There's a common way to evaluate an Affiliate Manager in affiliate marketing: brought in media buyers and volume - good manager, didn't - bad manager. In practice, it's more complicated.
An Affiliate Manager really is responsible for results. They find partners, build relationships, negotiate terms, reactivate dormant media buyers and grow volume. But there's a problem people rarely talk about: a manager doesn't just sell themselves, they sell a product. And if the product isn't competitive, even a strong Affiliate Manager's options are seriously limited.
Picture an average Affiliate Manager
They have a contact base, experience and market knowledge. They message the media buyer, message teams and pitch a new product. The product has no recognizable brand, terms are the same as most competitors or worse, there aren't many of the GEOs that matter, no exclusive offers, no unique advantages either. Meanwhile, the media buyer is already getting messages from 20 other Affiliate Managers.
What should they say? Why should the media buyer work with this product specifically? If the offer looks like dozens of others, the manager ends up selling something the market has already seen many times. How much does this manager's result actually depend on their skill?
Now picture a major brand
The situation changes completely. An Affiliate Manager at a major brand messages a media buyer: "We have a new offer for this GEO, let's discuss terms." There's no need to explain who they are, no need to build trust from zero, no need to prove the company actually pays out. The media buyer already knows the brand, the product and its reputation. In some cases, simply mentioning the new offer is enough.
That creates an interesting situation: one Affiliate Manager can look highly effective, another very weak, yet the gap between them may have nothing to do with skill. They may simply be working with products sitting in completely different conditions.
A good product partly sells itself
That doesn't mean a strong brand doesn't need good Affiliate Managers - it does. It just means this manager already has a foundation to build sales on: a strong brand, a good reputation, competitive terms, reliable payouts, solid conversion, the right GEOs, exclusive offers, a clear track record with partners.
All of this reduces the objections a media buyer raises. Instead of explaining why the product is worth trying at all, the manager can go straight into discussing specific terms and volumes.
Sometimes it's not the product, it's the network
Networks, also called affiliate programs in the niche, are a separate case. Here, the Affiliate Manager isn't just selling an offer, they're selling the trust of the network itself.
If a company has no real PR presence in the niche, it's harder for a media buyer or their team to decide to work with it, even if the specific offer terms look decent. There's simply nothing to check the reputation against: they haven't seen the company at conferences, haven't come across it in industry chats and media, haven't heard feedback from other media buyers.
This puts an Affiliate Manager from a network with strong PR and recognition in a noticeably better position than a colleague from a network that almost nobody in the niche knows. The first gets an easier line of credit on trust, the second has to make up for it with personal effort, and the result will differ even with comparable offers and terms.
What this looks like in practice
This checks out in practice too. Every day I get messages from junior Affiliate Managers who clearly were never shown, let alone explained, how to properly open a conversation or who they should even be reaching out to. Some of it is straight-up spam, and even after I reply, they still don't get that I'm not with a media-buying team. I'm simply not the person they're looking for. I often point these people to teams listed on our site if I see the offer could actually be relevant for them. Half of them write on behalf of networks whose entire online presence is a one-page landing with a couple of managers' contacts and an Instagram that makes it obvious there's no budget for real SMM. It's unclear who's the lead and who's the owner. Often the affiliates themselves are completely anonymous - just a logo everywhere.
With that combination of signals, I only have one question: what result does the CEO or founder of a project like that actually expect?
Our partners never run into this problem
Our partner networks never run into this problem. Their managers don't have to spend time explaining which network they represent, since the media buyer or their team has probably already run into them somewhere in the market. And they don't have to spend extra effort convincing anyone they won't run off with the money either. You can google any of our partners in a minute and see this isn't a team someone threw together last month, and that if they hit a cash flow gap, they can cover it from their own funds instead of disappearing. In a recent piece with Piarcia, we already wrote that Google is the first place most people check for information when they can't get it from people they know.
If you want to make life easier for your Affiliate Managers and build long-term PR in the niche at the same time, message me directly: Telegram.
The manager's responsibility doesn't disappear
At the same time, it would be wrong to remove all responsibility from the Affiliate Manager. You can hand a manager an excellent product and still get a weak result, because a good Affiliate Manager has to know how to work with what they've been given: understand the market and the specific partner, know which GEOs actually interest that partner, understand their traffic source, offer individual terms when needed, know how to build relationships, win back partners who went inactive, and find new points of growth.
And above all, understand that the job isn't to send every media buyer the same offer. So the real question isn't whether the product matters more than the manager, or the other way around - the result sits at the intersection of both.
How to measure performance correctly
This is where companies often make a mistake: they look at raw numbers. For example, "this manager brought in 500 FTDs," "this one brought 100" - so the first must be five times more effective. But what if the first is working with a known brand, strong GEOs and an exclusive offer, and the second is trying to sell a new, unbranded product with no competitive edge? Comparing them directly isn't quite fair.
Judge results against the product's potential
It's far more useful to judge a manager's result relative to what the product actually allows. If two managers work with the same product, the same GEOs and roughly the same terms, a gap in results genuinely says something about skill. But if the products differ, KPIs need to be read in context.
The most important interview question
There's a question worth asking an Affiliate Manager candidate before they even start: "What does your product offer a media buyer that competitors don't?" The answer needs to be specific. Not "we have a great team," not "we're personal with clients," not "we reply fast" - a real advantage. That could be a strong brand, an exclusive offer, a unique GEO, higher conversion, better terms, fast payouts, proprietary technology or something else.
But the answer has to exist. Because if a company can't explain why a media buyer should choose its product, the media buyer will ask that same question tomorrow, and the Affiliate Manager will be the one answering it.
The worst possible combination
Arguably, the hardest situation looks like this: the company sets an aggressive KPI, the manager is told "we need more media buyers," but terms can't change, there are no extra GEOs, no exclusives, the brand is unknown, there's no promotion budget, and the product doesn't stand out from competitors. A few months later, the manager hears: "Why don't you have results?"
In that setup, the Affiliate Manager is stuck between the company and the market. The company expects growth, the media buyer sees no reason to switch products, and the manager tries to solve, through communication, a problem that sits much higher up.
What Affiliate Managers themselves should keep in mind
The job can look very appealing from the outside: a large contact base, constant communication, high bonuses, a fast track to grow inside the company. But before accepting an offer, it's worth evaluating more than just salary and KPI - you need to understand exactly what you'll be selling.
Ask yourself which GEOs are available, what the terms are, whether there are exclusives, what the brand is, what the product's reputation is, what the conversion rate is, how fast partners are paid, how much room the manager has to adjust terms, and finally, why a media buyer should choose this product specifically. That last question matters most: if there's no good answer to it, the problem can start before you send the first message to a media buyer.
The bottom line
A strong Affiliate Manager can meaningfully boost the results of a good product, but even a strong manager can't endlessly compensate for a lack of competitive advantages. And the reverse is true too: a strong product can give an average manager far more room to perform.
That's why judging an Affiliate Manager on numbers alone isn't quite right - you have to look at the whole system: manager, product, brand, terms, GEOs, market. And maybe, before asking an Affiliate Manager "why didn't you bring in more," it's worth asking the company first: "why should a media buyer or their team work with us?" If there's no convincing answer to that, the problem probably isn't the Affiliate Manager.
