How to Perform Effective Affiliate Program Audits?

The Affiliate Program Audit serves as a vital instrument for analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of an affiliate program.

There are essential steps in evaluating the program’s achievements, including monitoring affiliate numbers and their performance, scrutinizing the program’s overall performance, formulating a marketing strategy and budget, establishing goals and objectives, and conducting a competitive analysis. 

Furthermore, affiliate audits offer guidance on streamlining the program, experimenting with fresh strategies and tactics, and implementing any required adjustments.

In this guide, we will go over all the key aspects of performing effective affiliate program audits and identify opportunities for growth. Each of these measures is carefully designed to guarantee that your affiliate program is both prosperous and cost-effective.

An effective affiliate program audit and health assessment should include a review of the following:

• Brand and Program Goals 
• Competition Analysis
• Program Terms and Conditions
• Commission Structure
• Publisher Performance
• Promotions and Offers
• Branding and Creative Assets
• Communications
• Fraud and Compliance

Ready? Let’s dive in!

Brand and Program Goals

When you inherit the task of auditing an account or taking over the management of an existing affiliate program, understanding the affiliate program goals and objectives is one of the first steps to having a clear idea and path for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the program.

First, review the documentation and guidelines provided for the affiliate program. You should have a written document that outlines all the details.

Based on the goals and objectives for the period, here are questions to answer to gauge the baseline of your affiliate audit assessment: 

• Does the program generate the targeted volume of sales?
• Does the program yield profits? Over or below targets? 
• Does the program generate more brand mentions, and clicks, and reach new customers? Is there more demand for branded searches? 
• Does the program contribute to a higher sales % over the industry sales for the period?
• What was the performance of the last product launch campaigns across all the relevant affiliate KPIs, clicks, conversion rates, revenue, ROAS, and CPA?
• How quickly did you meet the affiliate program goal? What were the specific processes, automation, and tactics that contributed to building more efficiencies? 

Consult with relevant stakeholders, such as program managers or marketing teams, to gather additional insights. Actionable steps should include documenting the objectives of the affiliate program clearly and concisely. 

You will also gather details around the brand’s unique key value differentiators, identify who are the best customers and target audience, what products the brand offers, what is your unique selling proposition, your initial budget, and how are the market and competition. 

Competition Analysis

By conducting a thorough assessment of your competitors’ affiliate programs, you can gain valuable insights to refine and enhance your own affiliate marketing strategy, ultimately attracting more affiliates and driving better results for your business.

Evaluate competitors’ affiliate programs and their target audience. Identify gaps and opportunities to differentiate your program.

• Identify the top 3-5 main competitors
• Identify the affiliate network or platforms your competition is using
• Review traffic stats and analytics. What are their market shares?
• Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor’s program.
• Investigate the affiliate recruitment strategies they employ. What affiliates do they work with? Editorials? InfleuncerS? Reviews Sites? Loyalty partners? CLOs? Etc. 
• How often do they release new offers, products, and solutions? 
• Gather information about each competitor’s commission rates, bonus structures, payment terms, promotional materials, and support provided.
• Check the cookie duration provided by your competitors and tracking technology.
• Assess their presence in top-funnel publications, review sites, and other media outlets where your target audience looks for information and starts their decision process. 
• Review your competitors’ presence in top publisher sites, showing up in the top 3 organic positions for relevant “best + keywords” terms 
• Run a cash-back analysis to evaluate how they work with loyalty, rewards, and lower-funnel partners. 
• Evaluate gaps and opportunities to adjust or build new competitive offers for your affiliate program
• Document the findings and conclusions in a report or summary.

By thoroughly assessing your affiliate program competitors, you can gain valuable insights that help you make informed decisions and stay competitive in the affiliate marketing space. 

Program Terms and Conditions

Now that we have a clearer idea of the brand’s USPs, and goals of the program, and assessed the competitive landscape, the next step is to assess your affiliate program terms and conditions. Similar to your competitive analysis and research, you should ask yourself the same questions to identify gaps and opportunities to adjust. 

Program terms cover affiliate eligibility and requirements, payment procedures, attribution windows, marketing guidelines, trademark bidding rights and restrictions, brand representation, termination terms, dispute resolution, and various legal and operational aspects. 

Carefully review and comprehend these terms to ensure compliance and a clear partnership understanding. 

