LISA: [00:00:00] Hi. I'm Lisa Maynard, VP of Marketing at Awin. Welcome to the Performance Marketer's Toolkit, the series where we explore the biggest challenges modern marketers face and the solutions to overcome them.

In each episode, we'll look at a real world marketing challenge and how brands are solving it through the agility of the affiliate channel and the help of Awin's Tech.

Today we're balancing contributions from lower and upper funnel partners, ensuring everyone is rewarded for what they do best.

Managing an affiliate program used to mean managing a list: a few blogs, a handful of cashback and coupon partners. Simple.

Then things changed.

Today's affiliate managers work with entire networks of influencers to put their products in front of new audiences.

That's powerful.

Upper funnel partners spark the journey. They're the reason a customer starts looking.

But then the journey continues. The customer browses, they compare prices, some go looking for deals on coupon sites. They might even use a browser extension to surface coupons as they shop.

You need the right attribution model to guarantee everyone gets paid for their work. Otherwise, these [00:01:00] final touches get all the credit.

As for the influencer who started it all?

Invisible and uncompensated.

It's like giving a Grammy to the streaming platform because that's where the song was played. Meanwhile, the songwriter gets nothing.

Upper funnel and lower funnel partners drive real value. It's time your affiliate program had the tools to balance contributions all the way up and down your program.

That's where Awin's Soft Click solution comes in.

In simple terms, Soft Click prevents technologies that appear late in the shopping journey - like browser extensions or overlays - from overriding the partner who originally referred the customer.

We do this through cookie hierarchy.

Most affiliate tracking is built around hard or post click cookies. A customer clicks a link, a hard cookie drops, a sale is attributed.

It's clean, but it only tells part of the story.

Soft click cookies apply to technologies that interact later in the journey. These cookies cannot override an existing hard cookie already set in the customer's browser.

So when an influencer refers a customer, but they're converted by a browser extension, the extension can't [00:02:00] overwrite the influencer's referral.

Awin's Soft Click protects a crucial part of the affiliate landscape. It allows brands to see and reward the partners who start the customer journey,

not just the ones who finish it.

That's especially important for influencer programs where creators generate huge brand value long before a purchase happens.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from homeware brand, McGee & Co, whose influencer program runs through Awin and the creator platform CreatorIQ.

Mike: So, you know, if you're a VP of marketing or a CMO, you know, and you're running, you know, multi channel marketing strategy and affiliate and influencer are part of that strategy - you got to get those teams working together to really maximize the value you can get from, from influencer and, and, and affiliate and expanding affiliate with influencers.

And the one thing that I think Amanda, you'll, you'll validate on this point is that you also understand the brand value of what's being generated in this program, right? Cause not every post is going to generate a sale, but it does generate media value for, for McGee & Co. And that media [00:03:00] value builds toward brand awareness over time, right?

So, you know, certainly some of your products are a little bit more temple type purchases. It's not like a fast fashion or something like that, right? So, you gotta just keep hammering the brand home so that when that consumer decides that they're going to redo a room or whatever, you know, McGee comes to mind.

LISA: For years, stories like McGee & Co's have been powered by Awin's cookie hierarchy, which is built into our platform.

Influencers and content sites are on a hard cookie. The final partner to drop a hard cookie is always credited with the sale.

As we learned earlier, your remarketing ads, browser extensions, tech partners - they're on soft cookies.

These cannot override the hard cookie dropped by influencers, but they can be credited for sales they drive on their own.

And the impact of Soft Click is already clear across the Awin platform.

Today, more than 600 partners operate on Soft Click, ensuring their technologies get customers over the line without overriding all the previous steps in the journey.

And importantly, those bottom funnel partners [00:04:00] are still thriving, generating over $2.7 billion in revenue for their brands and earning $177 million in commission in 2025 alone.

In that same period, Soft Click protected over a hundred million dollars in revenue and $7.1 million in commission for those traffic generating partners.

That's the upper and lower funnel seen and compensated.

The affiliate channel has an incredible mix of partners and strategies to explore. With Awin's Soft Click, you don't have to choose between them. The result is a fairer ecosystem in which discovery and conversion partners work together, without competing for the same credit.

Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Performance Marketer's Toolkit.

Join us next time as we tackle another marketing challenge and show how Awin helps marketers enhance their performance.