In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on one of the most misunderstood and under-leveraged growth drivers in your marketing stack: affiliate marketing. 

In Redefining Affiliate Marketing Brand Performance for Maximum Revenue Impact, I'm joined by Lacie Thompson—founder of LT Partners and now an executive at New Engen, a top-tier performance marketing agency. We'll talk about why affiliate deserves a seat at your media planning table, how to integrate it with your broader marketing strategy, and how smart brands are using data and measurement to unlock serious revenue impact. So stay tuned through the ad, where Lacie shares how you can get smarter about measuring affiliate and truly integrating it into your broader strategy.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.23):
So welcome, Lacie. Please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and expertise.

Lacie Thompson (00:06.617):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm Lacie Thompson. My background, before I started LT Partners—an affiliate marketing agency—was in affiliate and digital marketing on the brand side.

I was very lucky in the early days to have some really great mentors and leaders. After spending about six years on the brand side and then three years at another startup agency, I started LT Partners in September of 2018. We grew very quickly—very organically, I should add—

and were acquired by New Engen, which is a digital marketing agency, in June of 2023.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:53.998):
Excellent. Well, we're so glad to have you here. I've always been very impressed with your success—and congratulations on building your own successful company and getting acquired.

I know you've been in the industry a long time and have lots of expertise to share with us. So, to start: when you're talking to other senior executives, marketing leaders, CMOs, what's the buzz you're hearing? What are people talking about today—especially when it comes to affiliate and digital marketing?

Lacie Thompson (01:27.459):
Yeah, thinking of the big picture—what I found really interesting about New Engen is the way they have grown and adapted over the course of their history. New Engen is about eight or nine years old at this point, but initially started as a tech company. They built a hyper-granular bidding model on top of Google and Meta, primarily.

Over time, as those platforms introduced their own algorithms, that technology became a little less important. What they realized when they took a step back was—they were an agency. It was the people helping the brands leverage the technology who were actually making a big impact. So over time, New Engen pivoted to become a performance marketing agency. 

Then, just before the acquisition of LT Partners, what the New Engen leaders were hearing in the market was a need to stop thinking about marketing in silos of brand and performance—and to bring it all together. Because thinking about it more holistically is where a lot of brands are trying to get. 

We had seen that in Affiliate very early on. That was a big part of our growth and success—this focus on understanding the incremental value of partnerships and working more closely with the ones that were more incremental. 

For us, that means introducing brands to new audiences. We had been hyper-focused on that in our "channel"—I use that word in quotes, because there's always debate about whether to call it a channel. But we had been doing that for a long time. So, at the same time that New Engen was pivoting toward a digital marketing solution in the space—we had already been doing that for a long time in affiliate. And they didn’t have Affiliate as a capability. So it was a really natural coming together, because our thought process around measurement and how to evaluate how different marketing channels and methodologies create value for brands—whether it's within a branding ecosystem or a performance one—was very aligned. And we need to solve and measure for that across everything. So there was just a lot of strong alignment there.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:11.03):
They were so smart to acquire you—for your success, but also to see the potential of integrating an affiliate strategy into their offering. IWhere you and I have discussed in the past, I also grew up in a performance marketing world: SEO, paid search, paid social, programmatic. And the more I learned about affiliate, the more I realized affiliate needs to be part of these conversations. But what we’ve seen is that it’s really hard to get people—especially those who haven’t wrapped their head around affiliate—to recognize the importance, value, and potential of it.

Lacie Thompson (05:02.073):
Yeah, and I think that’s what’s really fun for me about the channel. Because affiliate, like I said, there's this debate around whether it’s a channel or a mechanism. And I think that's part of why it’s difficult for some people to wrap their head around it—because you don’t have an ad platform with a campaign structure. It’s not like you push a button and things change. It’s 50% data analytics and deep insights—and 50% interpersonal relationships and business development of sorts.

But what's funny about affiliate is it’s actually the one channel that really intersects so many different parts of your marketing stack: influencer, PR, even paid search. Some partners have capabilities that fall under other types of marketing channels. But for some reason, over time, there has been this trend of affiliate-only agencies. And this narrative that you need an affiliate agency—and a separate digital or performance marketing agency—and that the two operate in silos. Oftentimes, they're not as closely connected as they could be if everything were handled under one roof.

