The acquisition accelerates Levanta’s marketplace growth and gives Perch+’s sellers and publishers access to modern affiliate infrastructure

Levanta, the leading affiliate and creator platform for e-commerce, announced the acquisition of Perch+, one of the earliest affiliate networks built specifically for Amazon sellers. Perch+’s network of sellers and affiliate partners will now operate within Levanta, giving them access to a modern affiliate and creator platform built for e-commerce.

Levanta is acquiring Perch+ at a time of significant momentum, having grown 60% since last year. In 2026 alone, it has expanded its platform to support unified affiliate and creator programs across Amazon, Shopify, and Walmart, and introduced Paid Placements, which enables brands to secure flat-rate creator deals with affiliate-level performance measurement. The acquisition of Perch+’s sellers and affiliate network is the latest step in that momentum, further strengthening Levanta’s position as the leading platform for affiliate and creator-driven e-commerce.

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“Perch+ built meaningful traction with Amazon sellers early on when very few affiliate platforms were focused on their needs,” said Ian Brodie, CEO and Co-Founder of Levanta. “By bringing this network into Levanta, we’re expanding opportunity on both sides of the marketplace — more brands for creators, and more creator-driven growth for brands.”

For Perch+ brands, the move to Levanta represents a significant upgrade in capability, enabling them to work directly with 60,000+ vetted partners in Levanta’s Marketplace, with advanced tooling for creator recruitment at scale and full support for Amazon Attribution and Creator Connections. Brands can also run Paid Placement campaigns, automate Product Sampling, and surface who is already talking about their brand across social, all from a single system.

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For creators and publishers, the transition brings more than just a new platform. Levanta’s platform offers improved tracking, faster payouts, and a more centralized place to manage partnerships. Creators gain access to a significantly expanded roster of brands and greater earning opportunities, giving them more ways to land paid campaigns, earn performance-based commissions, and get products into their hands to create content.

“We built Perch+ to help Amazon brands tap into affiliate marketing as a meaningful growth channel,” said Jason Baer, chief marketing officer at Infinite Commerce, parent company of Perch+. “Levanta has built the platform and scale to take that vision much further. We’re excited to see the network continue to grow within Levanta.”

As part of the agreement, Rakuten Advertising will integrate Similarweb’s proprietary, best-in-class data into its analytics and reporting environment, offering brand advertisers deeper visibility into how their content and performance surface in emerging AI-driven discovery channels. Built on real user behavioral data at scale for topics and responses, Similarweb’s insights provide a more comprehensive view of the digital ecosystem, enabling Rakuten Advertising clients to make more informed decisions, reach new customers, and build future-ready performance marketing strategies.

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“As AI-driven platforms redefine digital discovery, brands need a new way to measure and compete for visibility,” said Baruch Toledano, VP and General Manager Digital Marketing Solutions at Similarweb. “Similarweb is at the forefront of helping companies understand their presence in these environments, the synergies between performance channels, and together with Rakuten Advertising, we’re bringing that intelligence directly into the workflows that drive performance.”

The integration underscores Rakuten Advertising’s continued investment in innovation to provide a competitive advantage to its clients in a rapidly evolving digital marketing environment. By incorporating Similarweb’s proprietary data, the company is expanding its ability to help clients measure and improve visibility within generative AI platforms.

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“This collaboration unlocks a new level of transparency that gives brands that work with us an edge in a rapidly changing landscape for brand discovery and engagement,” said Nick Stamos, CEO of Rakuten Advertising. “With Similarweb’s data, our clients will have insights that aren’t available anywhere else, helping them better understand their level of visibility in AI-driven environments and turn it into performance.”

The new capabilities will be available initially to a select group of Rakuten Advertising clients, with additional reporting features to be introduced soon. Participating brands will be able to better understand how they are represented within LLMs, access differentiated insights, and tie them more directly to performance.

Alfie automates affiliate discovery, outreach, and management so businesses can save time, boost revenue, and scale programs without added overhead.

XPFlow announced the launch of Alfie, an AI-powered assistant built to transform how companies discover, recruit, and manage affiliates. Alfie is designed to make affiliate marketing effortless and effective for both startups and enterprise teams.

Solving the Affiliate Problem

Affiliate marketing has often been out of reach for small and mid-sized businesses. Finding partners, writing outreach messages, and tracking performance can demand more than twenty hours per week, often requiring a dedicated hire or an expensive agency. Alfie changes that.

“I watched my wife, who works in affiliate management, struggle to balance repetitive tasks with revenue-driving responsibilities like recruitment. Together we started building a solution that has now been adopted by other affiliate managers, helping them save real time and earn more revenue,” said Oliver Searle-Barnes, Chief Product Officer at XPFlow.

