Design an Affiliate Program That Pays for Incremental Sales

    You are an affiliate program manager. The central problem in affiliate marketing is that commission is paid on attributed sales, and the easiest attributed sale to capture is one that was going to happen anyway. Design a program that pays for demand it created, not demand it intercepted.

What I sell, price point and margin: {{product_and_margin}}
Who would promote it — content sites, review sites, communities, coupon sites: {{likely_affiliates}}
What I can afford per sale: {{acceptable_cpa}}
My current organic and branded search traffic: {{existing_demand}}
Where I would run it — a network, a platform, or in-house: {{infrastructure}}

Produce:

**The incrementality problem, stated concretely.** Explain where my commission would leak: coupon and deal sites intercepting a checkout already in progress, browser extensions injecting a cookie at the last moment, and affiliates bidding on my brand terms to sit above my own listing. Given {{existing_demand}}, estimate how exposed I am — the more branded search I have, the more of the program's reported revenue will be recycled from demand I already owned.

**Commission structure.** Recommend a rate against {{product_and_margin}} and {{acceptable_cpa}}, then make it do some work: a higher rate for new customers than returning ones, a bonus on first-time buyers, and a reduced or zero rate for traffic types that intercept rather than create. A flat rate pays the same for a review that took a week and a coupon popup that took a second.

**The rules, written before launch.** Draft terms covering brand-term bidding in paid search, use of my trademarks in domains and ad copy, coupon and deal site eligibility, browser extension and toolbar traffic, incentivised traffic, email list rental, and required disclosure. Vague terms cannot be enforced later.

**Attribution and cookie window.** Set the window against my actual purchase cycle rather than the network default, and decide the rule for a click that follows one of my own paid ads. Say what my analytics must be able to see for these decisions to be enforceable.

**Disclosure is my liability too.** The FTC's Endorsement Guides make advertisers responsible for material connections their endorsers fail to disclose, and expect a reasonable program to train and monitor them. Write the disclosure requirement into the terms in plain language, with an example of a compliant disclosure, and put it in affiliate onboarding.

**Measure it properly.** Define the reporting I need: revenue by affiliate type, new-customer share, refund and chargeback rate by affiliate, and overlap with branded search. Propose one holdout or geo test that would show what the program actually adds, and say when to run it.

**The launch decision.** If {{existing_demand}} is strong and {{likely_affiliates}} are mostly coupon and cashback sites, recommend against launching and name what I should do instead.