So I find the irony of that really interesting. It’s not common to see digital marketing agencies that have affiliate as a core area of subject matter expertise. And obviously, as someone who’s spent most of my digital marketing career in affiliate and partnerships, I found New Engen’s interest in that really exciting.

I think, as we’ll probably talk about here, when we think about measurement, and the amount of budget brands allocate to affiliate marketing—it’s so small compared to the impact it can have. And it's exciting to be part of a larger organization that has the infrastructure and teams to help us prove that value with advanced measurement.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:27.022):
Yes, definitely. And I'm excited to talk more about measurement. But we forget that, to your point, there still needs to be more buy-in, education, and understanding of affiliate’s value among CMOs and senior marketers.

As you said, affiliate is so full-funnel—it covers PR, awareness-building (influencer/creator or mass publications), all the way down to the research phase before purchase.

It opens the door to strategic opportunities and conversations. But it's the term "affiliate" that tends to trip people up.

Lacie Thompson (08:24.889):
Yes, just a couple of weeks ago, we were talking to a potential client, and we actually got into the affiliate portion of the conversation by first talking about performance PR and influencers—and the convergence of brand and performance. That really opened their minds more than saying, "We’re here to talk about your affiliate marketing program."

What was cool in that conversation—as sometimes happens—is you could just see this light go off where people start to realize this isn’t the same affiliate channel marketing that was happening 10 years ago. We’re not just a bottom-of-funnel ecosystem. We really have to change the nomenclature and the structure of how we reward partners to evolve past that old, negative perception.

Lacie Thompson (09:39.651):
So I hope—and I’ve seen—that the industry is shifting. More and more people are talking about it this way. It’s evolving, and that’s wonderful to see.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:52.79):
Yes, I agree. And I think the more upper-funnel opportunities—really, the awareness placements—are becoming essential. I know for PR agencies, if they want to be in a top publication, they need to have an affiliate practice within their organization or partner with an affiliate agency. That’s been driving a lot of the shift. And obviously, nothing’s grown faster than influencers and creators. It’s about understanding that there’s integration and overlap. There’s so much potential. And to your point, it’s really important to understand that affiliate’s not just toolbars or coupons.

Lacie Thompson (10:36.559):
Right. The cool thing about affiliate marketing is that you're essentially, as a brand, letting other people tell your story for you, right? And that is so much more powerful for consumers—hearing from an influencer, a media publication, or an editor. Especially editorial publications with strong reputations.

People have a lot of trust in those voices. They trust them more than they trust the brand. So we’re seeing a shift toward leveraging what your partnerships are saying about you in other marketing channels. That’s another cool thing about being part of New Engen: figuring out how to take what an influencer or a content partner like Wirecutter is saying and turn that into

content that gets in front of your audience through other channels. And I think a lot of people now know that performs much better than just the brand talking about itself.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:46.412):
Yes, I definitely think that third-party endorsement—especially from a trusted source—goes so far. Again, that ties back to what you said about affiliate being a brand strategy as well. You’ve talked about the shift from performance-only to brand-plus-performance integration. Talk more about how you’re approaching that within New Engen and what you’re seeing with clients or brands you're speaking with today.

Lacie Thompson (12:19.993):
Yes, I mean, historically, I grew up in the age of performance marketing, right? We had sophisticated MTAs. We were focused on understanding what the right MTA was, and how to tweak it in order to understand performance. But you get to this point where, when you’re hyper-focused on trackable KPIs, you become as efficient as you can be—but you're also not scaling. So internally at New Engen, a lot of what we focused on in the early days were DTC startups that scaled very rapidly, hyper-focused on performance marketing. But then, at a certain point, you reach a plateau. And the way brands have historically thought about brand versus performance is: performance has KPIs we hold to—ROAS, CAC, whatever it is. 

On the brand side, those don’t really exist. You're looking at engagement rates and lots of other indicators. As we've seen the two converge, we’ve needed to come up with better ways to measure the impact across the board. That’s led to our belief that the foundation needs to be measurement—specifically, a mindset shift in how you approach it.

