Google and Meta ‘not held to affiliate marketing standards’
While tracking and compliance are still the biggest concerns for publishers using affiliate marketing, industry figures have drawn attention to the double standards around the opaque practices of Google and Meta.
Speaking after the release of new IAB data on affiliate marketing, Future Agency’s commercial director (APAC) Chris Ferguson said that the increasing transparency of the affiliate marketing pipeline was not mirrored in the closed systems of the digital giants.
Sophie Metcalfe and Chris Ferguson (Mumbrella)
“The affiliate ecosystem is designed to allow for every partner along the way to validate a transaction. That allows people to check back and make sure that there hasn’t been a return of that item, if there’s been some dispute on that actual sale,” he said.
“We never get that transparency or that opportunity to validate any sale or any transaction that’s happened through the Meta ecosystem or through Google.”
The sentiment was backed up by director revenue operations at Commission Factory Sophie Metcalfe, who highlighted the inability of any third party to verify transactions and traffic on Google and Meta.
“Transactions within the affiliate channel – they’re tracked as pending and then they’re validated, at either end, by advertisers and brands that run affiliate programs.”
“We’re not allowed the same validation process for Google and Meta. And therefore it’s not really even playing field … transactions are subject to more scrutiny [with affiliate marketing].
The pair spoke to Mumbrella during the launch of the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Industry Review 2025, a survey of advertisers, agencies and publishers who use affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is performance-based and rewards publishers for driving traffic to sales, usually through commissions.
The IAB survey found that retail and fashion are still the biggest categories in the affiliate world, and that the most important areas for publishers working with advertisers were tracking and commissions.
Emily Spinks, paid media strategist at luxury fashion brand Camilla, told the launch about a hybrid out-of-home and affiliate campaign that saw the global sales of one dress take off in April last year.
At the time, Camilla had an activation with Saks Fifth Avenue that involved Camilla branding in window displays.
Camilla Franks in the dress, Times Square (Camilla)
“We also had our founder Camilla Franks visiting New York at the same time. So I was looking for ways that I could leverage this in-market activation across our performance marketing channels and grow e-commerce at the same time.”
Spinks’ solution was to buy an out-of-home placement in Times Square.
“Obviously as a performance marketer, purchasing digital out-of-home can be quite tricky when working towards ROI KPIs – trying to prove the effectiveness of that is difficult. So as a safeguard, in case we didn’t see an uplift from new customers [we filmed] Camilla Franks in front of the billboard. She was wearing the same dress and there synergy there.”
She then promoted the content heavily on paid social media, ran targeted campaigns on Youtube and then pushed the content to affiliates.
“We had this key product that Camilla Franks was wearing. It was featured on the billboard. And we had that product included in certain listicles … and so as a result of that, having every channel firing at once, we saw really great results. The [dress] became a global bestseller.”
