Masterclass: Diversifying Your Traffic

It's safe to say that traffic diversification has never been more important for partners.

As AI-powered tools threaten to erode the importance of organic rankings that many partners have spent years building, partners are being advised to look elsewhere for their visitors, and fast.

Yet disruption and opportunity tend to travel together.

Awin's own data tells an instructive story: across the platform, traffic was down 15% year on year in March 2026. But advertisers who upgraded their tracking reported a 6.4% increase in conversion rates over the same period.

The volume of visitors may be shrinking, but the ones who do arrive are converting at a higher rate, provided you have the infrastructure to find them.

In that environment, understanding exactly where your visitors come from - and what they do when they arrive - has never mattered more. Partners who can answer those questions have options. They can diversify into channels that are holding up, double down on the audiences that convert, and build the kind of brand that people seek out directly rather than stumble upon.

To shed light on that process, Awin-Win Marketing Podcast recently hosted Raymond Wright, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at furniture comparison platform uFurnish.com, and Sirio Küpper, Co-Founder and CEO at affiliate data solution wecantrack, to find out how building a proper data foundation unlocks the insight, diversification, and brand saliency for sustainable growth.

You can listen to the full podcast episode or read our masterclass for pointers.

Making fragmented data your first enemy

Wecantrack's origin story is also a diagnosis of the industry's most common problem. Before building the platform, Sirio ran a deals and coupons partner. Every month, attribution meant logging into around 200 different network accounts, exporting data, and reconciling it manually.

Sirio: "We had no tracking at all, basically. What we were doing is just tracking sessions and click outs, and we didn't really know what was converting. Every month, we had to get our commission data from the affiliate networks... it was a lot of manual work and just useless. I mean, you're just wasting time doing this."

The root cause was a lack of standardization across networks. Every platform handled tracking parameters, postbacks, and APIs differently, requiring constant maintenance. For uFurnish, the same fragmentation was blocking a bigger goal: building a data platform that could drive real decisions.

Ray: "We were looking at the way that the networks were set up and the things that wecantrack was addressing. They were very much focused on the issues of disparate information, inconsistencies, that kind of thing. And to be perfectly candid, we didn't want have to go and build that solution for ourselves."

Mistaking click-outs for conversions

Once the data is consolidated, the first thing most partners discover is uncomfortable.

Sirio: "A lot of publishers think that tracking click outs gives them a good overview of what is actually also driving sales. So they think: 'If I generate a lot of click outs on this page, it means the page is generating a lot of sales.' But this is not true."

The "aha" moment hits when partners can see, for the first time, that high-traffic pages may be driving almost no revenue, while quieter pages outperform.

For uFurnish, proper attribution also revealed something more encouraging: the audience most likely to convert.

Ray: "The people who are most engaged, who were then converting into purchases, actually were the ones that were coming on organically and directly. And wecantrack unlocked that for us. Without it, we wouldn't have had that visibility. And it would've been harder for us to scale our business the way that we have."

Accurate tracking has become a key talking point for both advertisers and partners in light of Awin's CPI. Challenges exist, yet crucially, the solutions are waiting in the wings. Take the example of Button, which provides a much more granular view of data flowing into mobile apps specifically.

Diversifying your traffic before you're forced to

For partners built primarily on SEO, a single algorithm update can be existential. Sirio is direct on the cost of inaction.

Sirio: "If you don't diversify, you cannot be surprised that things will go bad at one point. You really need to start diversifying your traffic channels. And in order to do that, you need to be able to identify how your channels are performing. So that [diversification] is definitely a must-have."

The pattern is already visible in wecantrack's own customer base.

Sirio: "We lost a lot of customers because of that too. Some affiliate publishers ran out of business because they were too focused on SEO."

Diversification requires knowing which acquisition channels are actually earning their cost. Connecting affiliate conversion data back into platforms like Google Ads and Meta allows partners to train those systems to find the right audience rather than just more of it.

Ray: "What we started to do was calibrate and use the conversion APIs to send signals into those platforms around the type of people that we wanted to attract to uFurnish.com and the type of behaviors that we wanted those people to exhibit."

