How To Perform an Affiliate Marketing Audit As a Bank or Fintech

• An effective audit provides a comprehensive affiliate program analysis with actionable insights to improve performance. 
• An affiliate program audit for financial brands can go beyond evaluating performance to identify strategic market growth opportunities and gauge product competitiveness. 
• Even positive affiliate audits (with no improvement plans) can help you know you’re on the right track, giving you confidence to experiment.  
• An important best practice is to evaluate your affiliate program against other digital channels to spot similar trends, which can bring greater market insights.
• Plan your audit around low business periods, so you have time to make data-driven decisions based on audit findings and to implement recommendations.

An affiliate audit gives you a 360-degree overview of your program, offering specific findings and clear recommendations for improvement. This analysis, coupled with an action plan, enables you to prioritize any changes on two levels: 

1. On a micro level, an audit can give you a granular overview of your program. 
2. On a macro level, an audit can tell you if it’s time for major changes, such as shifting direction in strategy, product, or program management.

This comprehensive view can offer many benefits, including:

• You can review your program’s performance for effectiveness. For example, did you hit your customer acquisition goals and KPIs while staying within your affiliate budget?
• You can identify specific areas of improvement. For instance, know which affiliate partners are underperforming and whether tracking issues prevent you from catching funnel drop offs. 
• You can find optimization opportunities, like adding essential publisher types to your affiliate mix for greater audience reach. Or maybe you need to change your commission structures to pay out on certain events, such as certain funding criteria.
• You can explore growth opportunities you may be overlooking. This can range from a change in campaigns, strategy, and product choices to working with a different agency partner so you can scale your program more efficiently.
• You can discover a low-functioning program that requires more strategic affiliate program management, whether that’s in-house or via an agency. 
• You can rest assured you’re on the right track. Some audits may simply reveal you’re doing everything you should be, providing you with validation. 

So an audit is an excellent litmus test on whether to make micro changes, a macro-level move, both, or none.

While audits can be a great way to optimize your partner programs, they can also provide you with greater insights and direction. To get the most out of an audit, here are two best practices we use with our partners. 

1. Consider your affiliate audit in the context of your other digital channels

If you’re planning an audit, you may have already noticed some negative trends or patterns within the channel that you want to understand better. But don’t treat your affiliate marketing results as an isolated case. 

Cross reference your affiliate marketing results with other channels, like paid search or display ads. This cross analysis could reveal similar trends and a broader pattern that may not be as extreme as you first thought or completely within your control. 

For example, you might find there’s a general market shift taking place, affecting all your channels. Or a repeated pattern could mean a seasonal change rather than a problem with specific affiliate campaigns or tactics.

Analyze your other channels to spot similarities before starting an affiliate audit. 

Note: Make sure you’re comparing like for like. Consider channels where you’re promoting a similar product or offer. If you’re promoting different product features in one channel vs. another, factor this into your comparison.

2. Even if the audit proves you’re doing everything right, keep your foot on the gas

A positive audit can be a confidence booster. It gives you the validation to continue applying the same practices and principles that have been guiding your current strategy. 

Yet some financial firms see a positive audit as a loss of time and money, leading them to inaction. Don’t let your program run on cruise control just because your current strategy and program are performing well. 

Instead, a positive audit confirms it’s time to explore new roads and experiment. Find unique avenues for growth and expand your working principles into broader partnerships and net new opportunities you may have been hesitant to try before. Test different strategies, learn from their outcomes—whether negative or positive—and iterate.

You can also test new products via your affiliate marketing program. Since publishers are a direct conduit to your buying audience, you can see if a new product will resonate with potential customers. 

Our 2024 Financial Industry Affiliate Marketing (FIAM) report shows that publishers consider their audience behaviour as a key factor influencing their product promotion choices. So be sure to ask your partners what in your product arsenal they think may perform even better than the ones they’re promoting currently.

Fintel Connect’s 2024 Financial Industry Affiliate Marketing Report, surveying publishers on the factors influencing their product choices 

Or you can test promoting another existing product to gain a competitive edge on the next market shift while boosting your margins. 

So, even if your audit results don’t provide action steps, give yourself some. Keep your foot on the pedal to see how much farther the affiliate channel can take you.

Download our Financial Industry Affiliate Marketing Report to tap into financial publishers’ insights and discover trends shaping the financial industry.

There are two ways you can conduct an audit. You can do this in-house or via an affiliate management agency. 

1. In-house marketing teams

An in-house audit will allow you to reduce the resources needed to perform an audit. The drawback to an internal affiliate audit is that it’s difficult for your team, who run the day-to-day operations, to stay neutral and give you an unbiased view of your program. 

