting lost in numbers and metrics is easy, and if you’re not analyzing the right things, you’re wasting time and losing money.

Focusing on earnings per click may seem like too simple a solution, but it’s a quick way to ensure that you’re making money efficiently.

For more tips, check out TUNE’s Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

This article was originally published in August 2016 and has been updated with new information and insights.