Affiliate Marketing Guide: Run, Join and Measure Programs

Choose your side first. A brand that launches a program starts with platform cost and tracking. A publisher starts with the business model and the search rules. An auditor starts with fraud controls and attribution in a program that already runs.

Check these changes before you sign a platform contract or change a partner's terms. Each one changes what a sale pays, who gets credit for it, or what a platform costs.

Amazon's Associates agreement changed effective April 14, 2026. A 180-day time limit now applies, and a product must be shipped, streamed or downloaded, and paid for, to qualify.

Purchases by customers referred through any paid or boosted advertisement that links to Amazon no longer count, whether or not prohibited keywords are used, with limited exceptions. If you buy traffic, keep those ads off Amazon links.

Onsite commission applies only to direct qualifying purchases of the same ASIN variant as the linked product page. A link to one variant earns no onsite commission on another.

Awin's FAQ says the ShareASale platform closed on October 6, and Hello Partner's 2025 report below dates that to October 2025. Most existing ShareASale tracking links keep tracking. Short links with no clicks in the 12 months before the migration stopped tracking, so test every link you still rely on.

Payment statements can no longer be retrieved from the closed platform, and eligible pending commissions were finalized and paid from the ShareASale balance. Download any record you still need from your Awin account.

Hello Partner reported that Awin completed the transfer of all active ShareASale customers on August 15, 2025, and that ShareASale was preparing to sunset in October.

Impact's public pricing lists a Starter plan at $30 per month and 2.5% of revenue, available only on platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Essentials is $500 a month and includes up to $2,500 a month in partner payouts. Pro is $2,500 a month and includes up to $14,300 a month in partner payouts. Enterprise has custom partner payouts.

Price the platform against your expected partner payouts, not against the monthly fee alone. The affiliate platform selection page compares networks and software platforms on total cost.

Write the disclosure and search rules into your program terms before the first partner publishes. The FTC treats the advertiser as ultimately responsible, so the rules are yours to enforce, not only the affiliate's.

The FTC's Endorsement Guides give the example of a blogger who reviews products independently but earns a portion of the sale through affiliate links. Because that compensation could affect how much weight readers give the reviews, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose it.

The Guides make advertisers liable for misleading statements made through endorsements and for failing to disclose material connections, even when the endorser is not liable. Advertisers should give guidance to endorsers, monitor their compliance and act to remedy non-compliance.

Place the disclosure where it is difficult to miss, next to the recommendation. The Guides define a clear and conspicuous disclosure as difficult to miss and easily understandable by ordinary consumers, and they treat a disclosure that sits only on a profile page as not clear and conspicuous.

Google's spam policy judges an affiliate page by the value it adds for the reader.

Thin affiliation is the first pattern to avoid. Google describes it as publishing affiliate-link content whose product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the merchant.

Google says good affiliate sites add value by offering meaningful content or features.

Scaled content abuse is the second pattern. Google describes it as many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.

Coupon and deal sections on an established host carry a similar risk. Google's site reputation policy covers third-party content published mainly because of the host's established ranking signals.

Amazon's agreement sets a similar bar for original content. It requires commentary, analysis or transformation for additional value.

The affiliate site playbook covers how helpful content updates, E-E-A-T and recovery apply to an affiliate site in depth. Read it before you publish comparison or coupon pages at scale.

Put extension rules into every partner agreement that allows toolbars, coupon tools or browser add-ons. Chrome Web Store policy sets concrete rules for affiliate extensions, so use them as the minimum terms for any partner that ships an extension.

Affiliate links are allowed only when they give users a direct and transparent benefit.

The affiliate program must be disclosed on the store listing, in the user interface, and before installation.

User action must come before any affiliate link, code or cookie is applied. The link must be tied to a direct benefit for the user at that moment.

Enforcement began June 10, 2025.

Review every partner that uses an extension, toolbar or coupon placement before the next payout run. Test the install flow yourself. Check that the disclosure appears before install, and that no code or cookie is applied without a user click.

The running an affiliate program page covers browser extension fraud, partner vetting and enforcement in depth. Read it before you accept an extension partner.

Use market size to decide whether the channel can carry a program. Do not use it to set your own payout or budget, and read the study's definitions before you quote a figure.

The Performance Marketing Association credits affiliate activity with $113 billion in e-commerce sales, which its study puts at 9.4% of all US e-commerce sales.

That figure counts sales credited to affiliates. It is not advertiser spend, and it is not publisher earnings.

The study draws on data from eight leading affiliate networks and more than 50 publishers.

The same study estimates 15 to 20% of sales for companies that leverage affiliate marketing strategies.

For return on ad spend by vertical, read the affiliate marketing statistics page and set your budget from those ranges, then set conversion targets from your own partner data.

Open the page that matches your next decision: run a program, build an affiliate site, choose a platform, or size the market.