You risk an incomplete picture and missing valuable opportunities. 

If you’re set on performing an audit in house, choose someone internally who doesn’t have daily oversight on your program. 

For example, you could ask a marketing lead running one of your other digital channels to perform your affiliate audit so they can remain as neutral as possible. But, give them a blueprint to follow (i.e., what to look for and how to evaluate) because they’re likely not as well versed in affiliate marketing to conduct an audit completely on their own. 

2. A marketing agency

Using an agency can be more costly than doing your audit in-house. But, unlike your marketing team, who may struggle to stay neutral, an agency can provide you with a fresh take on your program. This means you’ll have an unbiased third party who can provide a more complete overview and be brutally honest with you. 

An affiliate marketing agency that’s knowledgeable about financial services can provide an audit with even greater benefits. Since they have different connections across financial publishers and other companies within your industry, they’ll have a broader view and a better pulse on the market. 

For example, a financial services marketing agency can help you understand how your product stacks up against the competition and how effective your program is against similar companies.  

They’ll leverage their own experience in running campaigns for financial services firms.

A good agency will even engage their affiliate partners to feed into the process with objective feedback and recommendations from the market, providing you with industry-specific areas of improvement.

Here are the steps we take at Fintel Connect to audit affiliate programs for our banking and fintech clients. You can use the following as a checklist to manage your audit in-house or as a benchmark against a third party’s method if you choose to rely on an agency.

1. Ensure your affiliate tracking is set up properly to monitor and report on all parts of the funnel

An audit can reveal that your affiliate marketing tracking isn’t set up correctly. Without the right tracking and reporting, you can’t gather the insights needed to make your program more effective. 

Improving your reporting quality and consistency can let you be more nimble when you want to optimize your publisher mix, campaigns, or strategy. The reliability of your tracking and reporting also allows you to gain deeper insights into the value of accounts being generated.

Look at whether your tracking allows for reporting on quality metrics, which can impact performance. If your tracking doesn’t tie readily to deeper funnel data, then that may be an opportunity to scale your results and maximize your ROI. Learn more about common tracking challenges for banks and how to solve them.

Since cross referencing affiliate channel trends with other digital channels can help you understand the scope of potential issues, ensure you’re integrating data across all your marketing channels. Having cross-channel data integration can provide more accurate findings.

Effective tracking and reporting are foundational when evaluating your program’s performance. If you feel your reporting hasn’t been optimal, run a mini audit on that first. Once your reporting is top-notch, gather consistent data for at least three months before a full auditing of your program. 

Discover the top trends shaping financial services in 2025

2. Analyze your publisher mix and conversions

Once your tracking and reporting are consistent, analyze your program for efficiency by reviewing all your publisher and affiliate data to spot overlooked opportunities. Use your current reporting systems to study:

• The affiliates actively promoting your specific product
• The volume of monthly approvals per affiliate per product and their associated costs
• Click-to-application and application-to-approval rates

Some questions to ask yourself as you’re studying the data include:  

• Do you have the right publisher mix?
• Have there been any sudden changes in performance—and, if so, why?
• Are you missing any key partners?
• Are you paying the right amount of commission? 
• Are you paying at the right event? 
• Could you benefit from changing any of these aspects above and how?

For example, when one of our national banking partners conducted an audit with us, they discovered an operational problem with growing their program. Their terms of service (TOS) contained a lot of legal jargon, making it hard to get new partners to sign off and join their program. It meant considerable legal back and forth, which ate up resources and delayed campaign launches. 

This made it difficult to scale their program and hit their customer acquisition KPIs. We worked with them to induct their legal team into the process of how affiliates typically work and helped address risk concerns. We then helped them refine their TOS to something more amenable to the partners.

Once they set up a standardized and easy-to-understand TOS, they managed to onboard new affiliates more efficiently and get campaigns live, enabling them to scale their program quickly. 

3. Look at your product competitiveness

Another foundational step of your audit is looking beyond your publishers to know how competitive your product is. How do your features stack up against the competition? How do your conversion rates compare against market standards?

This benchmarking can help you understand if your product and its features are affecting the ability to drive conversions and sales through your affiliates. It can also show you’re using the wrong metrics to evaluate success.

For example, an audit for a new banking partner revealed they were measuring the value of new savings accounts created through the affiliate channel on the day of account opening. While this metric gave them a quantitative overview, it didn’t fully account for the quality of those accounts. 

This meant they perceived their affiliate program as more expensive than other channels. Instead, it was actually more efficient when tied to metrics like account balances and activity. 

When our banking partner slightly shifted this metric to measure funded accounts on 60, 90 and 180 days after opening, they saw a truer picture of account value. 

