Awin’s Adam Ross: Why Affiliate Still Wins! Two Decades Distilled in One Episode

Why tracking everything your affiliates do matters more now than ever before (and what conversion protection tells us about lost revenue)

If your affiliate program isn't tracking properly, you could be losing millions without realising it. Adam Ross, CEO of Awin and 21-year industry veteran, reveals exactly how AI-powered search is fragmenting the customer journey, why deterministic tracking alone won't survive the next five years, and how Awin's Conversion Protection Initiative has already recovered over $250 million in previously untracked revenue. Lee-Ann and Adam discuss his leadership approach, why probabilistic tracking methods are becoming essential, and what the convergence of influencer and affiliate marketing means for program growth.

Talking Points Include:

• The seismic shift happening in content attribution – how LLMs are citing publisher content to answer consumer queries, why this value currently goes unrewarded, and the new tracking signals needed to expose it
  
• Why different traffic deserves different tracking methods – different traffic has different value and possibly needs different tracking methods and different reward mechanisms, ending the era of treating all affiliate partnerships equally
  
• The conversion protection wake-up call – how forcing tracking upgrades revealed $16 million in additional commission and what this tells us about invisible program value

From Dentistry Student to Network CEO: The Accidental Career Path

Most people don't grow up dreaming of affiliate marketing careers, and Adam Ross is no exception. After studying dentistry at university and not finishing, he found himself applying for jobs whilst considering a return to education. A fantastic recruiter introduced him to the founder of what was then Affiliate Window in 2004, and despite having no relevant experience, he was given a chance. Starting in technical integrations, Adam built the foundation that would serve his entire career, learning the real nuts and bolts of how affiliate programs work at a technical level.

One of the absolute beauties of this industry is the variety that exists within it, on both sides of the marketplace. Any advertiser can work in affiliate marketing, creating an incredible mix of different sectors. On the publisher side, it's a microcosm of everything in digital. Anybody with an online engaged consumer audience can be an affiliate, giving the industry adaptability to whatever is happening in the world today.

Over 21 years at the same company, Adam experienced major milestones every three to four years that kept the role engaging. He launched Affiliate Window's first key accounts team, joined the board, was part of the team that sold the company to Axel Springer, led the acquisition of competitor buy.at (which launched Awin into the US market), and orchestrated the merger with Zanox that brought continental European operations under one roof. Each phase brought new challenges, different cultures to integrate, and fresh perspectives on how affiliate marketing could evolve. By 2021, when Adam took over as CEO, he'd experienced virtually every aspect of running a global affiliate network that now spans over a thousand employees across 15 countries.

Content Still Powers Everything (Even When AI Rewrites The Rules)

High-quality content is absolutely essential and plays a major role in influencing users in different ways. What we're seeing now is that content is being used to give answers to consumers using LLMs, playing a massive role in customer journeys in various ways, probably expanding those journeys. At the moment, it plays more of a role in the research phase, though innovations around integrating checkout into those experiences are emerging. Whether that takes off remains to be seen, as there have been several attempts over the years to integrate checkout into publisher experiences that haven't succeeded.

What's certain is that content provides huge value and increasingly is not getting tracked and rewarded for that value. This presents an exciting opportunity because we can no longer rely entirely on the old tracking infrastructure and the old ways of doing things. We have to think of new ways of doing things, and we're already starting to see a variety of different solutions trying to expose the value being driven from that content, work out which content is being cited by the LLMs, and then presumably moving on to mechanisms to reward that.

There are going to be a whole bunch of new signals that we need to track and bring into the system to expose that value. Adam points to research from SEO expert Lily Ray (who spoke at Awin's Think Tank event and is returning to their Chicago event on April 20th) showing that ChatGPT and Gemini rarely provide the same list of brands when asked identical questions 100 times. This means firing a bunch of prompts at LLMs will give some insight, but not the whole picture. So you've got to take some of that insight alongside more deterministic ways to work out which content is appearing and why, marrying those together.

The fundamental challenge is this: the quality of the consumer's experience using an LLM is still fundamentally based on content. If the business model around creating that content no longer functions, then the content won't be produced, the quality of answers won't be any good, and the experience won't be any good. So there needs to be a way to solve this, and there are going to be ways to solve this. That presents a massive opportunity for the space, which Awin is leaning heavily into.

Why Conversion Protection Proved Tracking Failures Cost Millions

For years, Awin watched various challenges erode tracking effectiveness: ad blockers, GDPR, ITP, tracking prevention technologies. The industry developed sophisticated tracking methodologies to combat these issues, but the real challenge became convincing long-term advertisers to invest time, resources, and development effort into upgrading to the latest methods. Many had valid reasons for not upgrading immediately, but the result was massive revenue going untracked.

Awin drew a line in the sand. After April 2024, any advertiser not using the latest tracking methodologies would see Awin use its data to probabilistically assume sales that would have occurred with proper tracking implemented. The initiative drove huge adoption increases, with some advertisers even thanking Awin for providing the internal business case they'd struggled to make themselves. The results speak volumes: over $250 million in additional tracked revenue and more than $16 million in additional commission in just nine months. This doesn't represent new sales – it reveals how much value was already being delivered but remaining invisible. The artificially inflated ROI many programs were seeing wasn't efficiency gains; it was untracked journeys delivering unrewarded value.

Listen to Find Out More About:

• Why Awin does quarterly seasonal product releases to bring meaningful improvements to advertiser and publisher experiences, with the winter release focused on simplifying what is still an incredibly complex channel to help everyone get much more value out of the space
  
• How the new platform aims to get smaller advertisers to money-making partnerships as quickly as possible without needing account management support, using 25 years of data to know which partnerships work, what rates to pay, and how to increase active partnerships
  
• Why Adam is extremely bullish about affiliate's future, noting that while this disruption is probably going to be much bigger than past changes, affiliate is a wonderful monetisation infrastructure that can be quite agnostic about how end user experiences evolve
  
• The exciting new influx of AI startups connecting at scale with multiple brands looking for ways to monetise, where the CPA model works very well for AI recommendations based on personalisation
  
• Why the convergence of influencer and affiliate marketing continues accelerating and why people will always want to buy from other people, even when using AI for research
  

What it means that there's got to be an acceptance that in a lot of cases, the old ways of tracking from a technical perspective are no longer going to work, whilst deterministic tracking remains super important as the base

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:

[01:15] The unlikely journey from dentistry student to affiliate marketing through a recruiter who saw potential beyond experience

[18:55] Why different affiliate traffic has different value and needs different tracking methods and reward mechanisms

[27:00] How Awin's seasonal product releases bring quarterly improvements and what the winter release means for platform simplification

Master the tracking evolution that's reshaping affiliate marketing success. Adam's insights into probabilistic measurement, AI disruption, and conversion protection reveal exactly why upgrading your technical infrastructure isn't optional anymore. [Subscribe to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast] for more strategic conversations with industry leaders navigating these changes in real time.

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