If you don’t work in-house and are supporting affiliate management of future services from a specialized agency, you will need to get access to a copy of the affiliate program terms and conditions document or access the affiliate platform hosting the program. Consider the following questions while reviewing the terms and conditions:

• How often do the terms get revised?
• Are there any restrictions or limitations on how affiliates can promote the products or services? 
• Are affiliates allowed to bid on trademark terms? 
• What attribution period is set for commissioning referred sales? 
• Read and review the payment terms to understand the timelines and conditions for payments.
• Consider factors such as payment frequency, minimum payment thresholds, payment methods, and any additional fees or charges
• Were there any delays or issues with payments over the last 90 days?

You should compare the program terms and conditions with industry standards and best practices, if available. Once you gather the details, document the findings and recommendations for any necessary changes or improvements.

Commission Structures

Commission structures are an essential step in your audit to ensure you are aligned with the competition and offer fair, competitive, and attractive to incentivize your affiliates and partners and keep them engaged with your program. It should be designed in a way that aligns with your business goals and provides a win-win situation for both your company and the affiliates.

• What are the current commission structures and models? 
• Are the commission rates and payment terms fair and competitive?
• Does the program offer bonuses or work on flat fees with publishers? 
• How many different commission levels do you have?
• Do you commission on customer profiles (new, existing, amount, or other)?
• Do you commission based on position in the purchase path?
• Do you batch upload your commissionable sales?
• Do you commission on the first click? Last-to-cart, last-click attribution?

Publisher Performance

Let’s now take a deeper dive into publisher performance. It is important to ensure that the affiliates are trustworthy and have a good reputation in order to maintain the credibility of the program. The research may include evaluating their past performance, customer reviews, online presence, and any relevant industry affiliations.

• Review the performance of the affiliates across all KPIs of the program
• How many affiliates are producing sales in your affiliate program?
• Are you engaged in paid placements with top publishers?
• What percentage of producing affiliates do you consider coupon sites?
• What percentage of your affiliate channel revenue comes from content publishers, influencers, and micro-influencers
• How often do you personally speak to each publisher?
• Research each affiliate contribution individually
• Evaluate their reputation based on factors such as past performance, customer reviews, online presence, and industry affiliations
• Document your findings and make a determination for each affiliate

By thoroughly evaluating affiliate and publisher performance, you can make informed decisions to improve your affiliate marketing program, maximize ROI, and foster strong, productive relationships with your partners.

For more details on how to kick off profitable relationships with affiliates, check out our article on how to recruit and manage high-performing affiliates and build effective recruitment and activation strategies with your partners.

Promotions and Offers

Our next stop is to assess the program’s offers and promotions; 

• How often do you have affiliate-specific promotions?
• Do you offer promotions to single affiliates?
• Do you commission on orders with promotions from other channels?
• Do you use exclusive promotions to gain additional exposure from top-tier affiliates?
• Do you have a promotion calendar for ecommerce 
• Does your affiliate team regularly review site-wide statistics and data?

If you have everyday or evergreen offers such as BOGOs, free shipping offers, new subscribers, and welcome offers, these can be syndicated in your affiliate network for your partners to promote to their audience. 

We recommend setting up an affiliate-exclusive % your partners can offer to incentivize engagement and conversions such as an additional 10% on sales or 5% cashback if your loyalty program needs to be re-incentivized during key seasons or new product launches.

Branding and Creative Assets 

Branding and creative assets review are essential to review during your audit. Creative assets can include banners, images, videos, text ads, email templates, and social media posts. 

These assets should be compelling and effectively convey the benefits and features of your program.  

Analyze the marketing materials of your affiliate program to assess their effectiveness and alignment with the brand. It requires evaluating various aspects such as the messaging, visual design, tone of voice, and overall appeal of the materials.

• Review the affiliate program’s marketing materials, including website content, banners, email templates, social media posts, and any other promotional materials.
• Assess the clarity and effectiveness of the messaging in conveying the program’s value proposition and benefits to potential affiliates.
• Identify any inconsistencies or deviations from the brand guidelines or style guide, and make note of areas that need improvement. This is especially important when working with creators and influencers. 
• Write persuasive and informative text ads that affiliates can use in their ad campaigns.
• Develop email templates that affiliates can customize and send to their subscribers to promote your program.
• Create videos that explain the benefits and features of your program, and provide affiliates with embed codes or download links.
• Design social media posts that affiliates can share on their social media channels to generate interest and drive traffic to your program.
• Ensure that all creative assets comply with relevant advertising regulations and guidelines.
• Make the creative assets easily accessible to affiliates, either through a dedicated portal, email, or file-sharing platform.
• Regularly review and update the creative assets to ensure they remain relevant and effective.
• Monitor the performance of the creative assets and gather feedback from affiliates to make improvements.

