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.

Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly powerful channel for driving growth and revenue, but launching and managing a successful program requires the right tools. The affiliate marketing platform you choose will serve as the backbone of your entire program, making it essential to pick one that aligns with your goals, technical requirements, and future growth.  

This guide is designed for brands, affiliate managers, marketers, CMOs, and growth teams looking to start an affiliate program. By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly how to evaluate and purchase the best affiliate marketing platform for your business, as well as how to prepare your brand for success in the affiliate space. 

Why Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Platform Matters  

Affiliate marketing platforms are designed to streamline the management of partnerships, track campaign performance, prevent fraud, automate processes, and ensure payouts happen with ease. Choosing the right one can mean the difference between a high-performing channel and wasted resources.  

An ideal affiliate platform goes beyond surface-level needs to fit seamlessly into your workflows, connect with your partners, and grow alongside your program. Here’s the step-by-step process to ensure you’re making the smartest decision.  

Step 1: Clearly Define Your Affiliate Program Goals  

Before buying software, take a moment to assess your goals and strategy for the affiliate channel. Without a clear purpose, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overpaying for features you don’t need or underestimating the resources required for success.

Here are four important objectives to define upfront: 

1. What Offer Are You Promoting?
   • Are you focused on driving sales for a specific product, building email signups, or generating leads? Your program’s focus will determine the platform features you prioritize. 
2. Target Partner Types
   • Will you work with influencers, content publishers, coupon sites, or a combination of these? Each partner type has unique requirements. 
3. Recruitment Strategy
   • How will you onboard affiliates? Will you handle recruitment in-house using tools like the TUNE Marketplace, or will you enlist the help of an agency for scale and strategic guidance? 
4. Scalability Goals
   • Consider both your immediate needs and how your program might expand over time. Aim for a platform that can adapt as your business grows. 

Being clear on these objectives will help you evaluate platforms effectively and ensure you’re setting your program up for success.  

Step 2: Start a Discovery Call  

A discovery call with a potential platform isn’t just a sales pitch — it’s an opportunity to validate that the software is a good fit for your needs. Here are two strategies on how to approach it. 

First, ask targeted questions. Clarify whether the platform offers the tools and integrations required to meet your goals. Don’t be afraid to be specific. Example question: “Does the platform support pixel tracking, server-to-server postback tracking, or both?”

Second, focus on pain points. Discuss the challenges your team faces. The right platform should solve these challenges and not create more complexity. 

A discovery call enables you to quickly filter out platforms that won’t meet your needs, saving time in your selection process.  

Step 3: Request a Demo and Include the Right Stakeholders  

A product demo gives you a deep look at the platform’s interface, capabilities, and overall user experience. Ensure the right team members are present to assess its fit across departments: include your affiliate manager to review operational workflows; invite representatives from your tech team to evaluate backend integration requirements; and bring in your finance team, especially if automated payouts and invoicing are important for your program. 

During the demo: 

• Focus on tactical questions that address your pain points. 
• Look for examples of real-world use cases similar to your goals. 
• Ensure the platform provides features like fraud detection, customizable reports, and automation capabilities such as recurring payouts. 
• Ask how the platform will scale.
  • For instance, “What happens when we onboard 100 affiliates? Are there features to help streamline that growth while maintaining performance tracking?”  

Step 4: Prepare Your Tech Team for Integration  

One of the most important aspects of choosing a platform is ensuring it syncs smoothly with your existing technology stack. Every affiliate platform has unique integration requirements, so it’s essential to get your tech team involved at this stage.  

Key Considerations: 

1. Integration Compatibility
   • Does the platform integrate with your CRM, analytics tools, e-commerce platform, or payment providers? 
2. Scalability and Flexibility
   • Is the platform’s API robust enough to support customized workflows? 
3. Support
   • If issues arise with the integration, what support does the platform offer? Ensure they provide technical documentation and direct access to a support team. 

Review these points carefully to avoid roadblocks as you transition to affiliate automation.  

Step 5: Understand Pricing and Growth Costs  

Affiliate platforms often use tiered pricing based on factors like transaction volume or the number of active partnerships. Clarify the pricing structure during your evaluation process.  

• Ask About Hidden Costs
  • Some platforms charge extra for premium support, advanced reporting, or API access. 
• Project Growth Costs
  • If your affiliate program grows rapidly, how will costs change? Look for predictable pricing to avoid future surprises. 

Ensure the value of the platform aligns with your budget and delivers consistent ROI as your program scales.  

