Return on investment for an affiliate program, calculated as: (Net Incremental Affiliate Revenue - Total Program Cost) / Total Program Cost × 100. Accurate calculation requires: (1) Net revenue (after returns and cancellations, not gross GMV); (2) Incrementality adjustment (remove non-incremental purchases that would have occurred without the affiliate channel); (3) Fully-loaded costs including commissions, network override fees, platform fees, management labor, creative production, product seeding, and publisher bonuses. Benchmark ROI by category: electronics 150-300%; fashion 300-600%; health/wellness 400-800%; SaaS 500-2,000%+. Common mistake: calculating ROI as revenue minus commissions only — this inflates reported ROI by 40-60% by excluding management, platform, and production costs.
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