When it comes to leveraging affiliate marketing to grow your business, there are many things you need to consider in order to build an effective program. One of the most important ones is defining your publisher mix.
Each type or “vertical” has the potential to deploy a different marketing tactic and reach a diverse audience. This aspect of the channel provides a unique advantage since you can potentially drive different consumer behaviors and engage with your customers at different stages in the conversion funnel. Depending on your business and marketing goals you will be able to deploy a different strategy and optimize upon it.
The flexibility that the affiliate channel offers, along with the transparency and moderate financial risk given its payout model, make this channel a very good option when thinking about growing your business, acquiring more customers, and engaging your client base.
There are different publisher verticals, which can be grouped within the six traditional stages of the conversion funnel:
- Awareness — bloggers, influencers, social media
- Interest — mass media, search publishers, TM+ affiliates
- Consideration — review sites, comparison platforms, aggregators
- Intent — loyalty & reward, toolbars, browser extensions
- Conversion — coupon & cashback, deal sites
- Retention — technology partners, retargeting, funnel optimization
The publishers listed in each funnel stage are not meant to be a comprehensive list of affiliates, but more so an illustration of the different options available.
Awareness
At the top of the funnel, we find those publishers that help increase brand awareness, activate customer engagement, and generate leads. These include bloggers, influencers, and social media publishers.
Key qualities of this vertical:
- Large audience: influencer networks provide instant access to thousands of influencers from different niches.
- Measure influencer value: running influencer activity via an influencer/blogger network allows you to track & measure KPIs on campaigns.
- Impact purchase decisions: influencers evoke positive emotions and encourage purchase by sharing opinions and experiences.
- Multiple channels: influencers and bloggers often use multiple platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) to grow brand awareness and engagement.
- Growing adoption: close to 75% of marketers tap influencers for campaigns (eMarketer).
Interest
Moving down the funnel, we find publishers influencing purchase intent. These include mass media sites, search and SEO publishers, and TM+ affiliates — affiliates you allow to bid on your branded or non-branded terms to generate high-quality, high-intent traffic, rewarded via affiliate commissions.
These types of affiliates provide massive reach and traffic quality. It’s important to keep in mind that a flat fee is usually requested to start a campaign with some of these (e.g. Mass Media), and their editorial team has full control over what is published.
Key considerations:
- High traffic volume: large following and loyal readers, better at leveraging high traffic than other types.
- Boosted brand equity: editorial suggestions lead to boosted brand equity, with a 31% increase in AOV in 2022.
- Targeted reach: content partners often specialize in certain topics, allowing you to target niche consumers.
- Flexible commission options: brands with budget restrictions can leverage hybrid payouts, with lower flat fees and increased CPA.
- Cost efficiency: cost-effective alternative to in-house SEM by using a CPA model.
- Enhanced search visibility: cover additional keywords that you might not be hitting in-house. TM+ rights required.
Consideration
One step below, we find publishers assisting with purchase consideration. These include review and comparison sites, listicles, and sub-affiliate aggregators — which provide both reach and speed to launch promotions quickly.
Many review sites specialize in specific products or categories, and datafeeds are sometimes required for them to provide comprehensive information when posting a review.
Key points:
- Increased order value: comparison and review sites typically increase order value.
- Product discovery: great at providing mid/top of funnel value in early product and brand discovery stages.
- Customer trust: the more positive reviews and testimonials a product has, the more likely prospective customers are to consider and purchase — especially for high-ticket items.
Intent
As we move down the funnel, we get closer to the conversion point. Here we work with loyalty & reward publishers and toolbar or browser extension affiliates.
Browser extension and toolbar affiliates are a great tool to assist deal-savvy customers in finding the best deal to complete an order or revisit an abandoned session. It is key to use smart attribution (e.g. CJ situational commissioning) to avoid sales cannibalization, drive incrementality, and reward all affiliates present in the clickstream according to merchant preferences.
Key points:
- Reduced cart abandonment: customers cite receiving a coupon as the most likely motivator to complete a purchase.
- Deal appetite: with post-COVID high inflation, more customers look for a deal when they shop.
- Other engagement tools: browser extensions offer ways to engage beyond coupons — newsletters, price drop alerts, TM+ campaigns, and more.
Conversion
This is arguably the easiest stage to measure value and performance, yet a very nuanced and complex step in many cases. Here we typically leverage coupon, cashback, and deal sites to push the conversion through the finish line.
Cashback sites usually drive repeat purchases due to their reward model, whereas coupon sites are more likely to drive new customers at lower AOVs. Partnering with these sites allows brands to control the messaging and experience for their users.
Key characteristics:
- Higher conversion rate: reward models push customers to purchase, leading to higher CVR.
- Special event opportunities: brands can participate in year-round events, often with special offers like double cash back.
- Large loyal audiences: deal site categories average 8M unique visitors with a standard visit duration of 5 minutes (Awin Global).
- Influence purchase decisions: coupon affiliates have an 8% higher CVR than the average affiliate base (Awin Report 2022).
- Large user databases: member bases of millions of active and loyal users that can be hyper-targeted via newsletters, gift guides, social posts, and more.
Retention
Passing the conversion event, it’s time to think about customer retention. With the latest appearance of technology publishers and funnel optimization solutions that work under a performance payout model — rather than a traditional license fee — the affiliate channel can assist with these tactics too.
These are technology-driven solutions that can be embedded into a brand’s ecosystem via a strategic affiliate partnership, to assist in conversions, optimize traffic, enhance customer experience, and add value throughout the customer lifecycle.
Solutions these tools can provide:
- Improved ecommerce metrics: increase traffic, CVR, and AOV; decrease cart abandonment; enable targeting and website personalization.
- Automated product bundling: technology that automates product bundling and cross-selling through machine learning.
- Automated product recommendations: AI that offers recommended products based on customer preferences.
- Display prospecting and retargeting: banners and ads placed on content websites to bring interested customers back to your site.
Other Publishers
Two categories worth highlighting outside the funnel view:
Employee perks marketplaces (like BenefitHub, Abenity, or PerksSpot) and Buy Now Pay Later apps (BNPL like Klarna, Affirm, or Zip Co). Both can drive significant volume, increase awareness, and push conversions effectively.
BNPL publishers typically provide a large audience with high purchase intent; employee perks marketplaces are great for brands looking to play in the B2B space. A few considerations:
- Request semi-exclusive or exclusive discounts
- Onboarding usually takes longer (avg. 2–3 weeks)
- Typically require specific assets and imagery
- No required CPA/minimum payout and usually no onboarding fees
- Cover a variety of categories
Conclusion
Historically, the affiliate channel was seen as a “coupon-heavy channel,” with many believing it only offered coupon sites to partner with. Although this perception has evolved, there is still a negative connotation in some cases.
As this article demonstrates, there is so much more on the channel than coupon sites — and even coupon publishers bring great value in pushing conversions down the funnel. Every month, new publishers emerge with additional value and diverse solutions.
The channel has evolved from a pure customer acquisition framework to a broader acquisition-engagement-retention tool that can complement the full marketing mix for any given brand — if deployed correctly.