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Choosing an affiliate marketing agency can be challenging, and the process doesn’t quite look the same for a DTC brand as it does an enterprise business. The goals may be the same but the roadmap looks very different.
Most businesses prioritize growth, and for a DTC brand, that could be acquiring new customers, shifting your focus from paid media, capturing new audiences by finding the right publishers or showcasing incremental revenue. Compare this to an enterprise business where the focus is on managing thousands of creators, working in multiple markets and maintaining a mature program.
Finding an agency that treats DTC and enterprise businesses differently matters when choosing an agency.
As a DTC brand, you want to find an agency that helps you recruit partners… the right partners. Partners that align with your growth goals. Having thousands of publishers might appear impressive but if it’s not a good fit for your brand then it doesn’t mean much. An agency should also be able to help you with reporting and useful measurements, not just conversions, especially as your brand scales.
Let’s take a look at this in practice.
What should a DTC brand look for in an agency?
As your brand grows, your affiliate program will not only grow but it will need to adapt to an ever-changing landscape. When your DTC brand is in start-up mode, the challenge is building momentum. That momentum looks like; having a handful of publishers, people talking about your products, testing various partner types and working out your affiliate strategy alongside your other marketing efforts. As you’re scaling and you’ve reached the enterprise phase, this looks very different. Maintaining a program and ensuring consistency among hundreds of publishers becomes your biggest priority.
You can’t treat both models in the same way. So finding an agency that caters to your business’s phase is important. Here’s what a DTC brand should prioritise when evaluating an agency:
- Can an agency find partners you can trust?
It’s tempting to send invitations to all the partners you love as a consumer or partners that have the highest reach just to get your brand out there. You need to get really granular on your customers’ interests and habits in order to find the right partners to work with.
- Look at who your customers trust
- Which channels do they use to research products?
- What type of content influences their buying decisions?
Partner recruitment is a strategic process. Ask an agency how they go about finding the right partners to suit your brand. You can dig deeper by asking them the following:
- Do you actively recruit or just have a network pool?
- How do you evaluate audience fit?
- Do you have experience within my industry?
Remember, it’s not about finding an agency that can recruit the most partners. Find one that can find partners who can influence your customers.
- How are partners measured effectively?
This is crucial to the success of your program. General affiliate reporting can easily show you baseline metrics such as conversions and revenue but the real differentiator is when agencies have the ability to attribute incremental value to a partner.
Take a scenario where a customer comes across your products through paid advertisements and mulls over the decision to purchase for a few days. Let’s say they found a discount code when they were ready to purchase. In that case, a coupon publisher sharing the code would receive all the credit when they weren’t actually responsible for that particular buying decision.
PartnerCentric‘s FUSE Incrementality™ technology, for example, is designed to help brands move beyond standard attribution and understand which partners are contributing incremental value and new customers.
It’s not about which publishers generate the most revenue… it’s about which ones are creating revenue you wouldn’t have received otherwise.
- The economics behind DTC brands
Your program needs to make commercial sense. When you’ve worked out commissions, discounts and customer acquisition costs, you may find that the publisher generating the most revenue isn’t always the most profitable.
Besides incrementality, ask an agency about how they manage the following:
- Acquisition costs
- Average order value
- Profit margins
- Affiliate revenue
- New vs returning customers
The growth of your brand and affiliate efforts needs to be profitable, otherwise you’d be better off investing your dollars in other channels.
- What does growth look like?
Traditional affiliate programs usually focus on three things; conversion-focused publishers, coupons and cashbacks. When assessing an agency, look for ones that add loyalty programs, influencers, creators and card-linked offers to this mix.
For DTC brands, there is a strong link between influencer and affiliate marketing. A creator might start with a sponsored campaign and later move into an ongoing performance relationship using affiliate links and commissions. This makes way for a long-term partnership as opposed to investing money in stand-alone content creation.
You want to find an agency that can build these long-term relationships and leverage these partnerships strategically.
- If you already have a program, consider the technology changes
You’ll most likely always have the tools in place to deliver results for your affiliate program such as ecommerce systems, analytics and reporting software.
Ask an agency whether they would look to work with your existing technology or replace it entirely. Working with your existing tech stack would be ideal, it avoids re-platforming costs, protects historical data and reporting continuity, and means less disruption to partners who are used to your current setup. If an agency does recommend a change, it should be based on performance data, not because they’re contractually tied to a particular platform.
