Did you know Awin provides merchants with a system to see how different affiliates compare to each other? Learn more with our introduction to an often overlooked feature of Affiliate Window (Awin).
Awin performance ratings are basically a ranking system
Awin comes with a rating system to tell you how an affiliate compares against others. As an advertiser, you can see the performance rank for an affiliate in the various sectors they operate in to help understand how many sales they might make for you.
It is basically a ranking system – the largest affiliate in a specific sector is “1”, the second is 2, and so on. If an affiliate is rank “35” for “Mobile broadband”, it means there are only 34 publishers selling more than them.
You can find the index score in the “performance” tab of the advertiser profile:
Here is an anonymous example from a few months ago:
Every merchant is allocated to a master category, which may be enriched by the commission groups associated with each sale. Every now and again Awin ‘maps’ their partners commission groups to a common list of categories. You tell if this has been done because they rename the commission group to a standard format, starting with a 5 or 6 digit number.
Over time the success of Awin Access could make those results less accurate because each Access merchant only has access to one commission group, making categorisation harder.
As an affiliate these scores are useful because merchants don’t always believe you when you say you make sales. Saying “I’m the 15th best performing affiliate on Awin in this category” is a great icebreaker. It can also give you a bit of a reality check – should you be saying “we’re the leading partner for x”, when 200 affiliates rank better than you?
Once you understand the volumes and scores for affiliates of various sizes, you can take a reasonably accurate stab at guessing how many sales an affiliate generates based on their score.
When I learn a score and approximate sale volume I record it in a spreadsheet. Once you have more than three numbers for a vertical you can actually draw a graph to predict volumes.
Be aware that seasonal events can skew the ratings. One of my own accounts saw sales double during black Friday 2021, but the index rank actually dropped by 5 positions because the whole industry saw a similar (or better) increase.
It is also handy to see whether an affiliate is only strong in one vertical, like telco, or if they sell products from hundreds of merchants, like a voucher or cashback site.
Publishers can get a rank even if they don’t make sales. If you are a merchant, it’s worth paying attention to this. You might think there are thousands of affiliates making sales in the mobile contract industry, but the example below proves that’s is not the case – there are less that 234. This example is for account that hasn’t made a sale for months so the score can only come from clicks and traffic.
Performance drops off pretty quickly. When I first started out I managed to achieve a rank of 100-120 from just 2 or 3 sales.
Some sectors are more competitive than others but in general anyone outside the top 100 probably isn’t making a fortune. You can map this to predict how many sales any affiliate is making. Just start recording your scores and how many sales you made, and once you have a few results you can make a simple graph in Excel. The trend line will be a curve so the more data you have the more accurate you’ll be.
At Awin’s side there must a manual element to updating and publishing the scores since they are not always published at the same time of the month, and sometimes are not updated at all.
Merchant scores are less useful
Merchants also have performance scores. The problem for self managed or Awin Access merchants is that very low numbers break the calculations somewhat.
At the time of writing the modestly sized mobile merchant I manage has an unbelievably high score of 96/100. I’ll happily take it, but it is just a quirk of the maths when you only make a few sales. If I decline a single sale the ranking will probably fall by 20%.
Merchant scores are only based on the performance of their top three affiliates. This sounds limiting, but really it is the only way to get safe, reliable reports that can be compared between merchants.
The merchant performance score can help identify obvious issues when the score is very low (or very high). For example, a merchant that I used to manage switched agencies (not my fault!). Looking at their performance score a month later their “order approval” score had jumped to 100%.
They sold expensive bespoke furniture with long lead times and very high cancellation rates so this just wasn’t possible. It was obvious that the new agency had started approving every commission without waiting or checking for cancelled or returned. Luckily we let the merchant know in time and saved tens of thousand pounds in incorrect commissions.
This article was written as part of the Beginners Guide to Awin Access. As it became longer it was moved to its own article. You can find even more information on this topic in the book Affiliate Management for Self-managed Programs, available on Amazon.