Written by Brook Schaaf

The 2025 PI Live conference at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, offered a timely platform to address a critical issue plaguing affiliate marketers: Google Analytics 4’s systemic under-crediting of affiliate-driven conversions. As a panelist alongside Tom Rathbone (PartnerCentric) and Lacie Thompson (New Engen), moderated by Sol Wilkinson, I emphasized that GA4’s data-driven attribution (DDA) model obscures affiliate impact, jeopardizing budget allocations for performance marketers.  

GA4’s default parameters often exclude affiliate touchpoints from conversion paths, a flaw first quantified by CJ Affiliate in 2023. Their analysis of 1,200 clients revealed that 98% of affiliate-influenced conversions were omitted from GA4’s DDA reporting. By January 2024, Kevin Edwards’ APMA report corroborated this across major platforms, confirming a pattern of under-attribution that forces affiliates to defend their ROI with incomplete data. 

Neither Tom nor Lacie disagreed with this. Tom detailed how PartnerCentric’s FUSE product bypasses GA4’s limitations by aggregating raw clickstream data to validate affiliate claims. For her part, Lacie advocated for media mix modeling (MMM) as a complementary tool, later sharing a slide that resonated: “Other channels are also bottom-of-funnel and steal credit.”  

This underscores a broader truth: every channel inflates its contribution, but affiliate marketers are burdened by disproportionate scrutiny. While affiliates must justify each commission, open-web programmatic and walled gardens operate with minimal accountability. Consider the scale:  

– Ad fraud drains $84 billion annually, dwarfing affiliate’s $9B US market.  

– Fake users, phantom clicks, and agency kickbacks plague display and social campaigns, yet budgets balloon while affiliates face austerity.  

To quantify this imbalance, consider the work of Dr. Augustine Fou, an independent ad fraud researcher. Despite his eccentric persona – his bio cheekily penned in Early Modern English – Fou’s data-driven exposés reveal systemic rot:  

– Agency Misbehavior: Undisclosed fees and rebate schemes.  

– Fake Viewability: 58% of display ads never seen by humans.  

– Fake Incrementality: Brands pay for “new” users who already intended to buy.  

Longtime researcher Ben Edelman vouches for him: “Fou’s automation collects data others didn’t bother to gather”. His findings, while absent from affiliate discourse, highlight a stark contrast: ad tech’s lies are orders of magnitude costlier, yet its budgets remain sacrosanct.  

Fou’s crusade brings to mind a fitting Shakespearean admonition: “None in the world; but return with an invention, and clap upon you two or three probable lies.” Ad tech’s “inventions”-from bot farms to vanity metrics-are modern-day sonnets of deception, recited to justify bloated spends. Affiliate, by contrast, is a sweet song, albeit one sung sometimes out of tune.

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