You can’t rely solely on Google Analytics as your source of truth. You can’t rely just on your affiliate tracking platform—or even on some of the other channel platforms. So we believe that, to get past the performance plateau and actually grow your brand, you have to rethink how you're investing your dollars.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:26.38):
That is so smart. What I’ve seen over the years is that MMMs don’t include all the channels—not just affiliate. Media mix modeling often only includes paid touchpoints. So it sounds like you've gotten to a point where you’re really able to measure the impact. It’s not “Here’s your affiliate report over here, and here’s your separate search, social, programmatic report.” You're really looking at the data together. So talk a bit more about how you’ve been able to do that.

Lacie Thompson (15:02.307):
Yes, our SVP of Analytics, Andrew Richardson, is just incredible. His understanding of the whole ecosystem—I really respect it. Because oftentimes, affiliate gets pushed to the side, like the redheaded stepchild. But he actually really understands it. So when he built our MMM approach, everything includes affiliate. But it goes beyond that. 

It also includes: How are your competitors impacting your ability to grow? If they’re spending more on media, that has a negative impact on you. We’ve done things in our models that account for factors like: Is it an election year, and how might that affect your business? We’re also looking at your brick-and-mortar store performance and how your digital spend is affecting it. So it really depends on the business and its model—what components matter, the time of year, and everything else.

Lacie Thompson (16:08.943):
Every situation is different. So we want to come to the table with a model that makes sense for each brand. What’s really cool—and validating for me—is that early on at LT Partners, we built a proprietary platform called Lift. We believed just looking at the data in the tracking platform wasn't enough to optimize your program. We always believed that how much new traffic a partner drives is indicative of their incrementality. So we pull data from Google Analytics, match it with the tracking platform, and we’ve built insights and tools for our team to use on top of that data. We optimize toward partners who are introducing brands to new audiences. And with Lift, we have benchmarking data that tells us, on average, what percentage of traffic is new from content partners, coupon partners, or even individual partners.

When we talk with enterprise brands that have advanced measurement tools like Measured, Rockerbox, or Northbeam, sometimes they share that data with us. And we often see close alignment between the level of new traffic and the level of incrementality these models show. Same thing with our internal MMMs. So, while we look at multiple KPIs, it's validating to see that our focus on new traffic is supported by broader measurement.

That means smaller brands don’t necessarily have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are other ways to optimize toward what's incremental and valuable— and it doesn’t have to be a massive lift.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:34.678):
Thank you for sharing that, because there are so many data points. We talk about this all the time—how the customer journey is not linear. There are so many touchpoints. They go back and forth. Being able to measure impression data—like where someone read your article or saw your brand but didn’t take action until later—is really important. It’s a very normal behavior pattern. And being able to still attribute that back to the publisher matters. I remember hearing about brands cutting their affiliate marketing because they couldn’t prove it drove incrementality. But there’s this larger lift that you’re able to see. It just sounds like it’s helping brands get smarter and smarter about how they’re investing.

Lacie Thompson (19:32.163):
Yes, there are really a couple of different buckets when it comes to measurement to think about. One is actually being able to measure the impact—which I think requires a few different angles to get the right perspective on whether your affiliate program or any other channel is driving incremental value, and what that value looks like.

Then there’s another bucket: how do I optimize a program? How do I drive toward creating more incrementality? And those don’t have to be the same things. I think sometimes when I talk about new traffic, or first-click attributed revenue versus last-click attributed revenue, people ask, “Oh my gosh, do you think we should be using first-click attributed revenue as our measurement?” And I’m like, no—that’s over here. That’s a different conversation. I’m talking about what data we need to look at to try to improve what the measurement says over here. And oftentimes, that means trying to grow first-click attributed revenue because that is typically more incremental than last-click.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:50.476):
Yes, and to your point, it’s about looking at different data points and getting smarter. And I think the more we’ve seen analytics become more advanced—tracking more touchpoints—the more correlation we see between the channels and the impact they have on each other. At the end of the day, that’s what makes affiliate so incredibly valuable and important.

I’ve talked in the past about getting affiliate a seat at the planning table. When the brand is thinking about how to allocate budgets—TV, display, programmatic, search, social—affiliate needs to be part of that conversation. Within New Engen, you have that natural organizational structure to foster that. But it’s still a challenge for a lot of agencies and brands that aren’t looking at it that way.

It sounds like it comes down to getting smarter about the data you’re evaluating and how all those touchpoints are really driving impact.

