The Biggest Affiliate Marketing Trends of 2025 (and How to Use Them)

New and emerging affiliate marketing trends are reshaping the way merchants, brands, and affiliates collaborate.

In 2025, success in affiliate marketing will depend on smarter spending, stronger relationships, and diversified partnerships. Whether you're a seasoned affiliate marketer or a brand looking to improve its affiliate traffic, keeping up with these shifts will help you stay competitive.

Let’s explore the top affiliate marketing trends for 2025, and how you can use them to boost your affiliate performance.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses collaborate with affiliates — such as influencers, bloggers, and content creators — to promote their products or services. 

Unlike traditional advertising, where brands pay upfront for exposure, affiliate marketing ensures businesses only pay when a specific action is taken, such as a click-through, free trial sign-up, or purchasing virtual products. Affiliates receive a commission when that action occurs. 

The affiliate marketing landscape in 2025

The need for affiliate networks isn't going anywhere in the future. 

Influencer marketing is projected to reach $32.55 billion in global market size in 2025, compared to $24 billion in 2024 and $1.4 billion in 2014. 

Consumers are increasingly turning to influencer content and peer recommendations. Sixty-nine percent of consumers trust influencers over information coming directly from a brand — making affiliate marketing one of the most effective ways to connect with audiences.

Affiliate marketing in 2025 remains an essential strategy for businesses that want to thrive in digital marketing.

Trend One: Costs will continue to rise

Affiliate marketing isn’t as cost-effective as it once was. 

As ecommerce businesses increasingly rely on it, the demand for affiliate services has driven prices up and led to ROI challenges. To stay competitive, businesses and marketers must be strategic about where they invest.

Learn from affiliates' efficiency to protect against ad inflation

Your influencer marketing budget will give you much-needed visibility even when economic pressures decrease your advertising reach and volume.

Google cost-per-click ad prices started rising in mid-2022, right as social media sites increased prices because consumer privacy protections made ad targeting harder. And legacy ad companies like Facebook (Meta) and Google may inch prices higher as brands like TikTok continue to cut into their market share. Increased ad costs mean a lower profit margin for both you and your affiliate partners.

However, you can use your affiliate program to increase your advertising efficiency. 

Affiliates give you insights into audience behaviors in your niche. In tracking their successes, you’ll see which market segments are the most monetizable.

Your affiliates can also help you test various ad platforms and types among different demographics. Use this data to improve your ROI on all your marketing campaigns, and that tight budget won’t seem so restrictive anymore. 

Avoid fines by staying compliant

The Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, and other government organizations have been cracking down on claims made in affiliate marketing campaigns, and you should expect this trend to continue into 2025 and beyond. 

“Affiliates should take note that the FTC will hold you personally and financially accountable for false or unsubstantiated marketing claims,” said the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection after ordering a group of affiliate marketers to pay more than $4 million to settle charges that they promoted a fraudulent business. 

It's not just government organizations that are cracking down. Big companies like Google and Amazon, plus third-party payment processors, are keeping a closer eye on offers made from affiliates.

Stricter regulations around the affiliate industry could result in lower earnings-per-click for affiliates and reduced conversion ratios. There will be pressure to increase cost-per-acquisition payouts to ultimately increase earnings-per-click.

As stated above, expect these changes to shrink profit margins for both merchants and affiliates. Moreover, brands and merchants (especially in high-risk categories) will need to continue to be diligent about following the latest advertising and payment regulations in their niche to avoid hefty fines. 

Optimize campaigns with AI

Every day it seems a new AI tool has launched or there's an update about machine learning. Keeping up is dizzying. The trick to getting ahead is using these new tools in the right way.

Machine learning is great for automating busy work and repetitive tasks. Set it to analyze your marketing data, and you may uncover unexpected trends and patterns. You can trust these insights to guide you as you plan your influencer marketing program for the next quarter.

You shouldn’t use these new tools to replace the human touch in marketing. At an Affiliate Summit, Affilimate co-founder and COO Lynda Mann led a panel on the role of ChatGPT in marketing. The panel’s participants warned that pushing machine-generated content could harm your brand’s integrity. Affiliate marketers already know how to craft messaging that connects with audiences while maintaining your brand’s voice — so let them use that expertise to your benefit.

