What Is an Affiliate Network?
An affiliate network sits between businesses that want to sell something and publishers who can send them customers.
Publishers here means bloggers, review sites, coupon sites, comparison sites, YouTubers, newsletter writers, anyone with an audience. They promote your products using special links. When someone follows one and buys, you owe them a commission.
The network handles the parts neither side wants to. It provides the tracking links, records which referrals converted, calculates what's owed, and handles payment. It also gives publishers a catalog of programs to join, so partners can find you and you don't have to find every one yourself.
Awin, Impact, CJ, and Rakuten Advertising are some of the larger ones.
How It Differs From Paid Advertising
With ads you pay for attention, and every click costs you money whether or not it leads to anything.
With affiliates you pay for outcomes, so a publisher can send you a thousand visitors and if none of them buy, you owe nothing. That makes the cost far more predictable, which is why affiliate programs are popular with businesses that can't absorb a bad month of ad spend.
The tradeoff is control, because you decide what a conversion is worth and set the rules, but you don't decide how or where publishers promote you beyond the terms of your program.
Sales and Leads
Most programs pay on sales, meaning a commission that's a percentage of the order.
Some pay on leads instead, a flat amount for a form submission, a signup, or a trial. This suits businesses where the sale happens later, offline, or over a long sales cycle.
Some pay both, using different commission rates for different products. Networks handle this with commission groups, codes attached to each conversion telling the network which rate applies.
The Order Reference
Every conversion reported to a network carries an order reference, usually your order number.
The reference is how the network recognizes the same sale reported twice and avoids paying commission twice. It's also how you match a commission on your invoice back to an order in your own system when something looks wrong.
That's why reporting a conversion without an order number is a problem, since there's nothing to match on.
Getting the Amount Right
Networks generally expect the amount after discounts but without tax and shipping.
Commission is meant to be paid on the value of what you sold, instead of postage you're passing through or tax you're collecting for a government. If you report the full order total instead, you're paying commission on both, and on a store with a lot of shipping that adds up over a year.
Why Tracking Accuracy Matters More Here
With analytics, a missed conversion is a reporting problem. With an affiliate network, a missed conversion means someone doesn't get paid for work they did.
This happens more than people realize, because ad blockers and browser privacy settings stop tracking code from running and a genuine sale never gets reported. The publisher has no way to know, and neither do you.
Publishers compare what they think they sent you against what they got paid for, and if the numbers don't add up, they promote someone else. Your best partners leave first, because they're the ones with the most to lose.
That's why server-to-server tracking is so useful for affiliate programs. Reporting the sale from your server as well as the browser means the ones that get blocked still arrive.
Affiliate Networks on WordPress Sites
Networks usually ask you to add tracking code to your order confirmation page with the sale details filled in.
On WordPress that's fiddlier than it sounds. Your confirmation page is generated by your ecommerce plugin, the totals have to be calculated the way the network expects, tax and shipping need separating out, and the whole thing has to survive theme updates and caching.
How Conversion Bridge Helps
Conversion Bridge reports conversions to Awin without any code on your confirmation page.
It calculates the amount the way Awin expects, passes the order reference and any coupon code, supports lead conversions with their own commission group where your program pays for them, and reports sales from your server as well as the browser, so a sale whose browser tag gets blocked can still arrive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an affiliate network, or can I run a program myself?
You can run one yourself with a WordPress affiliate plugin, and many do. A network costs more but brings an existing pool of publishers and handles payments, which becomes worth it as a program grows.
Does affiliate tracking send customer data to the network?
It depends on the network, but generally far less than advertising platforms need. A network mainly needs the amount, the order reference, and which publisher sent the visitor. It doesn't need to identify the customer.
What stops someone claiming a sale they didn't earn?
The click has to be recorded before the purchase, and the network attributes based on that record within a set window. Networks also have their own fraud checks and terms publishers agree to.