Q: My affiliate manager hits all their KPIs but revenue is flat — why?

Q: My affiliate manager hits all their KPIs but revenue is flat — why?

You're measuring activity, not outcomes. "Partners recruited" and "emails sent" are vanity metrics — easy to hit, disconnected from money. A manager can sign 200 dead affiliates and look productive.

Measure what compounds:

— Active-partner ratio: how many recruited partners drove a sale in the last 90 days. This exposes dead recruiting fast.

— Revenue from new vs. existing partners — are they growing the base or just maintaining it?

— Net revenue after clawbacks and fraud, not gross attributed sales.

— Time-to-first-sale for new partners; shrinking it means onboarding actually works.

Caveat: don't swing to pure revenue and ignore the pipeline. Some quarters the right move is foundational — fixing tracking, recruiting a slow-burn content partner. Judge the manager on a blend, and give recruiting 2-3 months to show up in revenue.

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