Last click shows affiliates in 12.41% of sales, not 24.92%, BVDW finds

Germany's digital economy association, the Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), on October 22, 2026 published a 21-page white paper arguing that affiliate and partner marketing is being measured with the wrong instrument. Under last-click attribution, affiliate touchpoints appear in 12.41% of transactions across 185 advertisers; counted across the full customer journey, affiliates took part in 24.92%. The paper, titled "Affiliate und Partner Marketing als skalierbare Wachstumsarchitektur" (affiliate and partner marketing as a scalable growth architecture), was written by seven executives from networks, platforms, agencies and consultancies who sit on two BVDW committees.

In Short

A German industry group looked at how companies judge the websites and creators that earn a commission when they send shoppers to a store. Most companies only credit whoever sent the shopper right before the purchase, and the group says that hides about half of the sales these partners help with. The group wants companies to measure the whole shopping path, though the data and the authors come from the affiliate industry itself.

Who published it and when

The paper is a joint project of the Affiliate und Partner Marketing Circle (APMC), a closed BVDW working group of leading companies in the sector, and the open Working Group Affiliate Marketing, which according to the BVDW focuses on data protection, tracking and standardisation. The BVDW's announcement page is dated October 22, 2026 and gives that date as the publication date, listing the document at 20 pages. The paper's own imprint reads "Berlin, September 2026", and the PDF counts 21 pages including the cover. The imprint also states that the paper was produced using artificial intelligence.

The author list names Anna Babajeva (Senior Specialist Affiliate Marketing, Artefact), Annalena Bauer (CEO and founder of digitAL Consultancy and deputy chair of the APMC), Nichelle Büttner (Head of Operations, Webgains), Kristina Gärtner (authorised signatory and Director Tech, Partner, People at uppr, and deputy chair of the Working Group Affiliate Marketing), Daniel Kocher (Teamlead Affiliate Marketing, MAI xpose360), André Koegler (Country Lead at impact.com and first chair of the APMC) and Nicole Pekar (CMO and authorised signatory, AdCell). One detail does not match across the two documents: the BVDW announcement attributes Bauer to easy Marketing, a tracking provider whose data feeds the paper's central finding, while the paper itself lists her at digitAL Consultancy.

The audience is stated plainly. According to the paper, it addresses chief marketing officers, heads of performance marketing, e-commerce leads and strategic marketing planners, with an appendix aimed at affiliate managers and web analytics teams.

"Anyone who makes decisions about affiliate and partner marketing today needs more than individual performance metrics. Our white paper creates the framework to better understand the value contribution of the entire partner ecosystem, to recognise blind spots in one's own management and to derive concrete measures from them," Bauer said in the BVDW announcement. All quotes in this article are translated from German by PPC Land.

Gärtner added: "We want to enable companies not only to manage partnerships more efficiently, but to use them deliberately as growth potential."

The numbers behind the argument

The paper rests on two APMC data sources. The first is the APMC market survey for 2025, which according to the footnotes was published in Berlin in May 2026 and is built on data reported by 13 networks and platforms active in Germany. The second is a supplementary APMC study on touchpoint impact, collected in the first quarter of 2026.

From the market survey, the paper takes four headline figures:

• €932 million invested in affiliate and partner marketing in Germany in 2025
• €18.7 billion in revenue generated through the channel
• a return on advertising spend of 16:1 in the retail and travel segment
• a 16.3% share of German retail e-commerce

The paper does not show how the 16.3% share was calculated or which denominator it uses. Across the whole market, the affiliate ROAS for 2025 stood at 13:1, according to the paper.

Close to 80% of all investment in the German market is paid only on a completed sale, under cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost-per-order (CPO) models. According to the authors, no other performance channel offers success-based pay at that level.

Growth against the market

Growth rates carry most of the paper's case that the channel is outpacing its surroundings. The German advertising market grew 3.2% in 2025, citing the ZAW's year-end forecast of December 5, 2025, which put net advertising revenue at €27.54 billion. Gross online retail sales also grew 3.2%, according to a bevh release dated January 22, 2026. Affiliate investment, by comparison, rose 8.3% and affiliate-generated revenue 12.0%.

