 | Episode Cheat Sheet |
EP667
28 SEP 2026
56 MIN LISTEN
Annabel Gray
Vice President APAC, Silverbean
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THE TL;DR
Annabel runs Silverbean's APAC business. She has spent fifteen years in affiliate and partnership marketing across the UK and Australia.
She published a set of LLM prompts in the ATC community so brands can audit their own affiliate program without an agency.
The funnel is collapsing in the middle. We still want to measure direct sales, but we also want to measure influence.
Coupons and cashback still work. Only when you manage them and make them change behaviour rather than mop up demand you already had.
| Watch the Full Episode |
| From Bushy |
Affiliate was always the channel you (felt) could trust the numbers on. It was pretty transactional. Click, cookie, sale, commission, done. But now the middle of the funnel is collapsing. Someone can read a partner's review. They ask an LLM about it. They buy without that link ever being touched.
Annabel Gray at Silverbean joined me to discuss what that means for affiliate and partnerships programmes in 2026. She left me with one idea that's been bouncing around in my head. How will we measure return on influence moving forward where links aren't the link at all? Would love your thoughts after you've had a chance to listen.
CHEERS, BUSHY
| 01 Skip To The Good Bits |
Tap any time code anywhere in this cheat sheet and the episode opens on YouTube at that exact moment.
| What the collapsing funnel does to affiliate attribution | 6:24 |
| Measuring cost per influenced sale, and the eleven you cannot see | 9:21 |
| When a cashback program is cannibalising demand | 14:27 |
| Anyone can be an affiliate if you can track them | 19:08 |
| Spotting the partners who manufacture sales | 21:09 |
| Getting ready for TikTok Shop and social selling | 35:29 |
| Third party networks and the back door into your program | 41:32 |
| Why your brand story is not yours to tell any more | 46:20 |
“For every one sale within this category, eleven others influence sales which weren't being detected from that one content piece.”
ANNABEL GRAY | Silverbean
| 02 The Big Lesson |
THREE PLACES WHERE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS CAN LEAK MONEY
Affiliate scales beautifully. That is also the reason brands lose money without ever seeing it leak. You are paying a lot of different partners who each optimise differently. Annabel shared three places the money goes missing.
LEAK 01 42:21
The partner you can't actually see
Third-party networks sweep the web for brand mentions and turn them into affiliate links. That saves content partners logging into six platforms per article. In your dashboard, that long tail shows up as one name. So you can be paying a content rate while most of those sales come from coupon sites. A partner you rejected directly can also walk back in through the side door.
You may have them on a content partner commission when actually 80% of those sales that they're driving are from coupon sites.
LEAK 02 22:55
The spike nobody questioned
A common scenario is the partner that has done nothing for months and suddenly goes through the roof and no one knows why. Annabel's team treat silence or a thin presence as the trigger to investigate. They watch brand bidding separately with monitoring tools. A partner buying your brand name plus the word discount is intercepting people who were already on their way to you.
If someone's performance suddenly spikes, there's usually a driver for it.
LEAK 03 32:10
The partner you are underpaying without meaning to
Affiliate is still largely last click. So anything that works at the top of the funnel looks weak when compared to last-click. The trick is to price for the leakage rather than wait for attribution to improve. Annabel pays upper funnel partners a higher commission. She adds a tenancy or a CPC deal so there is a guaranteed outcome for the work.
You tend to do higher commissions for upper funnel partners because there is leakage and they won't get recognised as much.
Every one of these leaks is a visibility problem before it hits the bottom line. That means the gap between what your partners did and what your reporting can prove could be costing you significant revenue or eating into margin. Audit for what you cannot see. Not just for what looks expensive.
| 03 Guess The Winner |
Cash Rewards shutting down was a real loss to the channel. What happened to the money afterwards is not what I expected.
Cash Rewards shut down nearly a year ago. What happened to the revenue those cashback partners were driving?
| 04 Steal These Tactics |
1
Ask an LLM which articles and sites get cited for the problem your product solves. Then go and partner with whoever owns them. 44:23
2
Stop limiting affiliates to the usual suspects. Find the forum or private group your customers already trust and teach the admin how affiliate works. 29:03
3
Make cashback change behaviour instead of mopping up demand. Use a commission boost, a newsletter slot or a front page placement. 14:33
4
Put brand bidding rules in your program terms and conditions. Then use a monitoring tool to police them. 23:44
5
Draft your social selling contracts now. Make sure they include the right to amplify a creator's content through your own channels. 38:35
| 05 Myth Busting |
Myth: The bigger affiliate's share of revenue, the better the channel is working.
Busted: Annabel treats a high contribution as a warning on your other marketing channels rather than a big win. If the affiliate share is climbing, there is a good chance the program is carrying low-quality partners or the other channels are not pulling their weight. There needs to be a balance across all of your marketing.
So what: When affiliate's share of revenue jumps, check the quality of your referrals or whether you are paying for sales you would have got anyway.
| 06 The Stack |
A third-party network that turns brand mentions in editorial into affiliate links. Annabel works with them a lot and names them as the example of one that shows you who is actually underneath it.
Coupon partner network. Her test for a coupon site is whether the codes are live and current. This is the one she says stays on top of that.
Cashback platform skewing Gen Z and millennials. Heavily gamified and app-led. Cashback audiences stay loyal to one site rather than shopping across all of them.
Affiliate network. Named as one of the platforms a content partner has to log into separately for every article they write.
Affiliate and partnership platform. They hosted the iPX event I spoke at a couple of weeks ago.
| 07 If This One Landed |
EP658
Influencer Gifting Done Right: Don't Send Them Tea, Send Them the Tea Set
Amplification rights only matter if the creator relationship is worth amplifying. This one is about what you actually send and why the reason beats the volume.
EP460
RIP Marketing Funnels: Exploring the New Age of Partnerships
The middle of the funnel collapsing is not a new idea around here. This one argued advocacy had already moved from the bottom of the funnel back into discovery. It reads very differently now an LLM is doing the recommending.
EP297
How to Set Up a Successful Partnerships Strategy with Neguin Farhangmehr
A self-audit assumes you already have a program worth auditing. This is where to start if you don't. How to budget for partnerships and which partner types actually earn their commission.
| Pass It On |
Episode Cheat Sheets are built to be forwarded. If someone in your world runs an affiliate program they haven't properly looked at in a year, send them this one.
| Continue the Conversation |
Would you pay a partner more for sales you cannot prove they influenced, or does that feel like paying twice for the same customer?
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