The talk of the industry in the past few weeks has been MegaLag’s viral YouTube video Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam. If you’re not familiar with Honey, they have a popular browser extension that claims to find the best deals for whatever online store you’re currently browsing.

The key takeaway from that video is the major problem with Last Click Attribution, where social media influencers and other “top funnel” publishers put lots of work into creating curated content to promote a merchant only to have a coupon toolbar like Honey swoop in and drop a cookie only seconds before a sale is completed.

Because most affiliate programs award commissions to the Last Click in the user journey, the content creators are left with nothing.

Another interesting bit is how Honey can get a tracking cookie to drop even if they weren’t able to find a valid coupon code. If you’re the merchant in this scenario, you have to ask yourself if that’s really deserving of a commission.

At the end of the day, the Honey Problem is simply a symptom of not using the right tools. Most major affiliate networks do not offer the correct solutions for handling this scenario.

Also, it’s not just Honey that does this. If you work with any coupon or rewards affiliate, you’ll see this crop up all the time.

The thing is, coupon affiliates like Honey do have their place, and can entice new customers to give your brand a shot. Therefore, you need to find a solution that allows you to properly reward your content creators while also providing a pathway for affiliates that promote coupon codes.

ReferZone has just that. Best of all, it’s completely free to join!

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through our recommended approach for creating an Attribution Model that’s fair to both influencers and coupon sites alike.

The model we’ll create in this example will be based on Last Click, but it will have a preference for social media influencers while moving coupon affiliates to the bottom of the attribution.

The Situation

In our example merchant (Awesome Socks), you can see that we have a number of affiliates who are just individual people. Let’s assume that they’re all social media influencers, podcasters, YouTubers, or any other top-funnel promoter.

At the bottom, you can see an affiliate named BestCoupons.com. This coupon affiliate is getting most of the commissions in our program simply because they will usually always be the last click.

The first thing we want to do is to group our affiliates so we can make attribution rules. We can do this by creating Labels and assigning affiliates to those labels.

1. Creating Labels

In your ReferZone account, go to Affiliates -> Manage Labels. Click New Label. The first Label that we’ll create will be for our Social Media influencers:

For the sake of simplicity, we won’t be assigning a custom rate for either the social media influencers or the coupon affiliates, but you’re more than welcome to do so if that fits your strategy.

After you’ve made the Label, create a second one for your Coupon Publishers. You should then have something like this:

Excellent!

After creating the Labels, we need to assign affiliates to them.

Let’s click the + icon on the right-side of the screen for the “Social Media Influencers” Label. Choose the affiliates from the dropdown that you’d like to add.

For this example, we’ll be adding Grace Myers, Olivia Hall, and Liam Smith.

Go back and do the same for the “Coupon Affiliates” Label. We’ll be adding BestCoupons.com to this one.

2. Building the Attribution Model

Now we need to define how these Labels will affect attribution.

In your account, visit Settings -> Attribution Model. Click the Edit button to get started. We’ll leave the default settings the same and scroll down to Global Commission Splits.

In our example, we’ll be awarding commissions to every affiliate who got a click, but more commission will be awarded to affiliates whose links were clicked last. To do that, we’ll select Split progressively among all affiliates.

Now scroll down to the Label Rules section. Let’s add the two that we created earlier.

Because we want social media influencers to get the highest priority, we need to move “All other affiliates” down to attribution priority 2 and “Coupon Affiliates” to attribution priority 3. Click the down arrows on both of these to move them into place.

We also want to ensure that if a coupon affiliate is getting a commission, then a coupon code should have actually been used in the sale. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a point in rewarding them for a sale they didn’t influence.

On the Label Rule for Coupon Affiliates, select Yes for Suppress if no coupon used. This will toss their clicks entirely if the customer didn’t use a code.

Now go ahead and hit the Save button and review the new model. If everything looks good, then hit Confirm Changes.

That’s it, you’ve solved the Honey Problem!

Your social media influencers will now always be considered first. The rest of your affiliates will be considered after them, and coupon promoters will be considered last. Even better, everyone will receive commissions on a sale, but social media influencers will receive the most.

Let’s take a look at a few scenarios and how our new model will affect this.

Scenario #1: A customer discovers our brand through a social media influencer, then gets a coupon code before completing the purchase

To see our most recent Transactions, we can go to Reports -> Transactions Report. We can see that a sale has tracked for $50, and we’ve awarded $10 in commissions.

To see the affiliate clicks and when they took place, click View Customer Journey:

From this data, we can tell that the affiliate first clicked Olivia Hall’s link, but then clicked a link from BestCoupons.com an hour later, 15 minutes before completing the sale.

In the traditional model, BestCoupons.com would take the entire $10 commission. But our Attribution Model has fixed this!

Close the window and then click Commissioned Affiliates to see how the commission was divvied up.

Here you can view a detailed breakdown of how much commission went to each affiliate and why.

We can see that our model moved Olivia Hall to the top of the attribution. Our progressive split model gives her $6.67 while BestCoupons.com isn’t left in the dust; they get $3.33.

We’re still awarding 20% commissions, but we’re now fairly distributing it.

Scenario #2: Multiple social media influencers get a click along with a coupon affiliate

Imagine now that our customer sees 1. Olivia Hall promoting our products, then goes to 2. Liam Smith to get his opinion. They view our site, then 3. go get a coupon code. But they aren’t entirely sold yet, so they see 4. Grace Myers‘ post before finally deciding to make an $85 purchase.

This situation gives us clicks from 3 separate influencers, who we’ve assigned as top priority in our attribution model.

With our settings, we will apply Last Click attribution to the social media influencers first before considering the coupon affiliate. The model will adjust the commission payouts accordingly.

Grace Myers got the last click overall, but her position in the attribution hierarchy didn’t change. Liam Smith and Olivia Hall both hopped over BestCoupons.com.

We have $17 in commissions to give out, so we split it up $6.80, $5.10, $3.40, and finally $1.70.

Scenario #3: Same as above, but no coupon was used

Let’s use the same clicks on another $85 sale, but this time the customer didn’t find a coupon on BestCoupons.com.

We still pay $17 in commissions, but each social media influencer gets more this time because BestCoupons.com no longer receives commission on this sale.

Scenario #4: No influencer links were clicked, but the customer looked for a coupon code and didn’t find one

Perhaps this customer came to our website organically or through a paid search campaign. Either way, they got to the site, then looked for a code on BestCoupons.com. Our coupon affiliate gets a click, but the code that was revealed is invalid or never existed at all.

We don’t have a screenshot for this, because there’s nothing to show!

No commission was paid out here because no affiliate actually influenced the sale.

The Wrap Up

Coupon affiliates have gotten a bit of a bad reputation, especially so since the MegaLag video. But it’s not entirely their fault either. Last Click attribution is just the standard system that’s been prevalent in the industry for many years.

Creating an affiliate program that fairly distributes commissions comes down to using the right tools for the job, and ReferZone is equipped to handle affiliate marketing in the modern world.

The commission priority levels outlined above can apply to many different types of models as well. You don’t necessarily have to split your commissions if you feel that it causes confusion among your affiliates.

If you have a specific type of Attribution Model you’d like to set up, feel free to hit us up at info@referzone.io and we’d be more than happy to help you set it up!