Judging affiliate on one month’s revenue when customers pay for years? With support from Trackdesk, SlickText fixed that measurement gap and grew affiliate MRR by 50%+.
Campaign Objective: Outgrowing the In-House Tracking
SlickText, an SMS marketing platform selling to businesses across North America, ran its affiliate programme on tracking it had built internally — adequate while the programme was small, and a constraint once demand grew. Tracking was fragmented across the setup, so there was no clear picture of what the channel was producing overall; affiliates had no visibility of their own earnings or progress; offer management was manual, time-consuming and prone to error; and reporting and attribution were limited enough to slow down any attempt at optimisation.
The programme kept growing through all of that, which is the awkward position most affiliate managers eventually find themselves in when the reporting layer underneath a programme was never designed for the size that programme has reached at some point. The objective, in effect, was to rebuild the tracking, reporting and commission setup so the programme could scale with clearer visibility for both the team and its affiliates.
Strategy and Approach: A Two-Year Attribution Window
Where most programmes work to a 30 or 90 day cookie, SlickText settled on 2 years, and the reasoning follows from how a subscription business earns rather than from anything to do with affiliate convention.
The longer attribution window keeps the referring affiliate eligible for credit when a qualifying conversion happens later after the original click. For partners producing software reviews and comparison pages, which can take months to rank and begin generating conversions, that reduces the risk of delayed conversions falling outside the attribution period.
SlickText treats the window as a recruitment position as much as a measurement one, on the stated basis that a 2-year window appeals to long-term affiliates bringing high-intent traffic — a different partner profile from the one a 30-day programme tends to attract.
Alongside the window, commissions were tiered so that the programme could set incentives by level of production instead of applying one rate to everybody on the list, and tracking was extended across both links and coupon codes running to several landing pages and several conversion types — which is what allows the team to distinguish a customer who arrived through a review site from one who arrived through an email drop, and to move effort towards whichever is producing better accounts. Rather than recruiting as widely as possible, the team concentrated on a single core market first and scaled outward from that base.
Execution: Payment Model First, Platform Second
The programme was rebuilt on Trackdesk, which is where the attribution window, the commission tiers and the partner-facing dashboards are configured — though the order in which SlickText approached the rebuild matters more than the choice of platform, because they worked out how they wanted to pay partners before they went looking for something that could support it.
In practice, the rebuilt programme combined a two-year attribution window, tiered commissions, link and coupon tracking across multiple landing pages and conversion types, partner-facing dashboards, and a core-market-first approach before scaling outward.
Results: 50%+ Affiliate MRR Growth
SlickText reports net affiliate MRR growth of more than 50% since the programme moved across, alongside a partner base that can now see earnings and performance in real time rather than waiting to be told, and a single view of the channel that makes it possible to segment by conversion type, source or landing page and adjust from there.
The transparency element tends to get treated as housekeeping, although it does more work than that in a programme where partners are being asked to commit to content that will not pay for a year or more, since a partner who can watch the position build has a reason to keep the programme in active rotation rather than filing it with the dozens they signed up to and forgot about.
Scope note: the figure quoted is growth in tracked affiliate MRR as reported by SlickText, so it describes what the channel produced rather than what the channel produced incrementally, and should be read on those terms.
“Any business with a payback period longer than its billing cycle will look inefficient when it is measured that way.”
Challenges: The “Expensive Way to Buy Customers” Objection
The objection most affiliate managers run into, in one wording or another, is that the channel is an expensive way of buying customers the business would have acquired anyway — usually supported by a comparison between commission paid in a given month and revenue booked in that same month. For a subscription business that comparison is unsound before anyone looks at the numbers in it, because it charges the whole cost of acquisition against a single month of a revenue stream that runs for years, and any business with a payback period longer than its billing cycle will look inefficient when measured that way.
It’s worth being honest about what extending the window does and does not do, since it’s an easy thing to oversell. It does not reduce the cost of the channel, and in the short term it raises it, because transactions that would previously have fallen outside the window now qualify for commission. In exchange, the advertiser is paying its partner base for revenue attributed to those partners under the programme’s rules — which tends to attract partners willing to invest in content that takes a year to pay back, and acquires a recruitment position that very few competing programmes can match.
This runs with the direction the UK channel has been taking anyway: the APMA’s own reporting on this year’s State of the Affiliate Nation shows that close to one pound in five is now spent outside traditional last-click CPA, and the SlickText programme is one worked example of what can occupy the remaining share, from a category where the distance between the click and the money happens to be unusually easy to quantify.
Key Learnings: What Transfers to Your Programme
For anyone considering something similar, the first piece of work has very little to do with the affiliate platform and a great deal to do with finance. Take a cohort of affiliate-referred customers and look at the time between the original click and conversion. Set that against the attribution window currently in place; where a meaningful share of qualifying conversions happens after the window closes, the programme may be failing to credit partners for later conversions. The second piece of work is costing the change before proposing it — re-running the last twelve months of affiliate-introduced orders at the longer window, so the conversation with finance happens over a figure rather than over a principle.
After that, the sequencing worth borrowing is fairly practical:
- Say it out loud. Attribution length is one of the first things an experienced partner checks, and almost nobody puts it in their recruitment materials — a programme that extends its window ought to be saying so prominently rather than leaving it in the terms for people to find.
- Hold tiers back until the data can support them. Commission tiers are worth holding back until the reporting can distinguish a partner producing volume from a partner producing customers the business would not otherwise have won, because tiers built on the wrong metric mostly amount to paying the largest coupon site more than it has earned.
- Real-time reporting punches above its cost. It’s inexpensive to provide and buys a disproportionate amount of attention from people who are managing dozens of programmes at once.
- Pilot before committing everywhere. There’s no need to make the change everywhere at once — one market or one vertical is enough to establish whether partner quality improves before the commission line has to be defended across the whole programme.
Read across context: the programme runs in the United States, in B2B, and on a subscription model, so the two-year window itself isn’t something to lift wholesale into a different market or model. The question that transfers is how long customers take to convert after an affiliate click, and whether the attribution window is still open when they do.
Original case study authored by Yuliia Kolomiiets, CMO at Trackdesk. Source: trackdesk.com