Step 6: Plan for Onboarding and Training  

Once you’ve selected a platform, onboarding and training are crucial to successfully getting your affiliate program off the ground. Here’s what to prepare: 

• Onboarding Proposal
  • Collaborate with the platform’s onboarding team to map out key milestones. 
• Training Resources
  • Look for documentation, video tutorials, or live training sessions to help your team get comfortable with the software. 
• Agency Assistance
  • If you’re new to affiliate marketing, consider partnering with an agency. Agencies bring decades of experience to help brands strategize, operationalize, and optimize their programs. 

With proper onboarding and guidance, your brand will be positioned to launch the channel smoothly and achieve results faster.  

Discover Affiliate Marketing Success  

Building a successful affiliate program starts with finding the right platform. By defining your goals, asking the right questions, and leveraging expert guidance, you can confidently choose a solution that not only fits your immediate needs but supports your long-term growth.

If you want a flexible, scalable, and customizable affiliate platform backed by an experienced team, explore what TUNE has to offer. From native postback tracking to automation and fraud prevention tools, we’re here to help you build the affiliate program your brand deserves. Learn more or request a demo here.

Already have your ideal platform in place? Then download our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing to learn everything else that goes into building and growing a profitable program.

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.

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.

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.

It has been another productive year for the TUNE Product Team as we continue to focus on our mission to help digital marketers build personal relationships and trust. 

2024 Product Updates and Releases

TUNE Marketplace 

2024 started off with a reintroduction of the TUNE Marketplace and a number of improvements to help make relationship building between brands and affiliates even easier through the Marketplace experience. This included the addition of a robust notification system to help keep brands and affiliates in the loop when key events take place, such as initial inquires. The system also sends reminders when a brand or affiliate may be waiting for a response. Relationship building requires timeliness, and these updates aim to keep the process moving in a positive direction.  

Google Ads integration 

A great relationship requires transparency. To help cement that concept from a tracking and compliance perspective, TUNE has become certified as an official Google click tracking partner. Customers utilizing the Google Ads platform can integrate with TUNE for a seamless link generation experience to ensure compliance with Google and industry standards.  

CPC First-Click Attribution 

Building on the transparency theme, TUNE has improved our session tracking tools to ensure cost-per-click (CPC) offers only pay out on the first click. For customers utilizing server-based postback tracking, this greatly reduces the risk of overpaying. Read more to understand how TUNE achieves this process.  

 Advanced Device Detection 

While Chromium has begun limiting the amount of information returned as part of its agent string, there may still be instances where marketers want to target audiences based on the operating system or device model they use. TUNE’s Advanced Device Detection feature gives marketers this additional insight into their audience. Once enabled, this additional data is available in reporting as well as the Advanced Targeting features. 

Microsoft Azure SSO Support 

Last year, TUNE introduced new security and trust features, including support for organizations that manage user access through Okta. In 2024, we expanded single sign-on (SSO) support to include Microsoft Azure. This helps IT staff maintain tighter controls and best practices when managing users and their access to third-party platforms. 

Additional Improvements 

Several smaller feature improvements made their way into the TUNE platform in 2024, including the ability to filter reports by partner status for more granularity when seeking program insights. 

TUNE’s Proactive Click Fraud Prevention system now surfaces deeper insight into the reasons behind potentially fraudulent activity. This includes fraud reasons from bot generated traffic to IP addresses being spoofed via VPN. 

We expanded promo code functionality to allow management via the TUNE API. This provides customers a more programmatic path to managing promo codes when integrating with systems outside of TUNE. 

Looking Ahead to 2025 

For the last several months, the TUNE Product Team has been reevaluating our core feature set and workflows with an eye toward improving the overall experience when interacting with the TUNE platform. We have spent a lot of time prototyping, asking customers for feedback, and getting a deeper sense of how our users operate day-to-day. (Thanks to everyone that has talked with us!)  

As a result, we are close to opening a beta version of a new offer experience that we believe will be more intuitive, and faster to navigate. In the end, we want customers focused more on marketing and less on the vagaries of the tools. Keep an eye out for an opportunity to help test that new experience very soon.  

Cheers to 2024 and here’s to an even better 2025! 

Acquiring new high-intent customers is a critical challenge for any business, especially in the finance market. Customers rely heavily on word-of-mouth and take many factors into consideration before converting, making the stakes even higher.

Traditional marketing strategies often miss the mark, struggling to hit the sweet spot between ad spend and customer quality. This is where outcome-based marketing (OBM) comes into play. OBM revolutionizes customer acquisition by offering a more effective, performance-based approach, positioning brands to access previously untapped high-intent traffic, all while sharpening their competitive edge in the financial services landscape.

What is Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)?

Outcome-based marketing (OBM) is a results-driven strategy ideal for financial services marketers. With OBM, you only pay when specific KPIs crucial to your business are achieved, such as acquiring a qualified lead, loan application submissions, or new account openings. Campaigns are tailored around these down-funnel events, enabling you to test performance across various channels and pinpoint the most effective placements for converting traffic into customers.

