Affiliate Orders Up 170%: How Can Brands Measure the Impact?

When evaluating affiliate marketing, three measures need to be distinguished.

First, attributed sales: sales recorded as the result of affiliate activity based on the attribution rules used by the platform or the brand. This figure shows the transactions linked to a particular creator.

Second, incremental sales: additional sales that occur thanks to marketing activity. This measure answers a different question: how many consumers actually became buyers because of affiliate activity, rather than simply completing a transaction through a trackable link?

Third, profitable sales: sales that make a positive economic contribution after related costs are taken into account. These costs may include creator commissions, discounts, promotional subsidies, content production, and other campaign costs.

Each of these three measures serves its own function. Sales recorded as affiliate results are not necessarily all incremental sales. Likewise, rising sales do not necessarily yield greater profit if the cost of obtaining them also increases.

Imagine a consumer who has already decided to buy a product after watching a creator’s review. They then search for the product on a marketplace and complete the transaction through a different affiliate link they come across. In certain attribution systems, that transaction could be recorded as a contribution by the creator last connected to the purchase.

That transaction is still valuable to the creator and the brand. However, there is something else worth knowing: did the creator’s content generate a purchase intent that did not exist before, help the consumer decide which product to buy, or merely serve as the transaction pathway for a purchase that had already been planned?

For this reason, affiliate sales figures remain useful for assessing performance. However, they are not enough to explain the full impact of affiliates on the business.

If affiliate evaluation relies only on the final transaction, parts of the purchase process risk going unmeasured.

Findings from the Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027 (ICMR 2027) by IDN Research Institute show that purchase decisions among the Connected Audience are not formed only when consumers click a link or first see awareness content.

In the report, respondents named several points at which their purchase decisions were formed:

Source: IDN Research Institute, Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027, p. 19.

These figures show that creators can play a role at various stages of the purchase decision. Reviews help consumers compare options, demonstrations show how a product works, and live sessions give consumers the chance to observe the product and get answers to their questions.

Affiliate links and promo codes also play a role in connecting interest to transactions. However, the decision to buy is not always formed at the moment consumers use either of them.

It should be noted that these figures show the points of decision formation as reported by respondents, not the conversion rate of each content format. The 77% figure, for example, does not mean that product reviews produce higher conversion than affiliates. Nor does the data prove that every purchase made after reading a review occurred because of that review.

ICMR 2027 draws on a survey of 305 respondents referred to as the Connected Audience: people who regularly consume creator content, follow their favorite creators, actively shop online, and have purchasing power. Given these characteristics, the findings describe an audience relevant to creator marketing, not the entire Indonesian population.

For brands, these findings offer a reason to look at creators’ contributions across the consumer journey. Even so, the role of each stage still needs to be assessed according to the function and objective of its content.

Attribution helps brands connect marketing activity with measurable results. Through this mechanism, brands can see which channels, campaigns, or creators are recorded as contributing to a transaction.

However, there is a difference between knowing who receives attribution for a transaction and knowing whether marketing activity actually generated additional sales.

Attribution answers the question, “Whose contribution is this transaction recorded as, based on the measurement rules used?”

Incrementality, meanwhile, answers, “Did this additional transaction occur because of that marketing activity?”

This difference is also evident in marketing research outside the affiliate context. Blake, Nosko, and Tadelis (2015), through an experiment on branded search advertising at eBay, found that transactions attributed to ads do not always reflect the ads’ incremental effect on sales. That study did not directly measure affiliate effectiveness in Indonesia. Nevertheless, its results illustrate why attribution figures need to be read alongside an appropriate measurement method.

This means that brands do not need to abandon attribution. The metric remains useful for monitoring activity and evaluating creator performance. What deserves attention is when attribution figures are used to answer questions that the metric cannot actually answer.

To find out whether affiliates generate incremental sales, brands can use experiments with comparison groups, test campaigns in phases, or compare sales before and during a campaign while accounting for other factors that influence the results.

The choice of method depends on the campaign’s scale, data availability, and the brand’s measurement capabilities. Not every affiliate program requires a complex experiment. However, the larger the budget spent, the more important it becomes for brands to complement attribution figures with measurement of incremental impact.

When brands want to improve affiliate results, they may be tempted to increase the number of creators or to prioritize those with the highest sales. This choice may suit certain objectives, but it does not necessarily address the needs of every campaign.

Research by Pan and colleagues (2025), published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, synthesized 1,531 effect sizes from 251 studies on the effectiveness of influencer marketing. The results show that content, follower, and creator characteristics have different relationships with different marketing outcomes. For transactional outcomes, creator communication is among the factors most strongly related to purchase behavior.

This finding suggests that follower count alone is not enough to determine the most suitable creator for a campaign.

Brands also need to consider how well a creator fits the product, how they explain benefits, audience relevance, their ability to answer questions, and content formats suited to the product category.

