Programme Setup
Setting an affiliate programme objective beyond gross sales
Set an affiliate objective around approved customers, product contribution or another defined outcome, with a baseline and review decision.
Set one primary objective describing the customer or business outcome you want. Define how it will be counted and reviewed.
Gross attributed sales show activity under a programme’s credit rule. Alone, they do not show whether orders were profitable, came from the intended customers or would have happened anyway.
Choose the decision the objective must support
Ask what the first review should help you decide. To recruit more specialist publishers, approved orders from the intended customer group may be more useful than total order value. When assessing a discounted offer, contribution after discounts and channel costs matters. For a new range, you might focus on its eligible sales rather than all catalogue revenue.
Possible objectives include:
- Increase approved first-time-customer orders from selected publishers while staying within a defined acquisition-cost limit.
- Generate eligible sales for a new range with positive contribution after commission and order costs.
- Increase approved orders from publishers reaching a chosen audience without increasing the share later cancelled.
Each example needs the business’s own baseline, target, period and data definitions before it can guide a decision.
Define what will be counted
For an approved-order objective, specify the qualifying order status and when the review period closes. For a first-time-customer objective, say how the store identifies customer status and handles unmatched records. For a contribution objective, state how GST, discounts, returns, commission and platform charges are treated. Keep these definitions consistent across the review.
Track three layers separately: recorded activity, approved eligible orders, and the outcome named in the objective. A click or recorded conversion may help diagnose a problem even when it earns no payment. A payable order may still miss a contribution target.
Gross Sales vs. Profitable Contribution: Key Differences in Affiliate Programme Metrics
- Gross Attributed Sales
- Total order value credited to affiliate referrals
- Contribution After Costs
- Profit after discounts, GST, commission, platform fees and returns
Separate credit from additional demand
A programme report assigns credit according to tracking and attribution settings. Estimating additional demand requires some comparison with what might have happened without the partnership.
Where practical, plan a suitable holdout or staged change. Otherwise, compare a relevant baseline, note concurrent promotions, seasonality and customer overlap, and describe the conclusion as directional.
A first-time customer is not automatically an incremental customer merely because a publisher received credit.
Write the objective in one testable sentence: For the selected products and publishers, we will review [defined outcome] against [baseline] over [period], using [data sources], and decide [action] if [condition] is met. Assign an owner and review date. Keep clicks and gross attributed sales as supporting measures.
