The Affiliate Everyone Warns You About
Every affiliate program attracts the same three parasites. I let them in for a while because I didn't know better. Here's how I spot them now.
Running an affiliate program sounds like free money until you notice half your commissions are going to people stealing revenue you already had.
I didn't see it for a while. Someone signs up as an affiliate, sales start showing up under their link, you think the program is working. Then you look closer and the "sales" are customers who were already mid-checkout, or people who googled your brand name and clicked an ad the affiliate ran against you.
Every first sale on my Partnero program now gets an AI risk review before I approve the payout. It flags three patterns, and these are the ones that keep showing up:
- The brand bidder. They buy Google ads on my company name, intercept traffic I was already going to convert, and pocket a commission on a sale I'd have made for free.
- The self-referrer. Existing customer signs up as an affiliate, puts their own link through their own second email, claims the commission on their renewal. Creative. No.
- The coupon-site squatter. Ranks for "[yourproduct] discount," offers a code that doesn't exist, catches buyers at the bottom of the funnel who were already typing in their card.
None of these are growing the business. They're taxing it. And the default settings on most affiliate tools happily pay them.
The question I ask on every first sale now: would this customer have bought anyway without the affiliate in the chain? If the honest answer is yes, the affiliate didn't sell anything. They toll-boothed a road I already built.
What I'd do this week if you run a program:
- Ban brand-name bidding in your affiliate terms. In writing. Then actually check.
- Block self-referrals by matching affiliate emails and payment details against your customer list.
- Review every first sale manually before the first payout clears. After that, trust is earned.
- Kill the "last click wins" default. The last click is almost always the cheapest one to buy.
A good affiliate brings you people you'd never have reached. Everyone else is just standing in the doorway with their hand out.
Talk soon,
— George
P.S. I spent Sunday night building a dashboard to visualise affiliate overlap with existing customers, got it working at 1am, and realised I'd already built the same dashboard in March. Different colours this time. Progress, I guess.