Lacie Thompson (21:57.435):
Well, I think that’s the problem. You have this conflicting dynamic within the channel: it’s traditionally performance-based, and it’s optimized on a last-click basis. You’re paying your partners based on whether they drive the last click. And then everyone gets mad when the big partners figure out how to get that last click—and they say the channel isn’t incremental. Well, maybe that’s because you’re hyper-focused on bottom-of-funnel, spend efficiency, and you’re not thinking about partnerships strategically. You’re not thinking about how to grow the channel or how to measure it appropriately to understand the impact.

The last-click performance nature of the channel will never allow you to fully reward the right partners. It will never allow you to fully understand the value of those partners. So, the actual construct of the channel is in conflict with it having a greater impact on your business.

Some marketing leaders just say, “I’m going to let it do its thing, be super efficient, and not pay attention to it.” But I think that’s a huge miss. When you think about your holistic approach and how to grow your brand, a lot of people say, “Well, it’s so small. It’s only 10% of my spend.”

Well, it could be 15% of your spend—but have twice as much impact—if you thought about doing it differently.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:28.942):
Yes, and that spend is purely attributable. It’s usually a commission—or a cost-per-acquisition model—so it’s not like other channels where you're spending millions of dollars and may never know the outcome. So, there’s still a lot of education that needs to happen. But the brands you work with are lucky to have you out there helping them get smarter. So, thank you. 

For the people listening who are thinking, “I need to get smarter about this”—what are some of the readiness steps or foundational things they should have in place to better measure affiliate and integrate it into their broader strategy?

Lacie Thompson (24:26.095):
I think the first step is really just making sure everything is set up properly. Do you have your UTMs set up—assuming you're using GA, which most people are? Some people use Adobe or other sources of truth, but most still have GA.

There are obviously nuances and other ways to do it, but in general, you should make sure that your UTMs are structured appropriately within your affiliate program so everything flows into Google Analytics in a way that lets you match it up with your platform data.

Otherwise, you’re missing visibility into traffic driven by partner—relative to one another. You might also miss out on more advanced attribution models. That’s the foundation to build on top of if you want to optimize your partnerships more thoughtfully.

It’s also very important to have that data available to share with the partners. Publishers don’t know how much new traffic they’re sending you. They don’t get that feedback loop. The way we think about the data isn’t just for internal use—we want to share it.

We want to show partners the KPIs that are most valuable to the brand and ask: What can we do together to improve these metrics? If you give them that information, many partners are creative and clever and can come up with great solutions.

But a lot of them have been trained to focus on the last click, maybe a higher conversion rate or AOV. And that training does a disservice to the partnership if you're not giving them better insight—and helping them succeed in ways that also help you.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (26:36.182):
Yes, definitely. To your point, all of it helps companies and brands drive better results and outcomes. So it's about having the right data—and doing smarter things with it.

So thank you so much, Lacie. How can people find you?

Lacie Thompson (26:52.731):
I feel like I’m everywhere! I'm on LinkedIn, you can email me, text me—I'm always available to chat. I'm always happy to help. I love finding ways to improve the industry holistically.

I'm happy to give advice—or I love hearing what other people are doing that's cool and unique and special. I love collaborating with other brands. I'm one of those people who doesn’t really say no to talking about anything, anytime.

You never know where conversations might lead, so please reach out if you want to chat.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (27:41.73):
Definitely. Well, thank you. I’ll be sure to include all that information in the show notes. I really appreciate your time. I’ve enjoyed our conversation and look forward to having you on again in the future. Thanks, Lacie.

Lacie Thompson (27:53.859):
Amazing. Thank you so much, Kerry.

Kerry Curran, RBMA 

Thanks for tuning in to Revenue Boost: a Marketing Podcast. I hope today's conversation sparked some new ideas and challenged the way you think about affiliate performance and full funnel growth.

If you're serious about turning marketing into a true revenue driver, this is just the beginning. We've got more insightful conversations, expert guests and actionable strategies coming your way. So search for us in your favorite podcast directory and hit subscribe. And hey, if this episode gave you value, share it with a colleague and leave a quick review. It helps more revenue minded leaders like you find our show.

Until next time, I'm Kerry Curran, helping you connect marketing to growth, one episode at a time. We'll see you soon.