Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Agency: 6 Reasons Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better

The biggest agency isn’t always the best agency.

Choosing the right affiliate marketing agency is one of the most important decisions you’ll make for your program.  The right agency partner can accelerate growth, expand your publisher relationships, improve efficiency, and become an extension of your in-house team.  The wrong one can lead to missed opportunities, stagnant performance, and months of lost momentum.

The challenge is that finding the right agency isn’t easy.

If you’re not asking the right questions during your search, you’re likely to end up with the agency that has the biggest marketing budget, not necessarily the agency best fit for your business.  

Most brands begin their search the same way: Google, ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI search tool. 

Popular search terms are:

1. Best Affiliate Marketing Agencies
2. Top Affiliate Marketing Agencies
3. Affiliate Marketing Agency Reviews
4. Best Affiliate Agency for Ecommerce

The agencies appearing at the top of these searches often:

1. Rank well because they’ve invested heavily in SEO over many years.
2. Spend aggressively on paid search advertising.
3. Invest in sponsored placements or premium listings on directories like Clutch and DesignRush.
4. Have sophisticated marketing teams dedicated to generating leads.

We recommend taking a step back to first identify the brand’s needs and what’s important to you in an agency partnership.  Answer these questions about your brand as the starting point in your search and the odds are you’ll find a better match.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Agency

Business Size & Metrics

• In the last 12 months, many mid-sized D2C brands have inquired about our services at Clique, citing that their large agency wasn’t providing the attention their account deserved.  Instead, resources were increasingly being directed toward enterprise-level clients.
  
• Large agencies generally come with higher fees, which can make it harder to generate a positive return on investment.  And if your revenue is a fraction of their largest clients’, it’s easy to become a lower-priority account. A boutique agency that specializes in businesses your size will often provide more strategic attention, faster execution, and a better overall partnership.
  

Growth Trajectory and Goals

• Understanding where your affiliate program currently sits in its growth cycle, and where you want to go is critical.  Some agencies lack the service level and experience needed to take a brand from a growth stage to becoming a world-class global brand.  If your brand aspirations are set high, make sure you pair with an agency that has proven they can reach the pinnacle of affiliate marketing.
  

Establish Non-Negotiables

• Success in affiliate marketing isn’t achieved by chance.  There are a lot of moving parts that are critical, and many are things you may never think to ask about.
  
  • Personality Alignment: Can you work with this team over the long term?
    
  • Leadership:  Determine if you need senior leadership on your account.  Or can it get by with mid-level experience? 
    
  • Account and Employee Turnover: Ask about account turnover.  Some agencies reassign account managers frequently which causes account turmoil and progress delays.   There are also agencies with high employee turnover, this can be a clue to how the business operates behind the scenes. 
    
  • Resource Allocation: Ask how many team members will be assigned to your account.  A good rule of thumb for mid-market brands is 1-2 Account Managers and 1 Account Coordinator.
    
  • Client to Account Manager Ratio: This may be one of the most important questions as many agencies will load up Account Managers with more than an 8:1 client-to-manager ratio.   At this rate, there’s little if any strategy execution.
    
  • Vertical and Platform Experience: Determine how important it is for your agency to have direct experience within your category.  Equally important is network experience. 

KPIs

• Understanding the goals of your affiliate program can help you match with an agency.   Affiliate agencies specialize in different areas:
  
  • Incrementality 
  • Efficiency 
  • Customer Retention
  • Content Creation
  • New Customer Acquisition
  • Acceptable Publisher Types

Many brand leaders assume a larger agency automatically means more resources, more publisher relationships, and better results.  While that can be true in some instances, agency size isn’t the most important factor.  The best affiliate agency is the one whose strengths align with your goals, budget, and growth stage.

To bring these concepts to life, here are a few examples we’ve encountered while auditing programs managed by larger agencies.

Senior Leadership

• Previous to Clique, our client was using the largest agency in our industry.  On their account they had 3 junior level coordinators with no experience in this clients’ vertical.
  

Network Fluency

• During a recent audit, we discovered a client had been paying $500 per month for a network feature that had never been configured. The feature had gone unused for more than a year.
  

Smaller Client-to-Manager Ratios

• In a recent interview with an Account Manager from another agency we learned this person managed 20 accounts.   We’re never above an 8:1 ratio at Clique.
  

More Accountability

• Our CEO has intimate knowledge of every account we manage, and clients have direct access to him.
  

Less Bureaucracy

• There are times when a client may have an out of the box request.  We’ve heard on many occasions from our clients that with previous agencies the response to every request was “let me check with leadership to see if this is within our scope of work.” 
  

Agility

• We have no red tape, which allows us to quickly pivot to new strategies, test and onboard new technologies, and adapt quickly to the everchanging environment. 

Before signing a contract, make sure you can confidently answer these questions:

1. Is this agency experienced with brands our size?
2. Will our Account Manager have the bandwidth to proactively manage our account?
3. Who will actually be working on our business?
4. Does the agency’s publisher strategy align with our goals?
5. Does the agency define success the same way we do?
6. Is the agency equipped to support where we want our business to be in three to five years?

Not sure whether your current affiliate agency is the right fit?

We’ll perform a complimentary, no-obligation audit of your affiliate program, identify opportunities for growth, and share our recommendations, whether you choose to work with Clique or not.

Contact Us Today!