A proper affiliate program audit checks 20 things across tracking, commercials, partners and operations. Most underperforming programs fail on the same handful of items – stale tracking, weak commission, an inactive publisher list nobody has pruned. Run this list before spending more on the channel, not after.
We use this same checklist internally before we tell any brand what to change about their program. It is not exhaustive in a theoretical sense – you could always add more line items – but these twenty cover the areas where mature programs actually lose money and momentum: the data underneath the program, what you pay and to whom, who is actually driving results, and whether anyone is managing the thing day to day.
01Is your tracking and data telling the truth?
Start here, because every other number in the program is only as good as the tracking underneath it. If attribution, cookie windows or validation are wrong, commission decisions, publisher decisions and reporting decisions all inherit that error. Five checks before you trust anything else on this list.
- 01
Tracking setup
Confirm tracking is actually firing correctly across every purchase path – desktop, mobile, app, and any checkout variants. Set up and tested before go-live is the standard; on a mature program, re-test it periodically rather than assuming it still works because nobody has complained.
- 02
Cookie window
Check the attribution window matches how your customers actually buy, not a network default left untouched since launch. A window that is too short under-credits partners who influence a slower purchase; one that is too long over-credits last-click activity that did little of the actual work.
- 03
Attribution and validation process
A partner should get credit if their link genuinely helped drive the sale within the agreed window – that is the plain-words rule. Check that your validation process actually enforces it: declined and voided orders removed properly, and rules applied consistently across every publisher, not just the ones someone happens to be watching.
- 04
Reporting quality
Reporting should let you see performance by publisher, by campaign and by trend – not just a single top-line number. If you cannot answer "which partners actually drove this month's growth" from your own dashboard, the reporting is not doing its job yet.
- 05
Network fees
Know exactly what you are paying the network itself, separate from commission paid to publishers. Fees are platform-dependent and worth checking against what the platform actually delivers for your program size – not against what a competitor pays, since network and service mix differ.
02Are your commercials competitive?
If your commission is weak, publishers will ignore you – that is the whole logic of this section. Commercials are also where quiet cost creeps in: legacy overrides, coupon leakage, terms nobody has re-read in years. Five checks on what you pay and the rules around it.
- 01
Commission rate
Benchmark your rate against your category and margin, not against a number picked at launch and left alone. Fashion and beauty categories can generally support more aggressive rates than furniture or travel; low-margin categories need to stay competitive enough to earn attention without giving away the margin the sale was meant to protect.
- 02
Commission leakage
Check for commission being paid where it should not be – duplicate claims, expired codes still being honoured, or partners claiming credit for sales they did not influence. Leakage rarely shows up as one big number; it is small and constant, which is exactly why it survives unaudited.
- 03
Coupon quality
Review what your coupon partners are actually offering and whether the codes in circulation are current, approved and not being used to intercept sales that would have happened anyway. Stale or unauthorised codes floating around the internet are one of the most common sources of leakage.
- 04
Brand bidding rules
Confirm your brand-bidding policy is written down, communicated to every partner, and actually being enforced. Partners bidding on your own brand terms in search can quietly convert traffic you were going to get anyway, at a cost you did not need to pay.
- 05
Terms and conditions
Re-read your program terms rather than assuming they still reflect how you operate. Legacy clauses – old override rates, outdated exclusivity terms, cookie-window language that no longer matches your platform – tend to hide here until someone finally checks.
03Is your publisher mix working?
A program is only as good as the partners actually in it. Review who is active, who is dead weight and who you are not working with yet. Five checks across the different partner types most Australian programs run.
- 01
Publisher mix
Look at the balance across partner types – content, coupon, cashback, loyalty, closed-group – against what your category and goals actually need. A mix that is heavily weighted to one type, usually coupon, is a sign the program has been left to run on autopilot rather than actively shaped.
- 02
Inactive publishers
Identify partners who have been inactive for an extended period and decide deliberately whether to re-engage or remove them. An audit should show you the program you actually want, not the one that has quietly accumulated over time.
- 03
Cashback and loyalty performance
Cashback and loyalty partners want decent commission, a strong offer, and sometimes paid placement – boosted rates during key sale periods are common. Check whether this activity is driving genuine incremental volume or cannibalising sales that would have converted anyway; run blind, it tends toward the latter.
- 04
Content partners
Check that content partners are still producing genuinely useful coverage – reviews, comparisons, editorial placements – rather than a link sitting on a page that stopped getting traffic months ago. Content partnerships decay quietly because nothing about them triggers an alert when they go stale.
- 05
Closed-group partners
Review any closed-group or private partnerships – employee, membership or niche audience deals – for whether the access still makes sense and the terms still reflect the value being delivered. These relationships often get set up once and never revisited.
04Is anyone actually managing it?
Most brands think affiliate is plug and play. It is not – someone still has to run the thing. This section is the honest test of whether the program has an active manager or is simply ticking over on its own momentum.
- 01
Approval rules
Check who has automatic approval into the program versus who needs manual review, and whether those rules still match your risk appetite. Programs that approve everyone by default tend to accumulate exactly the low-quality activity this checklist is designed to catch.
- 02
Campaign calendar
Confirm there is an actual campaign calendar – key trading periods, boosted commission windows, coordinated pushes with top partners – rather than the program simply running in the background between sales. A channel treated like a real channel gets planned; a channel someone checks once a month does not.
- 03
Competitor activity
Look at what comparable brands in your category are doing on commission, partner mix and campaign activity. You do not need to match every move, but you should know when your program has fallen behind the market rather than finding out from a publisher who left for a better offer.
- 04
Top publisher performance
Check in directly with your highest-performing partners rather than only watching their numbers. Relationships, not just rates, are what keep top publishers prioritising your program over the next brand asking for their placement.
- 05
Growth opportunities
Look for the partner types, campaign formats or category gaps you are not using yet. An audit should not only find what is broken – it should point at where the next stage of growth in the channel is actually sitting unused.
A good affiliate program is boring in the best way. Clean tracking, good partners, clear offers and consistent management.
05What should you do with the results?
Fix leakage before you scale anything. If the audit turns up weak tracking, commission bleeding out to inactive partners or a coupon problem nobody has looked at, that is the work to do first – not a new campaign, not a new network, not more budget into the same unmanaged setup. A program with clean fundamentals is worth investing in properly; a leaky one just loses money faster the more you put into it.
If you are building a program from scratch rather than fixing an existing one, start with how to start an affiliate program in Australia – the commercial model and tracking setup work the same way whether you are launching new or cleaning up an audit finding. And if your program runs on Rakuten, read what the Rakuten–Impact migration means for Australian brands before you migrate – a program that fails this checklist gets copied onto the new platform exactly as it is, problems included.