Search “best affiliate network in India” and you get listicles. Look closely at who published each one: a network on the list, an agency reselling one, or a blogger paid by three of them. The genre is marketing wearing a review costume.
This guide gives you the evaluation method instead. It is more work than reading a ranking and it produces an answer you can defend to your CFO. It also works on us — we run a network, and every criterion below is one we accept being graded on.
Start from your category, not their homepage
Network quality is category-specific. A network superb at COD e-commerce may have no real lending supply; a mobile-gaming specialist may never have run an insurance lead. Your first filter is one question: how many live advertisers do you have in my category right now, and can I speak to one?
A network with depth answers in numbers and offers a reference. A network without it changes the subject to its publisher count — which tells you about registrations, not about your vertical.
The five questions that separate operators from resellers
1. When is fraud screened?
Before billing or after complaints — there is no third answer. Screening before billing means the network absorbs bad traffic as rejected rows; screening after means you fund the fraud and then negotiate refunds. Ask for the specific checks: CTIT distributions, device dedupe, datacentre IPs, network-wide lead deduplication.
2. Are sub-publisher IDs mandatory?
Without sub-IDs, your only quality control is switching the whole campaign off. With them, one bad source is cut while the rest scale. Any network that resists sub-ID transparency is protecting its supply from your scrutiny.
3. Can you export the raw log?
Click ID, timestamp, device, geo, sub-ID and status, per conversion, on demand. Summary dashboards cannot be audited; raw logs can be reconciled against your MMP or CRM. This single request eliminates a surprising share of the market.
4. What date do publishers get paid?
Odd question for an advertiser to ask — and the most revealing one. A network that pays publishers late is holding your campaign together with float, and its best publishers are already routing quality elsewhere. Payout reliability upstream is quality downstream.
5. What happens when quality drops?
Listen for mechanics: caps, kill switch, publisher removal, credited clawbacks with a written window. If the answer is “that rarely happens with us,” it happens constantly.
Network vs your own program
An affiliate network rents you supply, speed and operations. Your own affiliate program owns the partner relationships and keeps the margin — but only if someone actually recruits, briefs and polices it weekly. The mature answer for most established brands is both: network buys for immediate volume, a managed program compounding underneath. Brands earlier in the curve should start with the network buy and graduate.
Run the test that settles it
Whatever the pitches say, the market settles it cheaply: a two-week capped test on two networks, same offer, same payout, sub-IDs on, reconciled against your own data. Delivered quality per rupee — contact rate, delivered-order rate, day-7 retention — makes the decision for you. Networks confident in their supply agree to this immediately; the others begin explaining why their case studies should be enough.
If you want Performetra in that test, send the conversion event and geos — you will have a payout quote the same day, and our answers to all five questions above are written into the insertion order.
Written by the Performetra campaign team. If you want this applied to a live campaign rather than read about, tell us what you are running.