The paper describes revenue growth as "almost four times" that of online retail. By PPC Land's calculation, 12.0 divided by 3.2 gives 3.75. Investment growth is described as more than double the advertising market's, which the figures support.

The authors attribute the gap to cost pressure. Advertisers, the paper argues, are shifting budgets to channels with transparent attribution and pay-on-results pricing. A global figure is offered as support: 74% of brands increased affiliate investment because costs in other ad channels rose, according to impact.com's "Global State of Affiliate Marketing in 2025" report, a survey of 818 marketing leads, 284 publishers and 421 creators in eight countries published in November 2025. impact.com employs one of the paper's authors.

Third place internationally, on different yardsticks

Germany ranks as the third largest affiliate market after the United States and the United Kingdom, according to the paper. The comparison mixes years, currencies and national methods: $13.62 billion for the US in 2024 from the Performance Marketing Association, £1.66 billion for the UK in 2024 from the Affiliate & Partner Marketing Association, and €932 million for Germany in 2025.

The authors also point to what they call a visibility gap in official statistics. The BVDW's own Online-Vermarkterkreis (OVK) forecasts German online display and video advertising at €8.2 billion for 2026, and that model expressly excludes affiliate, paid search and newsletter marketing. The channel, in other words, has not appeared as a separate line in Germany's best known digital ad market estimate.

The core finding: a factor of two

The supplementary APMC study analysed tracking data from 185 advertisers, supplied by three providers: attriXus, easy Marketing and Ingenious Technologies. Under the last-click logic standard in the industry, affiliate touchpoints are visible in 12.41% of all transactions. Counting every transaction with at least one affiliate touchpoint anywhere in the customer journey, the share rises to 24.92%. PPC Land's division of the two figures gives 2.01.

"Actual contribution and visible contribution are a factor of two apart. Anyone who evaluates affiliate and partner marketing only from the last-click view systematically halves its impact contribution - a gap that concerns not the channel, but the logic of its evaluation," Babajeva writes in the paper.

What the 24.92% figure measures matters. It counts participation, not causation: a transaction is included if an affiliate touchpoint occurred at any point before purchase, whatever role it played. The paper itself notes elsewhere that 39% of advertisers use no specific method to measure incrementality, the revenue that would not have existed without the channel. Participation in a quarter of transactions does not establish that affiliates caused that quarter. The paper provides no further detail on the 185 advertisers, their sectors, the attribution window or how the three providers' datasets were combined.

According to the authors, the consequence falls hardest on upper and mid-funnel partners - content sites, comparison services, influencers and comparison shopping services - because the final conversion usually runs through branded search or direct traffic.

The argument is a familiar one in 2026. TikTok launched Attribution Portfolio in May, saying that more than one in four TikTok-attributed conversions happen after a view and a same-day direct visit. Meta's "suite of truth" white paper estimated that rules-based models undervalue Meta by 31%. In September, Billy Grace reported that six of nine channels looked loss-making at Black Friday peak under last click. Each of these parties, like the BVDW committees, sells or represents the channel whose credit would rise under a different model.

Three gaps in how companies judge the channel

The paper's diagnosis names three interlocking gaps. The touchpoint gap is the factor of two. The other two concern metrics and customer value.

KPI distortion

Most of the survey data in this section comes from the "Affiliate Marketing Trend-Report 2026" by the agency MAI xpose360 and AffiliateBLOG.de, its tenth edition, published in January 2026. It surveyed 1,200 affiliates, merchants, agencies, networks and technology providers and added 42 expert assessments. MAI xpose360 also employs one of the paper's authors.

The top KPIs German advertisers apply to the affiliate channel in 2026, with multiple answers allowed:

• cost-revenue ratio (Kosten-Umsatz-Relation, KUR): 63%
• revenue: 56%
• ROAS: 39%, up 29 percentage points on the previous year
• CPA: 34%
• return on investment: 32%

These metrics, the authors argue, reward visibility at the bottom of the funnel. On incrementality, 68% of advertisers define incremental revenue correctly, but 39% use no specific method to measure it.