Trend Two: Relationships with affiliates will change 

Affiliate marketing wouldn’t exist without affiliates. Even with tight budgets, businesses need to invest in affiliate support. Target your support to current affiliate trends like those below to get the most out of each dollar you spend.

Support the shift from affiliate to advertiser

In 2025 and beyond, look for affiliates to become advertisers instead of simply driving traffic to your landing pages or sales funnels. To help them with this shift, provide tools so your affiliates can: 

• Quickly launch landing pages that seamlessly sync with a CRM
  

• Edit HTML and CSS, then easily preview changes
  

• Track the success of sales funnels with robust reports and analytics
  

• Comply with local tax regulations
  

• Test and refine campaigns to improve ROI
  

• Boost average order value through post-purchase upsells and order bumps
  

Providing software to your affiliates isn’t just a relationship-building move. It can also help you collect data on each person’s sales so you can see the ROI of each affiliate channel.

Centralize your affiliate management efforts

Managing affiliate relationships is much easier when everything is in one place. As affiliate marketing continues to grow, businesses now have access to dedicated platforms and agencies that streamline coordination. Partnering with the right agency or network can help you tap into new affiliates while ensuring competitive rates.

Affiliate marketing software like Everflow simplifies affiliate management by enabling: 

• Seamless communication
  
• Easy access to marketing assets
  
• Offer setup
  
• Streamlined payment processing
  

With the right tools, you can build stronger partnerships and drive better performance.

Help affiliates track their performance

Just as your marketing team tracks campaign ROI, affiliates want real-time insights into their performance. To streamline operations and reduce friction, choose an ecommerce platform that provides affiliates access to their sales reports without exposing sensitive data from other partners or business initiatives. 

The more selectively you can share data, the better for both you and your partners. Look for a partner marketing platform like Everflow that lets you generate in-depth reports segmented by partner type, ad placement, and other KPIs.

Even if you don’t share full reports, providing affiliates with trend insights can help them refine their strategies and drive even better results.

Trend Three: A diversified affiliate program will be key

Brands that rely on affiliates for marketing must be prepared for the risks that come with third-party partnerships. As we've all seen, a single misstep by a high-profile influencer can quickly put a company in damage control. 

To safeguard your brand and revenue, avoid over-relying on just one or two major affiliates. A diversified influencer program spreads risk, ensuring that no single partner’s actions can significantly impact your sales or reputation. 

Partner with smaller influencers for greater impact

Strive to build a network of smaller affiliates with deep audience connections. Not only does this diversified approach create a built-in safety net — allowing you to pivot quickly if an influencer no longer aligns with your brand values — but it also offers a cost-effective way to drive engagement and sales.

From a business standpoint, micro- and small-scale influencers often provide better ROI than their larger counterparts. They typically charge less per post while delivering higher engagement rates. Their close-knit communities foster a sense of personal connection and trust, making their recommendations more influential, and ultimately, more effective at driving conversions.

Set up brand-to-brand partnerships for greater reach

Collaborating with other non-competing brands that serve the same audience creates a mutually beneficial opportunity to expand your reach and monetize more effectively. Similar to influencer marketing, these partnerships typically involve cross-promoting each other’s products, allowing both brands to tap into a trusted audience. 

Beyond visibility, brand-to-brand partnerships offer exclusive ad placements that traditional marketing channels can’t. You might secure mentions in email newsletters, run co-branded social media contests, or even develop a joint product launch. The key is aligning with brands that share your audience but don’t directly compete.

And the impact is real. We surveyed subscription consumers and learned that 50% consider buying a product when they receive a cross-promotional email from a brand partner.

Future-Proof Your Affiliate Marketing Strategies with Smarter Checkout Solutions

Success in affiliate marketing doesn’t stop at driving traffic — it hinges on converting that traffic into paying customers. Even with the best affiliates promoting your brand, a clunky checkout process can kill conversions.

That’s where Checkout by Sticky.io comes in. With faster load times, a drag-and-drop builder, unlimited sales funnels, and seamless Shopify integration, it streamlines the buying experience, turning affiliate traffic into conversions. 

Ready to maximize your affiliate marketing efforts? Let’s talk about how Checkout can help you scale your business.