How to audit your affiliate program: a practical checklist

Most affiliate programs don’t fail loudly. They plateau. Revenue holds steady, commission costs creep up, and nobody can quite say which partners are worth what they’re paid. An audit is how you find out. Here is the checklist we use, roughly in the order we work through it.

1. Revenue concentration

Export partner-level revenue for the last 12 months and sort it. How much comes from your top five partners? Heavy concentration isn’t automatically bad, but it is a risk: if one partner changes its model or drops you, the channel drops with it. It also tells you where to look first.

2. Partner mix by type

Tag every active partner by type: content and review, comparison, coupon, cashback and loyalty, creator, sub-network, and so on. Then compare revenue share against commission share for each type. Coupon and cashback partners often sit at the end of the journey and pick up last-click credit for customers who were already buying. That doesn’t make them useless, but you should know how much of your spend goes to partners that introduce new customers versus partners that close existing ones.

3. New versus returning customers

If your network and tracking allow it, split affiliate orders by new and returning customers. A program that mostly pays commission on returning customers is closer to a discount scheme than an acquisition channel. Many networks support different rates for new customers, which is one of the simplest levers you have.

4. Commission structure

Write your commission structure on one page. Flat rates, tiers, bonuses, product exclusions, payout rules. Then ask three questions. Does it reward the behaviour you actually want? Is it competitive with what partners can earn from your competitors? Does it still work against your margins once you account for returns and cancellations? Tiered commissions and targeted bonuses usually beat a single flat rate, because they let you pay more for growth without raising costs on every sale.

5. Tracking and attribution

Place test orders through a few partner links on different devices and browsers, and confirm each one tracks. Check cookie windows, how cross-device journeys are handled, and how your network treats coupon codes used without a click. Then reconcile a month of network-reported sales against your own order data. Gaps here quietly erode partner trust: publishers notice when sales go missing, and they stop promoting.

6. EPC and conversion rate

Earnings per click is the number publishers use to decide whether you’re worth their space. Look at your EPC over time and by partner type. If it’s weak, the fix is rarely just a higher rate. Landing page conversion, average order value and offer strength all feed into it.

7. Average order value

Compare affiliate AOV with your site-wide AOV. A much lower affiliate AOV can point to heavy discount-code traffic. A higher one can justify a richer commission for the partners driving it.

8. Competitor partners

Search for your competitors on review sites, comparison pages, coupon sites and creator channels. Which publishers feature them and not you? This is usually the fastest way to build a recruitment list, because those publishers already have an audience for your category.

9. Compliance and brand bidding

Search your brand terms and look at who is bidding on them. Check your terms of service for paid search rules and confirm they are being enforced. Look for coupon codes leaking onto sites you never approved, and for partners making claims about your product that you would not make yourself.

10. Activation rate

Finally, count how many of your approved partners drove at least one sale in the last 90 days. In many programs the answer is a small fraction. A long list of inactive partners isn’t an asset; it’s a sign recruitment and activation stopped at the approval email.

Turning findings into a plan

An audit is only useful if it ends in decisions. Rank each finding by likely revenue impact and effort, then pick the three to five changes you will make this quarter. Typical early wins are fixing tracking gaps, introducing a new-customer rate or tier, tightening brand-bidding enforcement, and starting targeted outreach to the publishers your competitors already work with.

If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes, this is exactly what our free program audit covers. We review your partner mix, commissions, tracking and competitors’ affiliates, and send back a prioritised plan of what we would fix first.