A technical symptom gets its own passage. According to the trend report, 68% of discrepancies between Google Analytics 4 and affiliate networks come from different attribution models. The paper explains that networks work across devices and sessions with their own conversion definitions and attribution windows, while GA4 models conversions using data and partly counts different events. The result, according to the paper, is double counting of some transactions and data gaps in others, "in both directions" depending on channel and setup. That observation bears on the paper's own figures: the market survey's revenue and ROAS numbers come from network-reported data, the same data the paper says can double count.

The lifetime value gap

Some 59% of German advertisers know the customer lifetime value (CLV) of their affiliate customers, and 59% know the purchase frequency. Only 10% use CLV as an active KPI for the channel, according to the trend report.

The paper then argues that affiliate-acquired customers are worth more. It cites an Awin and Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Awin in January 2024, a survey of 650 director-level decision-makers, which reported 21% higher average order value and a 21% higher repurchase rate for affiliate-acquired customers than for those from other channels. Those are survey responses from executives, not transaction data, and the sponsor is itself an affiliate network.

On German data, the paper sets an €81 affiliate average order value in retail, from the APMC survey, against a €51.90 market average from the HDE Online Monitor 2025, a gap of 56%. The two figures come from different sources with different methods, and the HDE footnote describes the €51.90 as a reference value for comparable B2C assortments.

From channel to "growth architecture"

The paper's proposed change of perspective runs in three directions: from channel to funnel, from publisher to distributed touchpoint, and from partner to marketing asset. An affiliate programme qualifies as a growth architecture, the authors write, when it meets four criteria:

• Full-funnel capable: partners are active at every stage, from content publishers and creators for awareness, through price comparison sites and CSS for consideration, cashback and voucher partners for conversion, to email publishers, closed-group portals and brand-to-brand partnerships for loyalty.
• Cross-channel compatible: affiliate data and attribution are integrated with search, paid social, display, retail media and CRM, and conflicts such as brand bidding or overlapping coupons are settled by fixed rules.
• Data and steering capable: CLV, purchase frequency and incrementality replace revenue and KUR as the main KPIs, with last click kept for payouts and multi-touch attribution or a hybrid model used for strategic steering.
• Modular and scalable: the programme is run as an actively managed portfolio, with new publisher types recruited rather than waited for, and key partnerships run on quarterly, half-yearly or annual plans.

"Publishers are specialised touchpoints along the customer journey. Partners are strategic marketing assets with a clearly definable contribution to the growth architecture," Büttner writes.

Publisher types mapped to the funnel

The paper assigns each publisher type in the APMC survey to the funnel stage where it does most of its work, while noting that the mapping is not exclusive. Cashback, for instance, appears in both the lower funnel and loyalty.

The fastest growing segments sit in the mid and upper funnel, according to the paper: CSS, influencer and social content, and price comparison. Discount, voucher and email publishers are losing share in Germany. Influencer and social content grew 21.4% in 2025, CSS investment 22.1% and brand-to-brand 7.7%, according to the APMC survey. The paper refers readers to the survey for spend shares by publisher type but does not reproduce them.

An international contrast appears on email. Awin and Forrester reported that advertisers are turning back to email and newsletter publishers (+19%), with 59% of respondents having such partners in their programmes, while in Germany email publishers are losing spend share. Loyalty partners and closed-group portals - corporate benefits schemes, membership discount portals, sports and club communities - are not yet broken out in the market survey, the paper notes.

On creators, the paper cites impact.com: globally, creator partnerships deliver a split of 28% brand awareness, 27% engagement and 27% sales. A pure CPO assessment, the authors conclude, misses most of that value.

The lower funnel gets a defence. Coupon-based conversion triggers are being replaced by richer loyalty, recovery and onsite models, the paper says. Anyone who suspects the channel of simply collecting credit for sales that would have happened anyway "confuses the weak management of individual programmes with the functional logic of the publisher types," the authors write. That debate has a recent history: Awin confirmed in January that Honey had violated its publisher policies through commission diversion and suspended its payments, and Honey's merchant partnerships later fell from about 35,000 to just over 28,000 as a creator lawsuit moved into discovery. The paper does not mention the case.

