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Are you looking for the right affiliate marketing agency for your retail business?

We know it can be quite a daunting experience. But don’t worry, because we have done some of the heavy lifting for you.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to some of the best affiliate marketing agencies around, and give you a few guidelines on picking the right digital partner for your business.

What Services do Affiliate Marketing Agencies Offer?

Many affiliate marketing agencies are full-service digital marketing agencies, which specialize in performance and affiliate marketing. As such, they offer a full suite of marketing services and can tie your affiliate program into the rest of your marketing strategy.

The most frequently offered affiliate marketing services include:

1. Affiliate Discovery and Recruitment Strategy Development

Finding and vetting high-quality publishers, influencers, and ambassadors that fit your brand reputation and reach and resonate with your target audience.

Setting up the affiliate agreements, commission structures, and legal obligations and affiliate contracts to protect your business from legal liability and reputational damage.

3. Competitor Analysis

Analyzing competitors and competing affiliate programs to ensure that your program is aligned with current trends, and competitive and appealing to publishers. Competitor analysis also allows for the identification of gaps and unique opportunities to leverage.

4. Fraud Monitoring and Affiliate Partner Management

Ongoing monitoring of your affiliates to ensure that there is no fraudulent activity and that they are representing your brand truthfully, and are not using unscrupulous or unethical tactics to earn their commission.

5. Affiliate and Publisher Support, Content Management

Maintaining close relationships with the affiliates, publishers, influencers, and ambassadors in your affiliate program, as well as providing supporting information, documentation, images, etc. to ensure that they’re publishing up-to-date and current content that accurately depicts your products and brand values.

6. On-going Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy Optimization

Keeping track of your affiliate program data, KPIs, and attribution and conversion metrics to ensure that the affiliate campaign is working well and to provide insights into how to continually improve and optimize it.

As you can see, there is a great deal of work that goes into establishing and maintaining a successful affiliate marketing campaign. If you do not have the necessary time, skills, and resources in-house, an affiliate marketing agency is the best way to go!

Top 8 Affiliate Management Agencies in 2023

1. Gen3 Marketing

Location: Philadelphia, PA, and Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Founded: 2007

Gen3 Marketing is an award-winning digital marketing agency and the largest independent affiliate agency in the world.

As such, Gen3 Marketing has access to an extensive publisher network and a huge pool of diverse talent and expertise, as well as access to a scope of data that cannot be matched by smaller agencies.

However, despite being such a big agency, Gen3 Marketing maintains close relationships with its clients, giving them personal, one-on-one attention and fully customized services. They go out of their way to understand their client’s business, customers, and industry to create tailored affiliate programs for each client.

In addition to Affiliate Marketing, Gen3 Marketing is a full-service agency that specializes in paid search management and SEO. They also offer PPC management, paid digital media management, social media management, digital PR and outreach, and Amazon advertising.

As an affiliate marketing agency, Gen3 Marketing offers a full set of services from program strategy and development to affiliate/publisher recruitment to ongoing management, analysis, and program optimization. They provide customized services that meet their client’s unique needs, managing the whole program for them or working closely with the client’s in-house teams.

2. Hamster Garage

Location: Chicago, IL, United States

Founded: 2019

Hamster Garage is a leading partnership and affiliate agency servicing global brands like Uber, Airbnb, Canva, Turo, Brex, etc.

After managing a multi-million dollar affiliate program at Airbnb, the founder of Hamster Garage realized there was a need for an agency that understood growth from the inside.

Brands value Hamster Garage’s in-house background and ability to grow with its clients. Hamster Garage is as close to an in-house marketing team as an agency can get, which is why they often beat established global agencies head-to-head.

The Hamster Garage team brings decades of experience across traditional affiliates and strategic partnership opportunities, including influencers, podcasts, brand partnerships, and third-party email.

As a performance agency, Hamster Garage can take channels typically managed by brand teams — influencers and podcasts — or business development teams — brand partnerships — and make them work on a performance basis.

3. PartnerCentric, Inc.

Location: New York, NY (Fully remote agency with employees all over the US)

Founded: 2006

PartnerCentric, Inc. is the largest woman-owned (WBE-certified) affiliate marketing agency in the industry. They are experts at employing revenue-producing affiliate marketing strategies through a mix of service and our proprietary Control Suite technology tools.

PartnerCentric drives the highest ROI (7x across our portfolio) for some of the world’s most respected brands, from emerging startups to F500 leaders and our clients are supported by the most tenured account managers in the industry, with an average of over 14 years of experience.

Discover their new Control Suite and get affiliate marketing right the first time.

4. Acceleration Partners

Location: Boston, MA, USA; with teams in London, Berlin, Singapore, and Sydney.

Founded: 2007

Acceleration Partners is a premier global partner marketing agency with programs in 40 countries, for over 170 brands. They’re experts in affiliate, influencer, content, mass media, and B2B partner marketing.

Acceleration Partners emphasizes developing performance-based, scalable, sustainable affiliate programs, and offers a full suite of expert affiliate marketing services to help you set up, manage and optimize your affiliate marketing programs at a regional or international level.

You can count on Acceleration Partners to develop an affiliate marketing strategy that is unique to your brand’s needs, thoughtfully and strategically recruit the right partners for your brand, and build a data-driven affiliate program to drive measurable outcomes that are meaningful to your business.

Acceleration Partners will support your brand’s goals with a dynamic range of capabilities and high-touch client service. Their dedicated publisher development teams focus on developing meaningful, lasting, relationships, with the right strategic partners, that go beyond traditional affiliates to include influencers, mass media publishers, tech, and even brand-to-brand partners.

Acceleration Partners is a six-time Global Performance Marketing Award (GPMA) winner in the “Best Affiliate and Partner Marketing Agency” category and has won numerous other industry and culture awards.

Acceleration Partners is also credited with the expansion of the hugely successful Pura Vida brand ambassador program, which we recently covered in:

9 Best Brand Ambassador Programs and How to Simply Create Yours

5. Perform[cb] Agency

Location: Sarasota, FL. United States

Founded: 2002

Perform[cb] Agency is notably different from other affiliate marketing agencies due to a diversified service offering that is scalable and customizable to your specific business needs. They help brands along every stage of the brand journey from launching a brand new app to helping to incrementally grow an established e-commerce brand’s affiliate program. Perform[cb] Agency have won several awards and were recently shortlisted for “Best Performance Marketing Agency” by the International Performance Marketing Awards.

Bonus: They offer a free affiliate marketing audit via their website.