A US fine-jewelry retailer running a mid-six-figure monthly program on Awin came to AME with revenue sliding and eight agencies' worth of dead ends behind them. The obvious stuff — slow payouts, a validation backlog — was real, but easy. The revenue was hiding somewhere less obvious: in the commercial terms with their biggest partners, and in a network setup that was quietly capping every sale. Here's what most brands never think to look at.
On paper the program had scale: 720 registered publishers, a six-figure monthly run rate, a full product catalog of 158,000+ SKUs. But revenue was down 25% month over month and nobody could say why. The brand assumed it needed more affiliates. It didn't. It needed the program it already had to actually function. It had also worked through eight agencies before coming to AME, and not one of them had found, let alone fixed, what was actually wrong.
We ran a read-only deep-dive audit across the entire Awin account — commercial terms, tracking, commission logic, product feed, publisher mix and offers — and produced 549 discrete findings, 38 of them critical. The pattern was clear immediately: this wasn't a growth problem, and it wasn't the obvious admin either. The real money was tied up in the deals with their biggest partners and in network setup that quietly capped every sale — the two things nobody had touched in eight agencies.
The last eight teams weren't lazy. Affiliate account management, almost everywhere, is trained around daily admin: approve these transactions, post this deal, send that newsletter. Almost nobody is trained to ask whether the program's foundations are even sound, or how to rebuild them when they aren't.
AME doesn't run a playbook. Every program is broken in its own way, so we read each one from scratch and get our hands dirty in the account until we find what's really holding it back — the things neither the brand nor the last agency ever thought to check.
None of it shows up on a daily to-do list. All of it shows up in the revenue.
We don't hand over a 40-page report and walk away. The audit becomes a prioritised task list — plain, sequenced, and owned. And the tasks that actually move revenue aren't the obvious admin. Here's where the money came from, in order:
Your biggest affiliates are also your most negotiable — but almost nobody reworks the deal. We reset commercial terms with the top partners (rate, placement, exposure, exclusivity), win back the ones who'd collapsed, and turn a passive payout into an active partnership. This is where the biggest single lift came from.
End the flat-5%-for-everyone default and finally deliver on the "up to 25%" the program advertised — rewarding by publisher type and basket value so the right behaviour actually pays, and your best partners have a reason to prioritise you.
Reinstall the conversion tag at checkout, repair commission matching, and re-categorise the 158,000-product feed to Jewellery and refresh it daily — so every sale tracks, attributes and pays correctly instead of leaking out silently.
Reactivate the ~111 dormant "active" partners and go after the hardest partners in affiliate to win — content publishers — so the program stops living or dying on three accounts (more on that below).
Yes, we also settle the overdue invoice, unfreeze validation and clear the pending backlog. Important and quick, but table stakes. We get it off the board early so the real work can run.
Based on the audit findings, here's the kind of recovery available from renegotiating the top partners and fixing the network setup — before a single new publisher is even recruited.
These recovery figures are illustrative projections built from the audit's findings and AME's typical outcomes when these specific issues are resolved on a program of this scale. They are not a guaranteed or booked result, and every program differs. The diagnostic figures above (revenue, pending value, payment time, findings count) are the actual state of the audited account.
We didn't hand the audit over and leave. We ran the programme for eight months, Nov 2025 to Jun 2026. It ended with the programme growing through its weaker season instead of shrinking through its strongest, the commercial terms rewritten, the tracking sound and the partner base diversified.
Diagnostic figures come from the opening audit; revenue figures are actual tracked sales. Jewellery is strongly seasonal — read each month against its calendar position.
The first eight weeks were spent clearing the structural faults above. Only once they were closed did a single hour go into recruitment — which is why the first quarter looks flat and the second does not.
Share of tracked sales through the managed period, by partner type
The brand kept the audit, the task list and the documentation — the same materials we used to run it.
Commission architecture, tracking, feed categorisation and commercial terms rebuilt and documented, so the fixes hold after the engagement ends.
The prioritised task list, recruitment targets and activation sequences, written down so the in-house team can keep working it week to week.
We stay on call after handback. Whenever the account manager needs guidance, we're there — the relationship doesn't end when the programme moves in-house.
$1,297,000 in sales · 4,184 transactions · 1.6M clicks · 30% active partners
This brand had cycled through eight agencies looking for someone who could actually move the needle. After seeing nothing but AME's first audit — the findings, the prioritised tasks, the plan — they ended their incumbent agency on the spot and moved their program to us to run.
It was the first time anyone had shown them exactly what was broken and precisely how to fix it. That's the difference between a report and a task list, and it's why the audit sells the relationship, not the pitch.
Most brands don't need more affiliates. They need the partners and the setup they already have to work harder.
The revenue is usually already there — in commercial terms that were never renegotiated, and network setup that quietly caps every sale. That's the work AME does that the last eight agencies didn't: find the levers no one else pulls, work them in priority order, then grow from a foundation that actually holds.
I've spent 28 years in affiliate, and almost every program leaks in the same places. I'll audit yours and hand you a plain, prioritised task list: exactly what to fix first and grow next. Free, and yours to keep forever. No card, no catch. Brands who work the list week to week see up to a 20% lift in traffic in 6 to 8 weeks. Imagine where that puts you in six months.
Free forever · yours to keep whether you hire me or not · about two minutes to start
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