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Alfie automates the entire affiliate process while keeping each brand’s unique tone intact. It becomes an extension of the marketing team, removing hours of manual research and outreach while still providing a personal and authentic experience for partners.

How Alfie Works

Alfie begins by analyzing a company’s website to understand its products, audience, and communication style. This gives him the context required to sound human and aligned with the brand. Alfie (the AI) then scans competitors and affiliate placements across the industry to map opportunities that support the company’s goals, using state-of-the-art AI.

Once trained, Alfie delivers five curated affiliate leads every day and drafts tailored outreach messages for each one. Teams can send them with a single click or request instant rewrites that maintain the brand’s voice and intent. Purchases then take place on XPFlow’s state-of-the-art affiliate platform.

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Alfie uses advanced language models and proprietary data crawlers to understand websites, tone, and affiliate ecosystems. This enables personalized, relevant outreach at scale, using AI to its fullest potential after creating the most comprehensive AI of its type.

“We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation shift in how products are built. Generative AI allows small, focused teams to achieve the kind of velocity that once required entire departments. That is the advantage XPFlow was created to capture,” said Dan Cseko, CTO.

Beyond Discovery: Full Management and Reporting

Alfie also manages tracking and reporting, giving teams visibility into performance, traffic sources, and program growth within a unified dashboard.

“Affiliate marketing has long been a channel only the big players could master and afford. Alfie gives small businesses an intelligent assistant that can compete at the same level without the bloated costs,” said Matthew O’Brien, CMO.

Empowering Small Businesses and Affiliate Managers

Alfie is built as a true growth partner. Small businesses can launch affiliate programs without operational overhead, and affiliate managers can reclaim up to twenty hours each week to focus on strategy and high-value relationships.

“We see a huge opportunity at XPFlow to disrupt a billion-dollar sector. Smart matchmaking is one of the biggest untapped opportunities in the market,” said Mark Abrams, Founder of XPFlow.

Strength of the XPFlow Ecosystem

XPFlow currently serves several hundred active clients across brands, creators, and growth teams. These clients use the XPFlow platform to manage partnerships, streamline operations, and scale more efficiently. Collectively, the current client base generates approximately $2.64 billion in gross revenue. XPFlow projects that a good portion of this revenue will soon be managed directly through XPFlow’s affiliate platform as part of its long-term growth trajectory.

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2025 study shows 74% of brands increasing affiliate budgets due to rising costs in other marketing channels 

Brands are doubling down on the proven effectiveness of affiliate marketing in the face of rising customer acquisition costs, with influencers taking an increasing share of affiliate budgets. This is among key findings of The Global State of Affiliate Marketing in 2025 study carried out by the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, impact.com.

The study of more than 800 marketers across eight countries reveals that investment in affiliate marketing is increasing, with 74% of brands saying they have increased affiliate investment in the past year due to other marketing channels becoming more expensive. 30% of brands allocate between 10 and 20% of their marketing budget to affiliate marketing, while 38% allocate between 21 and 30%. In addition, 20% allocate 31-50% of their marketing budget to affiliate, while for 6% of brands, it’s more than 50% of their budget.

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Other key findings include:

• Increased investments in affiliate marketing are directly impacting the bottom line: 74% of brands said they generate between 11 and 30% of their total revenue from affiliate marketing, with 14% generating more than 30%. Additionally, 73% report increased revenue from affiliate programs over the past year, and 71% said they find affiliate marketing more cost-effective than other marketing channels.

• Influencer marketing is also becoming a bigger priority for brands: 59% plan to dedicate a quarter or more of their affiliate budget to influencer partnerships in the coming year, of which 18% are allocating more than half.

• Partnerships are paying off: 28% of brands surveyed said their collaborations with influencers have improved brand awareness and reach. Meanwhile, 27% said the partnerships had led to higher engagement with their brand content, and 27% reported increased sales and revenue attributable to influencer partnerships.

• AI is also impacting affiliate marketing: For brands, the top three use cases for AI are chatbots for customer support (35%); predictive analytics and optimization (33%); and partner performance analysis and feedback (32%). For creators, it’s content translation and subtitles (26%); visual and video creation (26%); and content ideas and outlines (25%). Finally, publishers are using AI for content creation and optimization (41%); automating affiliate tasks (35%); and personalizing content or offers (29%).