Finding an agency that is network-agnostic like PartnerCentric or Hamster Garage can be particularly useful for growing DTC brands because today’s setup may not be the one you need three years from now.
- What does the transition look like?
Let’s be honest, as a DTC brand owner, in a perfect world, you’d want to see results immediately. Realistically, when signing up with an affiliate agency, that won’t be the case. However, the first 90 days set the foundation for everything that follows.
Any agency can put together a wrap sheet of their success rates and client testimonials but not many can outline what your first three months will look like after signing up.
When asking what the first 90 days looks like… the answer should put your mind at ease if they mention the following aspects:
- Understanding your historical performance
- Current commission structures
- How your tracking works
- Existing publisher relationships
- Business goals
If you’re getting to the point of scaling, you want to make sure that an affiliate agency will also protect what works well for your brand, and not just change things to stamp their mark.
- Who will be managing your account?
This is something that is easily overlooked because you’re naturally focused on the potential campaign results. Agencies will often put their best foot forward in a sales process and will most likely introduce you to their senior leaders but you won’t know who you’ll be dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
There’s no harm in asking who your main contact will be and enquire about how many other accounts they manage. Agencies that offer dedicated account management with access to specialists in your vertical is key. As your program grows, you want to make sure that you have a team working on your brand that understands your business, customers and growth objectives.
Having a conversation about your tech stack, reporting and results are great but there’s a lot of value in having the right people using the tools and interpreting the data.
Affiliate agencies worth considering
Now that we’ve covered what to look for, let’s put some of those criteria into practice. I’ve shortlisted four agencies that approach affiliate and partnership marketing slightly differently: PartnerCentric, Hamster Garage, Acceleration Partners and Grovia.
| Agency | Best for | Known For | Capabilities | Price | Consider if… |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PartnerCentric | DTC brands prioritizing measurement and profitable affiliate growth | Incrementality and performance measurement through FUSE | Affiliate and partnership management, partner recruitment, influencer-to-affiliate programs and performance measurement | Custom based on requirements | You want to understand which partners are actually creating incremental value, rather than relying on attributed revenue alone |
| Hamster Garage | Growth-stage DTC and ecommerce brands looking to scale partnerships | Hands-on affiliate management across traditional and emerging channels | Affiliate management, partner recruitment, Amazon affiliates, TikTok Shop affiliates and AEO | Custom based on requirements | You want an affiliate specialist with a strong focus on DTC, emerging partner types and active recruitment |
| Acceleration Partners | Mature DTC and enterprise brands, particularly those expanding internationally | Global scale and infrastructure | Affiliate management, influencer marketing, partner recruitment, program optimization, global/regional management and measurement through APVision | Custom based on requirements | You already have a mature program or need the resources to manage partnerships across multiple regions |
| Grovia | Brands that need to build or expand their partner pipeline | Affiliate discovery and recruitment | Partner discovery, recruitment and affiliate program support | Custom based on requirements | Your biggest challenge is finding and recruiting relevant new partners |
From the comparison above, you’ll notice that each agency offers custom pricing. Pricing is generally customized according to factors such as the size and maturity of your program, the level of account management required, the markets you’re operating in and whether the commercial model includes performance incentives.
As a general industry benchmark, affiliate management can run from several thousand dollars per month for smaller and mid-sized programs to considerably more for enterprise programs. You’ll also need to account for costs outside the agency fee, including affiliate commissions, network or platform fees and potentially paid publisher placements.
Here’s a quick copy/paste list of questions I’d ask when evaluating agencies:
- How would you describe our biggest affiliate growth opportunity?
- How do you find publishers we’re not already working with?
- How do you measure incrementality?
- How do you distinguish new customer acquisition from attributed revenue?
- Who will manage our account?
- How much experience does that team have in our vertical?
- Which technology will you use, and why?
- What will you do during the first 90 days?
- How will you measure success after six months?
Choose an agency based on your business goals
Using an agency doesn’t mean you’re relinquishing control of your day-to-day work. It’s all about strategic growth.
Look at where your brand is at, and where you want it to be. Now fill in the gaps that will achieve that goal. It could be better partners, increased internal capacity, more clarity around measurement etc. But the key is to find an agency that truly understands your vertical and your customers, and can provide a clear growth path.
The right agency should be able to meet you where you are now and continue adding value as your DTC brand grows.