Building a destination, not a pipeline

Data and diversification create the conditions for sustainable growth, but the strategy itself comes from building a brand people return to without being prompted.

Sirio: "You want to become a brand, not just any publisher that promotes products and makes a quick buck. But you really have to dive deep into the data to also understand what your platform is actually providing to consumers and how you can improve it."

Ray frames it through the lens of the comparison sector's biggest names.

Ray: "Building a brand is critical because you have to stand for something... You think of like super salient brands in the UK, so like Rightmove, for me, they completely own their market. They're incredibly well trusted by people out there in the market. So you'd be hard pressed to find someone wanting to buy or rent a property in the UK that wouldn't be familiar with Rightmove. They probably just circumvent Google and go straight to that platform because it's known, it's trusted."

UFurnish learned this through trial and error.

Ray: "In the early days of our business... we did chase lower-down-the-funnel traffic coming from Google in particular and Meta, where we were focusing on people who were in market, searching for specific products. And it didn't work for us as a business... we were then in like some kind of arbitrage game, and that's not the game we're playing."

Turning data into advertiser investment

A partner with real insight changes the nature of their advertiser relationships. Demonstrating the quality of referred customers, not just their volume, gets affiliate spending taken seriously at a leadership level.

Ray: "There are executives within businesses that have to make decisions, and those decisions are accountable to a board who's trying to drive outcomes... How are we articulating our value proposition to those execs, so that they're leaning in and they can quantify that to their board when they're pushed?"

Treating AI as a brand signal, not a threat

The early research on conversions driven by LLMs has thrown up all kinds of conclusions. Many point to a fairly similar performance when measured against standard traffic generated by sessions from Google's "traditional" search rankings. However, experts have been keen to highlight the value in just being visible to millions more potential customers, even if they don't convert.

Ray: "Rather than thinking about it from the perspective of, 'I need to get that click through to my side', it's, 'the citation needs to show me as the authority in this space'. If that supports the rest of your model around how you bring people towards your brand, your product, your platform, that's actually the objective."

Despite the legitimate worries over the impact of AI on certain partner types, Sirio sees longer-term opportunity if the affiliate industry acts proactively.

Sirio: "I really hope that the affiliate publishers can be more included in the AI platforms in the future. Maybe by also providing their own outgoing URLs... directly into the AI platforms, for instance, through product feeds."

Regardless of how partners are facing up to the new landscape for acquisition, the time to act is now.

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FAQ: Diversifying partner traffic

Why do partners need to diversify their traffic sources?

Relying on a single channel leaves partners vulnerable to algorithm changes and platform shifts outside their control. Multiple acquisition channels allow a partner to absorb disruption without losing the business.

What is affiliate traffic attribution?

The process of connecting a visitor's click on an affiliate link to a downstream sale, identifying which channel, page, or partner actually drove the outcome, not just the click.

Why can't partners rely on click-out data alone?

Click-outs show how often visitors leave for an advertiser, but not whether a purchase occurred. Only closing the attribution loop reveals which pages are genuinely driving revenue and which are burning spend.

What is a data warehouse and why do partners use one?

A data warehouse is a centralized system for storing and querying data from multiple sources. Tools like Google BigQuery allow partners to combine affiliate conversion data with site analytics and paid channel data for deeper analysis.

How does consolidating affiliate network data improve performance?

It allows partners to compare performance consistently, spot tracking anomalies, optimize pages based on real conversions, and share credible insights with advertisers rather than surface-level traffic figures.

What does it mean to become a "destination brand"?

A destination brand is one consumers seek out directly rather than finding through discovery tools like search engines. In partner terms, destination brands generate returning visitors who bypass these steps, making the business more resilient to algorithm changes and more valuable to advertisers.

How does AI search affect publisher traffic?

AI search overviews can answer queries without a click-through, reducing organic referral volume. The opportunity for partners lies in appearing as a cited, authoritative source rather than optimizing purely for clicks.

How do partners win more advertiser investment through data?

Partners who can demonstrate the quality of their referred customers in the context of behavioral signals, conversion rates, and return visit rates, give advertisers evidence they can present to senior decision-makers, helping them justify and grow their spend.