Full transcript & breakdown
About this series
Affiliate Manager Spotlight is a recurring interview format where our affiliate management team answers, on the record, the questions that come up in almost every publisher onboarding call. No individual attribution — these are the team's standard answers, so you can hold us to them.
Q1: What makes a strong publishing partner?
Consistency and honesty about traffic. A partner sending 300 well-qualified leads a day from a source they can describe accurately is far more valuable than one sending 3,000 leads from a source they can't explain. Approval rate, not raw volume, is what gets a publisher moved onto better offers and higher payouts.
The second factor is willingness to instrument. Partners who fire postbacks and share event-level data get faster feedback loops, which means faster optimisation and fewer surprises at reconciliation.
Q2: How do payouts actually work?
Payouts are tied to the model the advertiser uses to recognise revenue. CPA pays on a completed action, CPL on a qualified lead, CPS on a sale, and RevShare on a share of ongoing player or customer revenue. Nothing about that is arbitrary — it mirrors when the advertiser gets paid.
Terms are set per offer and visible before you run traffic. Payment timing runs on a stated schedule, and lead quality reviews happen before payment rather than as a surprise clawback afterward. If an offer's approval rate drops, we'd rather have that conversation in week one than in week six.
Q3: How should a new publisher pick a vertical?
Start from the intent your traffic already carries. Comparison-shopping traffic maps well to insurance and home services flows. High-engagement entertainment traffic maps to iGaming, where the compliance requirements are stricter but the lifetime economics are strongest. Broad social traffic tends to work best on dating and low-friction email-submit offers.
Then test one vertical properly before adding a second. Two verticals at half attention almost always underperform one vertical with full attention and a working tracking setup.
Q4: What does onboarding look like?
A short application, a conversation about traffic sources, then access to the offer list matched to what you actually run. Your manager sets the initial offer set, watches the first week of approval data with you, and adjusts payouts and caps from there.