Invest the right efforts in producing assets and campaigns that will resonate with your affiliates. Some programs show that 90% of the campaign performance is driven by text ads or naked affiliate links, while others get higher engagement and conversions from creative assets such as videos or display banners. 

Tracking and Attribution

This step involves assessing the reliability and security of the affiliate program’s tracking system. The tracking system is responsible for accurately recording and attributing affiliate referrals and conversions. It is essential to ensure that the system is reliable and secure to maintain the integrity of the program.

• Review the affiliate program’s tracking system documentation to understand its features and functionality.
• Is there any issues with tracking, performance drops, unusual peak in traffic, conversions, and cost for certain affiliates? 
• Are you overpaying or crediting too much to publishers over other marketing channels? 
• Document any identified issues or vulnerabilities and prioritize them based on their severity.

Note that tracking can be impacted during website, cart, or network migrations. You should have a plan in place to measure the impact or inform stakeholders of the importance of putting a plan in place to prevent downtime and loss of performance. 

Communications 

At this stage, you should have a clear idea of the overall program health of the program. This step involves checking communications with affiliates and partners to determine if they are timely and clear.

• Review all communication channels used by the affiliate program, such as emails, newsletters, and social media platforms.
• Assess the frequency of communication. Are affiliates receiving regular updates and important information in a timely manner?
• Do you regularly send newsletters? Attend 1:1 calls and meetings with new and existing partners. 
• Is the tone and language used in the communications appropriate? 
• Check if the program provides clear instructions and guidelines to affiliates, including information on how to promote products or services.
• Are affiliate program managers prompt in addressing affiliates’ inquiries and concerns?
• Summarize your findings and provide an overall assessment of the program’s communications.

Affiliate program managers are the direct extension of the brand. Therefore, they should regularly engage and communicate with affiliates and partners, and be brand advocates to maximize the relationships. 

Fraud and Compliance

The final step in running effective affiliate program audits is systematically checking for fraud and compliance. Affiliate program managers must maintain a clean, trustworthy program that protects the brand’s reputation and adheres to legal requirements.

• Check from earlier research and review of the program terms and conditions that affiliates adhere to policies and guidelines
• Ensure there are no trademark bidding term violations. This could drive your owned CPC ad costs up and impact your brand’s reputation.
• Ensure auto-approval of affiliate applications is correctly configured. 
• Check cookie is correlated recording sales and data
• Identify any suspicious click patterns. Abnormally high click-through rates or unusual click patterns could be indicative of click fraud.
• Review the use of coupons and discount codes by affiliates. Partners should promote valid and authorized codes or be aligned with the program’s terms and conditions.
• Ensure that affiliates clearly disclose their relationship with your brand to consumers as required by law, such as through FTC (Federal Trade Commission) guidelines for affiliate marketing transparency. 

That’s it! If you follow all the steps we reviewed, you should have all the information needed to present a roadmap of the next steps to stakeholders, or to put in place your strategy and optimization plan. 

The goal of the optimization plan is to determine and prioritize the areas of the affiliate program that can be optimized to enhance the program’s performance and effectiveness as it relates to conversion rates and sales, quality of the partnerships, address issues assessed during the audit, and set up advanced affiliate strategies for the program 

How often should you audit your affiliate program?

The frequency at which you should audit your affiliate program can vary depending on your specific business needs and the size of your program. However, here are some guidelines to consider:

• Run a comprehensive audit every quarter
• Before any major campaigns
• After significant branding repositioning and changes, industry trends and market shifts
• Before an affiliate platform or CRM migrations 
• Upon lingering performance issues
• When compliance or quality concerns arise

Wrapping-Up

In this guide, we reviewed how to conduct comprehensive and thorough affiliate program audits, leading to improved program performance, stronger relationships with partners, and increased revenue in the competitive world of affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate audits are useful activities to perform to make informed decisions about refining your program and should cover the review of the brand, competitive analysis, program terms, and conditions, compensation structures, publisher performance, fraud monitoring, and communications, and should be performed at least quarterly or during major performance or industry changes. 

Performing an audit alone does not solve anything. It only gets effective when you put a roadmap of optimizations in place to address issues, revise terms, and maximize performance and scale. 

Start implementing new tactics to drive meaningful results!

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