Affiliates as the pay-on-results twin of paid media

The most direct claim for search marketers comes in chapter five. Every established performance channel, the authors argue, has an affiliate counterpart that performs the same function with success-based pay.

"Affiliate and partner marketing is not an additional channel alongside paid search, paid social and display. It is in each case their success-based variant - the same inventory, the same advertising function, a different distribution of risk," Gärtner writes.

For paid search, the paper cites Focus Digital's 2025 report, published October 31, 2025, which aggregated more than 5,000 Google Ads accounts from March 2024 to April 2025. Median ROAS was 5.17:1 for Search, 2.88:1 for Shopping and 2.57:1 for Performance Max. Comparison shopping services, the paper notes, serve the same Google Shopping inventory but are paid only on conversion, so the performance risk moves from advertiser to partner. Against those medians, the paper sets the 13:1 affiliate ROAS for the whole market and 16:1 for retail and travel.

Those figures are not measured on the same basis. The Google Ads medians come from a third-party aggregation of account data; the affiliate ROAS comes from network-reported revenue across 13 networks, using the networks' own attribution, which the paper earlier describes as prone to double counting against GA4. The ROAS comparison also sits uneasily with the paper's own central argument, since a channel that is undercredited under last click is, on the same logic, being compared with channels whose ROAS is measured under the same flawed rules. Channable's data on 1.38 billion euros of European Google Ads spend showed Performance Max ROAS falling 46% between June 2025 and June 2026 as cost-per-click rose 15%, which helps explain why the risk-transfer argument may resonate with retailers.

For paid social, the paper puts typical ROAS at 2 to 5 euros of revenue per euro spent, compiled from WebFX, Triple Whale and Superscale AI benchmarks. For display and programmatic, it gives 2 to 4 euros. The footnote behind the display range includes a figure that falls far outside it: Focus Digital's pure display ROAS in its Google Ads aggregation of 0.12:1. The authors describe their range as reflecting the middle of the market outside specialised retargeting.

Promotions, Black Friday and the one-in-eight figure

Around one euro in eight of German online retail on Black Friday is earned through an affiliate link, according to the paper. The calculation is partly estimated. The numerator is €347 million of affiliate-driven Black Friday revenue in 2025, from a sample of 12 networks in the APMC survey. The denominator is about €2.6 billion, which the authors derive by taking HDE's forecast of €5.8 billion for Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, from a release dated November 17, 2025, and assuming Black Friday accounts for about 45% of that weekend, based on international comparisons from Adobe Analytics. PPC Land's division gives 13.3%.

"Affiliate and partner marketing is the permanently available promotions platform of German online retail. Promotions can be rolled out within a few days - without upfront budgets, without lead time in media planning," Kocher writes.

AI, tracking and new touchpoints

The outlook chapter covers three shifts, again drawing on the MAI xpose360 trend report for German figures. AI use in the affiliate market in 2026:

• 78% for content production
• 53% for reports
• 44% for publisher recruitment, up 39 percentage points on the previous year
• 44% for ad creative

Some 41% of German advertisers expect AI to disrupt the customer journey, and 53% expect AI shopping features to partly displace classic affiliate touchpoints. The paper names ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews as already in the market and calls Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) a strategic task. Some 39% of advertisers think direct purchases inside AI environments such as ChatGPT and Copilot will be standard within two to three years. The coupon segment has already faced one AI-related threat this year: after Google introduced Universal Cart at I/O in May, observers questioned whether deal aggregator sites would still be needed.

"AI and social commerce do not only change tools. They shift the touchpoints. Those who understand this steer visibility before others lose it," Koegler writes.

On tracking, 83% see server-to-server tracking as the expected standard, 42% have first-party data in place, and only 24% have cross-device tracking working productively. The paper lists browser restrictions on third-party cookies, consent requirements under the GDPR and ePrivacy rules, and cross-device journeys as the drivers. Only 33% of German advertisers use customer journey tracking in 2026, which the appendix calls the direct cause of the factor-two gap.