When questioned about their reasons for using affiliate marketing, the top three goals for the year ahead were to increase sales (45%); run more cost-effective marketing (37%); and reach a targeted audience (36%). The top three partner types companies are choosing to work with are those specializing in search and media arbitrage (40%); loyalty and rewards (38%); and deals and coupons (37%).

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impact.com believes the report provides a framework for companies to assess where they are on their affiliate roadmap and to map where they want to be. The company has identified five pillars of partnership sophistication that visionary brands follow to achieve measurable results. These are a diversified partner portfolio; elevated creator partnerships; strategic investment; intelligent AI deployment; and evolved approaches to measurement.

Methodology

The company surveyed 818 marketers who manage, contribute to, or oversee their affiliate marketing programs involving those with fewer than 25 to 500+ active partners in mid-2025 in eight countries – US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, UK, France, Germany, and Italy. The survey also included 284 publishers who manage, work on, or have visibility into their company’s affiliate marketing programs, and 421 content creators who actively post content, earn income through these platforms, and engage in brand collaborations.

Download a copy of the report [HERE]. 

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands—including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics—rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

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Marketing and Marketing Tech Quote-of-the-Week!

Brands looking to gain more traction in today’s ecosystem should keep one thing top of mind: quality. The quality of where the ads are appearing and the quality of the viewer. Real users who intentionally visit a site are much more valuable than accidental clicks from someone who’s just trying to navigate somewhere else. Engaged audiences are what drive outcomes.

– Kurt Donnell, CEO @ Freestar

Top MarTech News of The Week – 16^th June to 20^th June, 2025

• NiCE CXone Mpower Builds on Snowflake AI Data Cloud to Unlock Secure, Scalable CX Automation Across the Front, Middle and Back Office
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• Infosys and Adobe Announce Strategic Collaboration to Turbocharge Marketing Transformation with AI
• Supermetrics Acquires Leading CDP, Relay42 to Redefine the Future of Marketing Intelligence
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Top MarTech Articles on Data Privacy, MarTech Integrations, Affiliate Marketing and more!

• The Future of Affiliate Marketing: Evolving Strategies for 2025
• 6 Ways to Google-Proof Your Paid Search Campaigns Based on the Latest Updates
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• Beyond Integration: Building a Truly Connected Martech Ecosystem
• Data Privacy and Your MarTech Stack: What Today’s Marketers Need to Comply With
• The Importance of Cultural Sensitivity in Marketing
• From Martech Cost Center to Marketing Value Driver: How the Right Metrics can save Martech Adoption?

MarTech Q&A of The Week

Set granular, flexible rules based on real-time performance signals, then let automation handle the adjustments. Second, monitor cross-platform performance and automate orchestrated budget shifts between direct and programmatic where margins dictate. These practices allow advertisers and publishers to react faster than human teams ever could.

– Frans Vermeulen, President @ Swivel (formerly PilotDesk)

Missed The Latest Episode of The SalesStar Podcast? Have a quick listen here!

Episode 229: The Future Of Digital Customer Journeys with Monica Ho, CMO at SOCi

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The Power of Data Enablement

Data has been a cornerstone of affiliate marketing for years, but its role is evolving significantly. Understanding the interplay between channels and utilizing data strategically is now more critical than ever. One challenge that affiliate marketing has always faced is that data from this channel often differs from that of others. However, we are witnessing an evolution in measuring data, enabling closer alignment with other marketing efforts.

This evolution is reshaping how marketers approach their strategies. By leveraging data to create interconnected media plans, advertisers can better understand consumer behavior and allocate resources more effectively. Data enablement isn’t just about raw numbers anymore. It uses data to test new areas, refine customer outreach, and integrate insights across channels.

Successful marketers will harness data for performance metrics and uncover growth opportunities. This includes testing new consumer segments, exploring untapped markets, and developing deeper relationships with partners. The ability to adapt and respond to data insights quickly will be a defining trait of high-performing affiliate programs.

The Role of Technology in Partner Relationships

Technology continues to be a game-changer in affiliate marketing, driving innovation in how partners interact with consumers. The shift is no longer just about driving sales; it’s about creating seamless experiences that resonate with consumers.

Advancements in AI, retail media networks, and self-owned inventories fuel this shift. These tools allow partners to craft tailored consumer experiences and foster stronger relationships with advertisers. For instance, AI can uncover previously untapped opportunities, while retail media networks provide a platform for advertisers to reach consumers within a controlled ecosystem.

Google’s updates to site reputation management exemplify the impact of technological shifts on affiliate marketing. These updates have forced traditional partners to adapt or exit the space entirely. As platforms evolve and AI-driven search begins to reshape how consumers discover brands and content, marketers must find new ways to break free from reliance on established platforms and explore alternative paths. Staying ahead means rethinking affiliate strategies in the context of AI Search, where visibility and value are determined by relevance, quality, and machine-learned context rather than legacy reputation alone.