A product that requires demonstration, for example, may be better promoted by a creator who can explain its function and usage well. A product that is easy to understand and tends to be bought on impulse may call for a different content approach.

These considerations also shape how brands read campaign results. A creator who successfully introduces a product does not necessarily generate the most direct transactions. Conversely, a creator with high sales figures is not necessarily the best choice for every objective, especially when costs, margins, and audience characteristics differ.

For this reason, brands need to define the role they expect creators to play before choosing the indicators used to judge their success.

Comparisons of creator performance also need to take into account the characteristics of the audiences they reach. Different conversion rates do not always indicate differences in creator quality.

ICMR 2027 found that higher-income and middle-income audiences are relatively close in proportion when it comes to clicking creator links, but differ in purchasing through affiliates.

In the report, the proportion of respondents who had ever clicked a creator’s link reached 70% among higher-income audiences and 69% among middle-income audiences. Meanwhile, the proportion of respondents who had ever purchased through an affiliate link reached 69% and 54%, respectively.

Source: IDN Research Institute, Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027, p. 58.

This data does not prove that income is the sole cause of the difference in purchases. However, the results show that interest in content and the decision to transact do not always go hand in hand.

Two audience groups can be equally interested in a product, watch content, or click links, yet have different spending capacity. Price, needs, spending priorities, and product characteristics can also influence the final decision.

For this reason, brands cannot compare creators solely on the number of transactions without looking at who their audiences are. A more relevant comparison needs to consider the target consumer, product category, transaction value, campaign costs, and business objectives.

For brands, differences in purchasing power are not a reason to disregard conversion. Rather, audience context needs to be taken into account so that creator selection does not simply favor segments with greater spending ability.

For affiliate evaluation results to be usable in business decisions, brands can start with the following six steps.

Define the creator’s role from the outset. Is the creator tasked with introducing the product, explaining benefits, addressing consumer doubts, driving transactions, or supporting repeat purchases? One creator can fulfill several roles, but the brand still needs to set its campaign priorities.

Choose KPIs that match the content’s objective. Awareness content can be assessed through relevant audience reach and quality of attention. Educational content can be evaluated through content consumption and interactions that indicate understanding. For transaction-oriented activity, brands can look at clicks, orders, sales value, and conversion rate.

Separate activity metrics from business results. Impressions, interactions, and clicks help brands understand audience response, but they do not automatically indicate sales growth. Conversely, transaction figures need to be read alongside costs and margins to determine their economic value.

Measure incremental sales in proportion to the scale of investment. For large-scale programs, brands can consider experiments or comparison groups to estimate the incremental sales generated. For smaller programs, evaluation can begin with simpler methods, accompanied by an explanation of their limitations.

Compare creators with context in mind. Consider product category, audience characteristics, content format, price, and campaign objectives. The creator with the highest conversion is not necessarily the best fit for all of a brand’s needs.

Calculate results after costs. Beyond sales value, include affiliate commissions, discounts, promotional subsidies, content production costs, and other relevant costs. This lets brands see whether transaction growth makes an economic contribution in line with business objectives.

Brands do not have to replace all the metrics they currently use. What is needed is to complement existing measurement so that evaluation results are more useful when choosing creators, allocating budgets, and planning the next campaign.

The 170% increase in affiliate orders points to an opportunity worth paying attention to. The next question for brands is under what conditions affiliates work best and how their contribution to the business can be measured.

Attribution figures show recorded transactions. Consumer journey data provides a picture of how purchase decisions are formed. Incrementality measurement helps estimate additional sales, while cost and margin calculations show the economic value generated.

Each of the four answers a different question, and they need to be read together to obtain a more complete picture.

Ultimately, affiliate evaluation is not simply a matter of finding the creator with the most orders. Brands need to know how creators influence purchase decisions, how much incremental sales they generate, and whether the results justify the costs incurred. This understanding can help brands determine creators, budgets, and affiliate strategies more precisely.

Read the Full Report

To see other findings on audience behavior, the role of creators, and the effectiveness of creator marketing in Indonesia, read the Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027 by IDN Research Institute.

Download the Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027 through the IDN Research Institute Report Library

References

Novianty (2026). Report on changing consumption patterns and the rise in TikTok Shop affiliate orders. Suara.com, 12 October 2026. https://www.suara.com/bisnis/2026/10/12/190957/gaya-konsumsi-orang-ri-berubah-total-data-bps-dan-tiktok-buktikan-ini

IDN Research Institute. Indonesia Creator Marketing Report 2027, particularly pages 19 and 58.

Blake, T., Nosko, C., & Tadelis, S. (2015). “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large-Scale Field Experiment.” Econometrica, 83(1), 155–174.

Pan, M., Blut, M., Ghiassaleh, A., & Lee, Z. W. Y. (2025). “Influencer Marketing Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 53, 52–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01052-7