January 20, 2025

Does Honey provide incremental growth? Our data shows it’s not as much as you think.

By PartnerCentric

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Honey.

Recently, a YouTube video posted by MegaLag claimed that Honey was a scam that’s participating in affiliate and advertising fraud and changing creators’ affiliate links to their own. This practice is known as commission hijacking and diverts commission earnings from the content creators to Honey, even when these influencers played a big role in sending traffic to the retailers.

MegaLag’s video also questions the validity of Honey’s value proposition of offering users the “best coupons available.” The claims made by MegaLag in this video have already had an impact on Honey’s reputation and user base. These revelations combined with trusted influencers’ concerns have resulted in Honey experiencing a drop of 3 million users. 

This has spurred a lot of necessary dialogue in the space about transparency while also providing an opportunity to reinforce how you can navigate and protect your affiliate program at all stages.

What we know for sure, though, is that integrity in this space means more today than ever. We’re sharing our perspective here; one that relies on data, not speculation.

Partnercentric’s FUSE Incrementality™ technology measures the additional sales value each publisher drives beyond what would have happened without their involvement. Higher incrementality implies that the publisher effectively introduces new customer-generated sales that would not have occurred otherwise. 

FUSE Incrementality™ data across our managed accounts reveals that Honey ranks poorly in incrementality, suggesting that most sales attributed to it would likely have occurred anyway. This weak incrementality, combined with its low solo close rate, indicates that Honey’s overall contribution to new, incremental revenue is minimal.

Take Back Control Over Attribution

We firmly believe that stand down policies should be upheld so that publishers driving true value are the ones getting rewarded. We’ve aimed a spotlight on clean data with our patented FUSE™ Precision technology to put control over attribution back in the hands of our clients. They can impact how they want any publisher to operate within their program and they can set the terms. This way they can pay out commissions based on their own analytics. 

• FUSE Incrementality™ shines a light on the full customer journey, helping identify any potential risks like link hijacking or unethical practices. To understand the effectiveness of any type of publisher, like Honey, our technology examines the ratio of solo closes (those orders in which the publisher was the ONLY session driver, among all channels involved in a conversion) to attributed conversions. Throughout our client base, Honey has a negligible number of solo closes (only .26%), meaning that it’s rarely the primary or sole driver of purchases.

• With Honey specifically, our team is able to remove them from an affiliate program if our data shows a significant amount of hijacking, especially with content and influencers. If Honey is adding some value, we keep their commission rate low and make sure stand down rules are enforced.
  
• Our team regularly reviews publishers like Honey to identify potential risks of commission hijacking or unethical behaviors. FUSE Incrementality™ identifies individual purchase journeys to pinpoint traffic sources especially focused on the “Session Start” source for conversions credited to publishers. This uncovers which bad actors hijack conversion results that belong to another source.
  
• The FUSE stack includes a new Conversion Origination score within FUSE Incrementality™ that determines which publishers are capitalizing on other partners or channels, and which are initiating sessions that drive sales – even among new or trusted influencers.

Protect Your Influencer Relationships

We know influencers can be a vital part of an affiliate program. The challenge for influencers is that their commissions can be diverted to other publishers without the right data. This can erode trust between the influencer and brands they aim to support. To ensure their efforts are protected, we can provide exclusive codes that will guarantee commissions are delivered directly to them. This prevents any other publishers from taking credit.

Another way to secure the relationship between an influencer and your brand is to find creative ways to reward them such as performance bonuses or accurate monitoring of their ongoing impact through tools like our own Placement Success Analyzer.

So What Happens Now?

Before we get scared off by chatter on social media that creates broad-sweeping doubt about entire publisher categories let’s make sure we’re using data and not hunches. 

We know that browser extension partners can be powerful tools for increasing conversions, capturing deal-savvy shoppers, and boosting customer retention. With the right oversight and strategies, they can complement a well-diversified program nicely while ensuring fairness for everyone involved.

At PartnerCentric, we use our in-house technology to show you which publishers are adding incremental value to your program so you’re only paying for partnerships that contribute to your bottom line.

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