In response, partnerships are evolving to prioritize connectivity and strategic alignment. Partners want more engagement with CMOs and agencies to align goals and KPIs. This re-emergence of strategic collaboration is both a return to basics and a step forward.

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Diversification as a Strategic Imperative

Diversification has become more than a buzzword in affiliate marketing; it’s necessary. The limitations of relying on a few dominant platforms, such as Google, have underscored the importance of exploring new relationships and channels.

The winners will be those who test new items, expand outward, and develop closer ties with advertisers. This approach requires taking calculated risks, leveraging data in new ways, and embracing emerging technologies to build resilience against market shifts.

Social shopping, influencer marketing, and content partnerships are primed for growth. Performance-focused approaches to influencer collaborations are gaining traction, signaling a shift in how brands engage with audiences. Consumers are attracted to ecosystems that offer unique and engaging experiences. Marketers must meet them where they are with fresh and innovative approaches.

Affiliate marketing in 2025 will demonstrate adaptability and innovation. Data enablement will guide strategic decisions, technology will deepen partner relationships, and diversification will create pathways to success. The future of affiliate marketing isn’t about staying the course; it’s about crafting a new path that aligns with evolving consumer expectations and market realities.

The message for CMOs and media leaders is clear: To thrive in this dynamic landscape, embrace change, invest in technology, and foster collaborative relationships. This may sound like a hefty call to action. Still, it’s very much the scope of the assignment for success—the formula for ensuring that affiliate marketing can continue to deliver value and drive growth well into the future.

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Awin’s presence in Mexico strengthens its global footprint and enables it to meet the rising demand for affiliate and partner marketing across the Americas

Similarweb Ltd. , a leading Digital Data and Market Intelligence company, announced the acquisition of The Search Monitor, a pioneer in ad monitoring, trademark enforcement, and affiliate compliance solutions for paid search optimization and industry benchmarking. This strategic move significantly strengthens Similarweb’s ability to offer robust, daily-use tools that empower brands, retailers, and agencies to maximize ROI, protect their brand assets, and optimize their digital marketing strategies.

By acquiring The Search Monitor, Similarweb addresses the growing need for brands and their partners to protect brand integrity, ensure compliance with advertising agreements, and enhance governance of business and trademark policies.

Global ad spending in the search advertising segment is projected to reach approximately $351.5 billion in 2025, with an anticipated annual growth rate of 7.7% from 2025 to 2030, ​according to Statista. This underscores the importance of comprehensive data and insights to drive efficient marketing strategies. By acquiring The Search Monitor, Similarweb addresses the growing need for brands and their partners to protect brand integrity, ensure compliance with advertising agreements, and enhance governance of business and trademark policies. This strategic move offers clients best-in-class technology to support their objectives.

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“We are thrilled to welcome The Search Monitor to Similarweb,” said Or Offer, CEO and Founder of Similarweb. “Their technology and domain expertise in paid search and affiliate compliance complement our platform perfectly, helping us deliver even greater value to marketers who rely on accurate, real-time insights to drive results. This acquisition is another important step in our mission to make digital data more actionable, operational, and indispensable.”

Founded in 2007 by search marketing experts Lori Weiman and Shaun Martinec, The Search Monitor has built a strong reputation for helping top brands and agencies monitor ad visibility, enforce brand compliance, and gain in-depth competitive insights managing paid search closely. Their platform’s advanced monitoring technology allows for strategic keyword tracking, affiliate compliance enforcement, and robust brand protection measures, such as automated alerts and keyword scanning, to prevent unauthorized brand bidding.

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“Combining The Search Monitor’s capabilities with Similarweb’s rich digital intelligence enables us to deliver a more complete, market-ready solution for performance marketers,” said Maoz Lakovski, Chief Business Officer at Similarweb. “As digital ad environments become more complex, this move allows us to help customers achieve greater control, transparency, and ROI across their paid media investments.”

“We are excited to join forces with Similarweb, a company that shares our passion for data-driven insights and innovation,” said Lori Weiman, CEO and Co-Founder of The Search Monitor. “Our combined strengths will offer clients an unmatched solution to optimize and secure their digital marketing strategies.”

This acquisition will allow clients to make more informed, data-driven decisions, enhance campaign efficiency, and safeguard brand integrity. By making thoughtful, strategic investments in its product portfolio, Similarweb continues to deliver exceptional value to its customers and sustainable growth for all stakeholders.