B2B affiliate marketing is named as the third shift, small in Germany but growing, with brand-to-brand partnerships up 7.7%.

The operating model in the appendix

The appendix, aimed at operational teams, lays out four building blocks the authors say close the gaps: data integration, attribution architecture, organisational design and active partner management. Several specifics stand out for their precision:

• CRM data such as existing-customer status, customer segment, order value class and lifetime value is fed into affiliate tracking via server-to-server integration and hash-based ID matching, so commissions can be tiered.
• Last click stays in place for paying commissions, described as "unambiguous and resistant to manipulation", while a second view runs in parallel for steering, with position-based attribution at a 40/20/40 weighting named as a pragmatic option.
• Incrementality is tested with control groups for cashback and voucher programmes, A/B tests for influencer partnerships and period comparisons for content partnerships.
• A written brand-bidding rulebook settles which publishers may bid on which brand terms, with whitelist and blacklist logic and set commission rates for brand-keyword conversions.
• Pay differs by funnel stage: CPO for cashback and voucher partners, CPO plus a reach boost or a share of advertising cost subsidies (Werbekostenzuschuss, WKZ) for comparison and test publishers, and tenancy or fixed fees with a CPO floor for influencer and media-buying partners.

Globally, brands work with three to four partner types on average, according to impact.com data cited in the appendix.

"Publisher models alone are not enough. They need an operating model that brings together data, attribution, organisation and partnership," Babajeva writes.

The paper closes with a statement of what it sees as the real choice. "Anyone who thinks of affiliate and partner marketing as a channel optimises costs. Anyone who understands it as a growth architecture steers growth," Bauer writes.

Why this matters for marketers

For search and shopping advertisers, the paper's framing of CSS as a pay-on-results version of Google Shopping lands at a time when PPC Land has documented sustained pressure on platform-side control. An October analysis set out how Google's 2026 product changes shifted control over performance toward the platform. The mandatory role of CSS partners in European Shopping ads makes that segment's 22.1% investment growth relevant to anyone managing Shopping budgets in the EU.

The measurement argument connects to a broader debate. Winterberry Group's survey, published October 4, found that only 9% of US brands say they do unified measurement extremely well, while 93% rely on platform-native reporting. The BVDW paper adds a channel-specific number to that gap, but it does not resolve the underlying problem: each party that proposes moving beyond last click also benefits from the move.

For the affiliate industry, the paper continues a run of BVDW frameworks for adjacent markets, from its influencer marketing landscape in November 2025 to its programmatic curation white paper in February. Platform scale outside Germany has grown alongside it: impact.com projected annual recurring revenue above $270 million for the fiscal year ending January 2026, with nearly $120 billion of partner-referred sales on its platform in 2025.

The limits of the evidence are worth stating as clearly as the paper states its conclusions. The market figures are self-reported by 13 networks. The touchpoint study draws on three tracking providers, one of which is linked to an author in the BVDW's own announcement, and its methodology is summarised in a single footnote. Several comparisons set network-attributed affiliate results against third-party benchmarks measured differently. Every named author works for a company whose business depends on affiliate and partner marketing budgets. The paper does not establish that affiliates cause the extra half of transactions it counts; it establishes that they were present.