Their affiliates were actually bringing in higher value accounts than initially reported. Once they added key metrics, they could see their affiliate program was effective in bringing in net new quality accounts, which gave the team grounds to expand budget in this area.

4. Ensure your messaging is not only consistent but compliant

An often overlooked aspect of affiliate marketing audits is optimization from messaging and compliance standpoints. With an audit, you can spot opportunities to improve both the effectiveness and the integrity of your affiliate marketing messaging so you can reduce compliance risks while building trust.

Measure your messaging for consistency. For example, how effective are you in maintaining your financial brand’s style and marketing regulatory compliance across your entire program? This part of the audit includes analyzing your affiliate campaign messaging for:

• Consistency with your financial brand’s guidelines, including tone of voice and brand colours, and logo across all your affiliates and publishers. This helps build brand credibility and awareness as you scale your program, making it easier for publishers to promote your products. 
• Correct positioning. Are your affiliates highlighting the features that resonate most with your target audience?  Misaligned messaging can undermine your affiliate marketing efforts, weakening your campaign’s effectiveness. 
• Compliance with regulations. Ensure pricing and interest rates are up to date, the right disclaimers are in place, and promotions aren’t misleading (i.e., look for terms like “free” and “guaranteed”). Instances of non compliance that go public can cause a loss of customer trust, harming not just your affiliate conversions but your brand reputation. 

Since checking your messaging and compliance can be resource intensive, outsource this job to an agency or use marketing compliance software. A marketing compliance solution designed for financial services can help you monitor specific affiliate pages while preventing the collection of thousands of data points across pages where you don’t have any affiliate agreements in place or legal responsibility.  

With Fintel Check, you can monitor your compliance only on pages where you have a commercial relationship in place. Book a demo to see how you can streamline your compliance monitoring. 

5. Make sure you’re promoting the right product

We’ve had the privilege of working with 100+ financial brands over the years. While many focus on a single product, some have found that expanding their perspective beyond one offering can unlock greater opportunities.

If your goal is deposits and you’re only promoting a CD product, maybe you have other products that could attract potential customers and achieve your deposit objectives.

To understand if you’re promoting your best product, study the market. Take your three main competitors and see which financial products they’re promoting. If you need more data on the product to promote, take a partner-first approach and ask your publishers for their insights. 

For example, our Financial Industry Affiliate Marketing (FIAM) report shows publishers expanding their product promotions for business audiences to include checking accounts and credit cards in 2024.

The Fintel Connect FIAM report shows the new financial products publishers expected to launch in 2024

Ask your publishers which products they find interesting and which are their audiences currently using. This feedback can help you validate your original product choice or determine if you need to shift gears.

Once you’ve completed your audit, ensure you have key findings with at least three actionable insights. If there’s nothing to improve, you can expect validation of your current practices and which areas to double down on. 

Here are a few things we include in our partner audit findings you can use as a guide:

• Top-level competitive matrix
• Top-level product suggestions
• Competitive gaps to close
• Potential affiliate program growth opportunities

If your audit finds your current program is underperforming or not maximizing its potential, this could mean you need to change approach or make significant changes to your affiliate program. 

Both validation and clear recommendations can help secure ongoing support and resources for the affiliate program from your leadership team. Even if your program doesn’t require major changes, the audit can give you more reason to keep investing into affiliates.

Think of the program audit as a physical check-up. You’d want to check your health at least yearly, so it makes sense to do the same for your affiliate channel. 

However, if your program is new, wait until you have just enough stability to avoid the volatility of  new affiliate partnerships or campaigns that could skew the findings. We define stability as when a program hits steady volume. For instance, achieving the same net new customer numbers three months in a row means you’ll have a predictable pattern of performance.

Wait until you have a level of maturity to the program and enough data to have a fair assessment of your performance. This could be anywhere from three to six months, as a minimum.

But which period of the year is the best for an audit? 

Based on our financial partners’ experience, we suggest conducting audits during your least busiest time. For instance, avoid auditing your program when you’re closing out your fiscal year, kick starting the new year, or launching new campaigns. This also holds true for high commercial periods like Back to School, Cyber Monday or Black Friday. 

Plan an annual audit around a low business period, like a seasonal dip in performance, when it’s less hectic. This allows you enough time to reflect, decide, and make improvements without haste, increasing the probability of a successful program.

An affiliate marketing audit summarizes your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, while providing clear recommendations on how you can optimize your affiliate channel. The key is using the audit to drive your affiliate program forward, scaling your channel for greater customer-acquisition and revenue growth opportunities.

Unsure if you need an audit of your financial affiliate program? Chat with one of our experts to see if an audit is the right move for you today.