How Smarter Affiliate Spend Drives Profitable Growth: The Fraser Hart Case

Marketing teams are under growing pressure to deliver more revenue without letting costs rise at the same pace. When growth is the objective, affiliate marketers have several levers to pull: recruit more publishers, increase commissions, secure more paid placements, or add budget.

Those approaches can all be effective, especially during peak trading periods. But growth can also come from using existing spend more strategically – directing budget towards the products, partners, and opportunities that create the most commercial value.

That was the approach Fraser Hart took with Tradedoubler. By moving beyond a one-size-fits-all commission model, the retailer increased sales by 18%, while reducing CPA by 20%. The takeaway: profitable affiliate growth is not only about how much you spend, but where you spend it.

Why One Commission Rate Cannot Reflect Every Commercial Priority

Not every sale creates the same value for a business. Margins vary by product, stock priorities change, seasonal campaigns come and go, and some categories matter more strategically than others.

Yet affiliate programmes can still rely on relatively uniform commission structures. That makes them simple to manage, but it can also limit how closely affiliate spend reflects wider commercial priorities.

A more flexible model allows brands to use commission as a commercial lever. Higher rewards can support priority products, stronger-margin categories, or key campaigns, while investment can be adjusted where the commercial return is lower.

Fraser Hart: Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Affiliate Marketing

For Fraser Hart, the limitations of a one-size-fits-all model were particularly clear. Its product mix spans watches, diamonds, jewellery, international brands, and exclusive in-house collections, each with different margins, stock priorities, and seasonal opportunities. Applying the same commission structure across the programme made it harder to align affiliate spend with those differences and with wider business objectives.

Together with Tradedoubler, Fraser Hart introduced product-level tracking across key categories and brands. This gave the team a clearer view of performance and made it possible to structure campaigns around specific commercial priorities, from individual brands to curated initiatives such as “Watch of the Month.”

The biggest change was the move to variable CPA models. Instead of rewarding every sale in the same way, commission rates could be aligned with product margins, stock priorities, and seasonal campaigns. This gave Fraser Hart more control over where affiliate spend was directed and allowed the programme to adapt throughout the year.

As Maria Simicev, Online Trade Manager at Fraser Hart, explains:

The ability to apply product-level and margin-led commission strategies has given us greater control over profitability while still driving scale.

Turning Affiliate Spend Into More Commercial Value

Following the shift to a more commercially aligned model, Fraser Hart saw sales increase by 18% year on year and order value rise by 31%, while CPA decreased by 20%.

What makes the case particularly interesting is the combination of these metrics. Higher sales would typically indicate growth, while a lower CPA would indicate greater efficiency. Taken together, these outcomes suggest that a more strategic approach to commission allocation can improve performance without increasing acquisition costs.

At its core, the principle is straightforward: affiliate budgets do not need to be distributed evenly to be effective. Investment can be increased where margins, demand, or strategic priorities justify it, and adjusted where incremental returns are lower.

This does not mean reducing commissions across the board. Publishers still require compelling commercial incentives. The goal is to create a closer relationship between the value a sale delivers to the advertiser and the reward offered to the partner.

How Huawei Applied the Same Principle

Huawei provides a useful supporting example from a different angle. While Fraser Hart focused on product- and margin-led commissions, Huawei looked more closely at where publisher-level investment was creating the strongest returns.

Rather than increasing investment across the programme, the team reviewed where budget was going, which partners were driving results, and where untapped opportunities existed. New partnerships and placements were tested on a smaller scale first, with more budget directed towards those that demonstrated clear potential. This approach contributed to 190% affiliate revenue growth while keeping costs under control.

The tactics differed from Fraser Hart’s product- and margin-led commission model, but the underlying principle was similar: understand where affiliate spend creates the most value, then invest accordingly.

Huawei shared the full story in a recent Affiverse webinar on scaling affiliate growth sustainably.

What Affiliate Marketers Can Take From This

The Fraser Hart and Huawei examples point to a broader shift in how affiliate budgets can be managed. The focus is less on applying the same logic across an entire programme and more on understanding where additional spend can create the strongest commercial return.

That starts with looking beyond programme-level averages. Overall CPA or ROAS can hide significant differences between products, categories, publishers, and campaigns. More granular data makes it easier to see where higher investment is justified and where it may be delivering diminishing returns.

It also means giving partners incentives that reflect business priorities. For Fraser Hart, that meant adjusting commission according to factors such as margin, stock, and seasonality. For Huawei, it meant testing publisher opportunities before scaling the partnerships and placements that showed the strongest potential.

Crucially, smarter allocation is not about cutting commissions or squeezing publisher margins. It is about creating a closer link between what the advertiser values and where affiliate budget is deployed.

For affiliate teams, the useful question is therefore not simply “How much should we spend?” but “Where can our next pound or euro of spend create the most value?”

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This content has been produced for Affiverse by an independent Advertiser and expresses their own views, in their own words. If you would like to feature as an advertiser and be interviewed on Affiverse’s media content platform, please email [email protected].