Overcoming Customer Acquisition Pain Points with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Discover how an OBM model helps tackle common obstacles in scaling customer acquisition in the finance industry.

High Costs per Acquisition: OBM helps manage high acquisition costs by ensuring you only pay for specific, measurable outcomes such as qualified leads or completed applications. This ensures every dollar you invest drives growth. With continuous optimization, OBM pinpoints where your best customers come from, enabling you to scale effectively without overspending.

Inefficiency in Targeting: OBM enhances targeting by using placement-based strategies across digital channels, geo-targeting specific locations, and dayparting for optimal ad timing. For finance marketers, this means precisely directing ads to high-potential leads. AI-driven optimization further refines targeting, continuously uncovering new customer acquisition opportunities and improving campaign efficiency.

• Working with an outcome-based marketing expert like Perform^[cb] connects you with top-performing partners to reach your ideal consumers. For example, a national mortgage marketer achieved a 481% increase in biannual growth and a 78% boost in conversions in just one quarter by leveraging Perform^[cb]’s expertise in tracking KPIs, managing volume, and analyzing competitive payouts.
• Investing in a performance marketing solution that can accurately track cross-channel conversions while protecting consumer data and complying with industry regulations is especially important for finance brands. A privacy-centric tracking platform like TUNE can ensure that every conversion is measured, whether it takes place in a web browser or a mobile app, without using third-party cookies or storing sensitive customer information.

Regulatory Costs: OBM allows you to work with partners who understand and adhere to financial regulations. These partners handle compliance aspects related to their marketing efforts, reducing the costs and risks associated with regulatory adherence.

• From FTC and SEC advertising laws to content compliance and bank regulations, Perform^[cb] ensures brands’ campaigns are protected through enhanced compliance monitoring, in-depth partner vetting process, and patented, built-in anti-fraud technology.

Measuring ROI: OBM prioritizes measurable results, simplifying ROI tracking even with complex customer journeys and multiple touchpoints. By paying for outcomes, you gain clearer insights into which channels and partners are delivering value, improving your ability to evaluate and optimize marketing effectiveness.

Lead Quality vs. Quantity: OBM emphasizes paying only for leads that meet specific criteria and convert into customers. This is especially crucial for financial services brands, where high acquisition costs are exacerbated by a significant portion of unqualified leads. By focusing on quality over quantity, OBM helps mitigate these costs and ensures a more efficient allocation of ad spend.

How Financial Services Brands Can Get Started with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Here are a few tips on how financial marketers can begin testing on a 100% performance-based model:

1. Define Clear Outcomes: Set specific goals like acquiring qualified leads or increasing conversions. This helps measure campaign effectiveness and ensures you’re focusing on high-quality metrics.
2. Leverage Data and AI: Use tools like Google Analytics for segmentation, Salesforce for predictive modeling, HubSpot for behavioral tracking, and Perform^[cb]’s PerformSense AI to enhance traffic quality and conversion rates by filtering out non-converting traffic based on extensive data. Choose a tracking platform like TUNE’s that offers real-time measurement and a library of dashboards and reports to get insight into what’s working and what’s not. For finance brands with business intelligence tools already in place, consider using a fully automated event delivery service such as Firehose to live stream data into proprietary systems.
3. Optimizations to Scale Incrementality: Regularly review and adjust campaigns to measure and scale incremental impact. Perform^[cb] uses advanced methods to isolate and test traffic, accurately assessing the impact of your marketing efforts. Set goals for key metrics like conversion rate, then use performance automation tools to automatically optimize campaigns based on those goals.
4. Consider Speaking with an Outcome-Based Expert: Connect with performance marketing partners experienced in financial services who offer robust targeting and transparent reporting. Perform^[cb]’s Outcome Engine leverages a performance-based model to acquire new customers alongside your existing marketing channels. TUNE’s expert team is knowledgeable about the challenges of marketing for financial services and can share learnings and best practices from years of experience.

Cutting Costs, Boosting Results

Outcome-based marketing offers a transformative approach to customer acquisition in the finance and insurance sectors. By focusing on measurable outcomes, leveraging precision targeting, and utilizing advanced tracking and analytics, marketers can significantly reduce spend without losing out on qualified customers.

Are you a financial services marketer eager to dive into outcome-based marketing? Connect with Perform^[cb]’s team of customer acquisition experts and get started today!

Email TUNE’s Partnerships Team at partnerships@tune.com to learn more about performance marketing for financial services brands and how the right tracking platform can help.

In the performance marketing industry, real-time data can mean the difference between a successful partnership and a lost opportunity. Yet too many brands still pair business intelligence tools with delayed or incomplete data, hindering their optimization efforts at best — and completely derailing them at worst.  

