My Motor World
How we built a UK automotive retailer's affiliate programme from a standing start into a seven-figure revenue channel — while making every pound work three times harder.
My Motor World approached us with no affiliate programme. Established competitors were already capturing intent-driven traffic through cashback sites, voucher publishers, and content partners on the major networks.
The longer they stayed absent, the more ground they ceded.
The brief: a complete programme build on Awin, with a recruitment strategy that would start competing within months — not years.
For a newer brand entering an established affiliate landscape, two strategic priorities stood out from the start.
Breadth before depth. With no programme history to learn from, betting on a single publisher category risked missing the partners that mattered most. We seeded widely across cashback, voucher, content, CSS, sub-network and closed-user-group publishers — surfacing the right mix faster than serial single-channel testing would allow.
Credibility through association. Newer brands struggle to win attention from top-tier publishers — established competitors have those relationships locked in. Closed-user-group partners (Blue Light Card, Defence Discount Service, healthcare worker discounts) carry institutional trust that compounds onto the brands listed within them.
Underpinning both: quarterly partner pruning and reinvesting where ROAS was strongest.
Over the launch period we identified, contacted and onboarded partners across nine publisher categories — cashback, voucher, closed-user-group, content, CSS, sub-network, charity, loyalty and category-specific automotive sites. From a working list of 180 researched publishers, 40 were brought live as active partners on the programme, with each onboarded against a defined commission structure and exclusive code where commercially viable.
To extend reach without the per-publisher overhead of individual recruitment, we onboarded five sub-networks — Skimlinks, Yieldkit, Sovrn, Digidip and FMTC — giving the programme inherited access to thousands of downstream publishers from launch. This proved a strategically defining decision: by 2026 sub-network partners were regularly the programme's top weekly revenue drivers, validating the early bet on aggregator infrastructure over individual publisher recruitment alone.
Rather than running the programme as set-and-forget, we built in regular operational rhythms — weekly publisher approvals, weekly voucher site audits, monthly performance reporting, ongoing recruitment outreach, and continuous review of partner ROAS against contribution. Underperforming partners were pruned and commission budget reinvested in those returning strongest, which is how a 14x revenue increase across three years was matched by a 3x improvement in channel efficiency.
Across three years on Awin — from a standing start in April 2023 — the programme grew into a seven-figure revenue channel while tripling efficiency, with 2025 marking peak performance and 2026 continuing strong.
Average ROAS by year
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 4.9x |
| 2024 | 12.0x |
| 2025 | 16.2x |
A standing-start affiliate channel typically takes time to find efficiency. By the end of year one, ROAS was already approaching 5x. By year three, the programme was returning over 16x — meaning every pound of programme spend was working more than three times harder than it had at launch.
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