Timeline

• November 2025 - impact.com publishes "The Global State of Affiliate Marketing in 2025", a survey cited throughout the paper
• November 13, 2025 - BVDW publishes its first influencer marketing landscape for Germany
• December 5, 2025 - ZAW forecasts 3.2% growth in German net advertising revenue for 2025, to €27.54 billion
• January 2026 - MAI xpose360 and AffiliateBLOG.de publish the tenth Affiliate Marketing Trend-Report, based on 1,200 respondents
• January 21, 2026 - Awin suspends Honey's payments after finding policy violations
• January 22, 2026 - bevh reports 3.2% growth in German gross online retail sales
• January 2026 - impact.com projects annual recurring revenue above $270 million
• February 26, 2026 - BVDW publishes its programmatic curation white paper
• First quarter 2026 - APMC collects touchpoint data on 185 advertisers from attriXus, easy Marketing and Ingenious Technologies
• May 2026 - APMC publishes its 2025 market survey: €932 million invested, €18.7 billion generated
• May 13, 2026 - TikTok launches Attribution Portfolio to capture conversions last click misses
• May 19, 2026 - Google introduces Universal Cart, raising questions for coupon and deal sites
• July 2026 - Channable reports a 46% Performance Max ROAS decline across European advertisers
• August 2026 - Honey's merchant partnerships fall to just over 28,000 as a creator lawsuit proceeds
• September 2026 - date in the white paper's imprint
• September 26, 2026 - Billy Grace finds six of nine channels look loss-making at Black Friday peak under last click
• October 4, 2026 - Winterberry finds 9% of brands excel at unified measurement
• October 22, 2026 - BVDW publishes "Affiliate und Partner Marketing als skalierbare Wachstumsarchitektur"

Related PPC Land coverage

• Awin confirms Honey violated affiliate policies, suspends payments - Awin's January 2026 finding that Honey diverted commissions, and the payment suspension that followed.
• Honey loses 7,000 merchants as judge lets creator lawsuit proceed - the August 2026 ruling sending the creator class action into discovery.
• Rakuten launches open-source SDK as Honey returns to its network - a technical fix for extensions that claim commission after another affiliate's referral.
• Partnership platform impact.com hits $270M revenue as creator economy reshapes advertising - scale figures for one of the networks represented among the paper's authors.
• Semrush quadruples affiliate sign-ups after switching to impact.com platform - a case of a programme moving from first-click to last-click attribution.
• TikTok's Attribution Portfolio wants to end the last-click debate - TikTok's tools for counting view-through and assisted conversions.
• Meta's 'suite of truth' framework rewrites how advertisers measure ad impact - Meta's case for combining experiments, MMM and attribution.
• Cost per order drops 18% in 2025 Black Friday week, Billy Grace finds - how last click and a unified model diverge at peak season.
• Only 9% of brands say they excel at unified measurement, Winterberry finds - a survey of US marketers on cross-channel measurement.
• Channable data shows advertisers lose 46% ROAS as Google clicks cost more - European Shopping and Performance Max cost trends.
• Google's Universal Cart may quietly kill coupon and deal sites - the AI shopping threat to lower-funnel publishers.
• Google optimises its own revenue. Advertisers have to optimise theirs - analysis of control shifting toward the platform in 2026.
• German association releases influencer marketing landscape for 2025 - the BVDW's market map for creator marketing.
• BVDW's programmatic curation whitepaper finally defines what the term actually means - an earlier BVDW framework paper from February 2026.
• YouTube opens Shopping affiliate program to UK creators with six retailers - creator affiliate commerce expanding on a major platform.

Summary

Who: The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), through its Affiliate und Partner Marketing Circle (APMC) and its Working Group Affiliate Marketing, with seven authors from Artefact, digitAL Consultancy, Webgains, uppr, MAI xpose360, impact.com and AdCell.

What: A 21-page white paper arguing that affiliate and partner marketing should be managed as a full-funnel "growth architecture" rather than a last-click performance channel. Its central figure is that affiliates are visible in 12.41% of transactions under last click but took part in 24.92% across 185 advertisers. It reports €932 million of German affiliate investment and €18.7 billion of revenue in 2025, and sets out a four-part operating model.

When: Published by the BVDW on October 22, 2026; the paper's imprint is dated September 2026. The underlying market data covers 2025, and the touchpoint data was collected in the first quarter of 2026.

Where: Germany, with international comparisons to the United States and the United Kingdom and global survey data from impact.com and Awin.

Why: The authors argue that conversion-only metrics hide the value affiliate partners create earlier in the customer journey, and that AI shopping, tracking changes and social commerce make full-journey measurement more pressing. The evidence comes from industry-reported data, and the paper measures affiliate participation in transactions, not proven incremental effect.