In this post, we’ll explain why real-time data is a must-have for performance marketers, how TUNE Firehose addresses this need, and how customers use our solution to combine streaming data with business tools to make truly intelligent decisions. 

Business Intelligence Is Booming 

The emergence of business intelligence (BI) tools, big data, and data scientists in modern business have allowed brands to bring various departments together to see and understand their data. Just in the last 10 years, amazing strides have been made to better collect, clean, store, and display various data sets. Delegating these tasks to specialized tools and services has allowed brands to remain agile, where previously this was not possible. 

Marketers especially stand to benefit from BI tools that enable them to make data-driven decisions in high-stakes situations — for example, when optimizing and scaling million-dollar campaigns. Previously, this data was stuck in silos and distributed into multiple interfaces for consumption. This left too many marketers with gaps in their data, and no choice but to make ill-informed decisions (or their best guess) with only data assumptions to guide them. 

A Unique Opportunity in Partner Marketing 

Throughout the past few years, traditional media buys have become saturated and increasingly competitive. Facebook is full of fake posts and AI-generated images, Google SERPs are increasingly based on content created for AI, and Twitter (or X, as it’s now known) is shedding advertisers. As a result, more businesses are discovering partner marketing as an efficient, cost-effective channel for growth.  

Unfortunately, brands looking to add data-driven methodologies to their partner programs have seen limited innovation from the traditional affiliate network model.

In this model, each network dictates its own data sharing and collection policies. These policies often limit the level of granularity provided to customers and make real-time access to data difficult. And since they have the final say on who actually “owns” the data, it’s not uncommon to see networks hide or aggregate data from brands and use it for their own gain.  

While most marketing channels have data sharing and analysis tools built in (think Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.), the partner marketing channel has lagged. Marketing dashboards usually have limited data integrity for this channel. Brands now expect real-time data across their marketing mix; lacking it here is a limiting factor in true optimization of this profitable channel. 

TUNE’s Real-time Data Solution 

Today, all the traditional affiliate networks in the industry simply provide an API call for pulling data out of their platforms. Brands that want to access this data have had to use costly development resources to build and run extract, transform, load (ETL) scripts, which pull data out of one system and convert it for analysis and storage in another.  

The problem with this one-way approach is that it can only provide a historical view, as you are basically running a script that pulls data at a set cadence (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.). Pinging a network’s API more frequently can quickly increase server costs, which is why many brands settle for once-a-day API calls in exchange for lower server bills. This process requires constant monitoring and makes it nearly impossible to get real-time data access. 

In 2016, we took a look at how TUNE customers were using our industry-known two-way API. What we found was hundreds of customers running ETL scripts non-stop, 365 days a year. We knew there had to be a more efficient approach, so we did what we normally do when confronted with a challenge: We innovated. 

Enter TUNE Firehose, our proprietary data streaming platform, where customers can enable TUNE to automatically push every impression, click, conversion, and adjustment directly to a customer-owned database, in real time. Firehose makes it possible for TUNE to essentially create a carbon copy of every data field and event collected for this channel and deliver it to your business intelligence solution as it occurs. No waiting for results, no incomplete datasets from your growing partner marketing channel. 

TUNE Firehose Use Cases 

Firehose has been a pivotal feature for TUNE customers over the last five years. In that time, we’ve seen them employ this data streaming technology for a variety of use cases. 

After moving to Firehose, brands on TUNE can receive every data field from every impression, click, and conversion in real time. This results in more accurate insights into the channel, and no lag between digital activities and reporting reflection. 

While some brands may use Firehose for simple data warehousing and dashboarding, other customers are using this data stream to enable real-time optimization and automation. These use cases include deploying artificial intelligence to look for anomalies and automatically making changes to campaigns in real-time. 

Because the TUNE platform provides more than 90 data fields on every impression, click, and conversion, other customers choose to use this data to monitor each partner and sub-partner to power automated fraud detection and dig further into this channel than ever before. 

In Conclusion 

Traditionally, brands in the partner marketing space have had to piece together limited data and access to their network’s reporting API, resulting in delayed results in internal reporting and incomplete data models. But modern marketers don’t want their data to be held hostage; they want to quickly and easily access more datapoints than ever.   

To do that, they need a partner marketing platform that complements their BI strategy just like TUNE does. Every TUNE customer owns 100% of their data on our platform, and we don’t hide, limit, use, or aggregate this data for our own gain. Instead, we provide solutions like Firehose to empower marketers to access their data in real time and use it to the fullest of their capabilities in business intelligence tools, custom integrated solutions, and their owned and operated databases.   

If you’re a TUNE customer and would like to add Firehose to your account, reach out to your dedicated success manager or email support@tune.com.