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Affiliate marketing on Instagram

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Instagram is a brand awareness channel before it is a sales channel: creators introduce products to their community. Framed properly, it also generates conversions, because showing a product in use builds trust.

This page gathers Affilae’s tips to recruit Instagram creators, track what they bring in and pay them without unbalancing the relationship. Instagram is also one of the affiliate profile types recognised by the platform, alongside TikTok, YouTube and blogs.

Identifying the right creators and recruiting them

There are several types of Instagram creators, usually sorted by follower count.

The main families of Instagram creators, sorted by follower count.

Follower count matters, but engagement rate matters more:

Engagement rate = ((Likes + Comments) / Followers) x 100

Tip: a small, engaged and loyal community often listens more closely than a large community with a low engagement rate. Read the quality of the comments before you look at the follower count.

An authentic, unique, dedicated relationship

Every creator has their own signature and theme, in other words their own editorial strategy. Good synergy between the brand and the creator is what makes a collaboration last.

Immerse yourself in their content, the hashtags they use and their profile description before reaching out. Creators value genuine contact, not an opportunistic approach.

Contact: send personalised messages, never automated ones.
Budget: the deal you negotiate must be a win-win. Reconcile the creator’s content production time with your need for performance.
Promotion: think about their community. If your positioning allows it, offer a dedicated promo code on top of the product itself.

Letting Affilae do part of the sourcing

Instead of hunting profiles one by one, open Match AI in the Tools section of your sidebar. It surfaces the affiliates whose audience and content match your program.

For Instagram creators to appear, your matching profile has to allow them. In your program’s Match AI configuration, tick the objective Visibility & Influence and the content type Influence & Social, whose tooltip reads “Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, UGC.”. That pair automatically adds Instagram to your Affiliates types allowed.

The filters on the page then mirror the criteria on this page: Affiliate type, Content formats, Min followers and Min engagement rate (%).

To qualify a profile further, you can rely on Instagram search or on specialised tools such as HypeAuditor or Kolsquare, whose synchronization with Affilae lets you follow your affiliate performance straight from your Kolsquare account.

Instagram formats and how to track them

Instagram stood out by focusing on visuals while leaving plenty of room for creativity. Each format is tracked differently.

The formats available to promote a product on Instagram.

Stories carry a clickable link, which makes them the most direct way to send tracked traffic. Since a Story is ephemeral, ask the creator to pin it to their Highlights so it stays reachable afterwards.
The link in the bio is permanently visible on the account’s main page. It can point to an article, a link hub page, a shortener or your homepage.
Reels are longer than Stories and do not expire. Their captions do not make links clickable either: point to the link in the bio, or use a dedicated promo code.
A dedicated promo code removes the need for a link entirely. Affilae lets you assign a promo code to each creator and pay them on the sales that code generates.

Good to know: a tracking link is not clickable from the caption of a regular post. To attribute sales generated by a post, use a dedicated promo code. The post still works, but for awareness.

Which tracking link format to use

Affilae offers several tracking link formats. On Instagram, favour the Redirection format, which goes through lb.affilae.com. The SEO format relies on a hashtag, which Instagram already uses for its own purposes, and it is deprecated.

The Link builder, in the Tools section, builds these links in seconds from your destination URL.

Telling one post from another with SubIDs

A creator publishing a Story, a reel and a bio link for the same brand needs to know what worked. That is what SubIDs are for: a free-form identifier added to the tracking link, which then appears in clicks, conversions and exports.

Tip: agree on a naming convention with your creators, for example story-march or reel-xmas, with one SubID per publication. You will know exactly which format carries your program. Up to 6 SubIDs per link, with no personal data inside.

Which compensation model for your creators

The point to keep in mind is the balance of the partnership. Paying on sales only means you take no risk, but it shifts all of it onto the creator: the relationship becomes unbalanced and demotivating. The opposite is equally true.

So the real question is this: how do you reconcile your need for performance with the creator’s need to secure the time invested in producing content?

The compensation models available for an influencer partnership.

Sending products is the baseline. A creator needs the product in hand to speak about it honestly to their community. On Affilae, the Product Marketplace organises those shipments: you list your products, creators request them.
Cost per action pays the creator for each sale made through their link, as a percentage of the basket or a fixed amount.
Cost per click pays them every time someone clicks their link.
Fixed fees cover an amount agreed in advance for content production.
Personalised promo codes pay the creator on sales made with their code, with no tracking link involved.

Have you considered hybrid compensation?

This is our advice for reconciling both needs. A creator can be paid on cost per click and cost per action for the same Story: you keep control of your profitability, and they secure income even when conversion is slow. You can also combine a small fixed fee, for instance 150 to 200 euros, with a cost per action.

These combinations are set affiliate by affiliate through a publisher’s custom remuneration. To cap what a cost per click partner can spend, add a capping.

In short, the value of affiliate marketing in an influencer partnership is to go beyond the one-off product gift and build a lasting relationship built on recurrence.

For creators: getting found and getting paid

If you are an Instagram creator, three habits are enough to stay visible to brands and follow your earnings.

Set Instagram as your Affiliate type on your profile. That type decides which advertiser objectives you are eligible and visible for.
Build your links from the Link builder and add one SubID per publication.
Browse the Marketplace to join programs, and Product testing to request the products you want to feature.

Frequently asked
questions

Not with a link: captions do not make links clickable. To attribute sales generated by a post, give the creator a dedicated promo code created from your program. The post still matters for awareness, but its contribution is then measured through the code, not through clicks.

The Redirection format, which goes through lb.affilae.com. The SEO format relies on a hashtag that Instagram already uses, and it is deprecated. The Link builder in the Tools section builds the link from your destination URL.

With SubIDs. Add a different identifier to each link, for example one per Story and one per reel. The value then appears in your clicks, your conversions and your exports. You can use up to 6 SubIDs per link, and you must not put personal data in them.

Open Match AI in the Tools section, then your program’s matching profile configuration. Tick the objective Visibility & Influence and the content type Influence & Social: Instagram is then added to your Affiliates types allowed. You can then filter on Min followers and Min engagement rate (%).

It is often the starting point, because a creator needs the product in hand to talk about it honestly. But it rarely sustains a relationship on its own. Pair it with a cost per action, a cost per click or a small fixed fee so the collaboration repeats instead of staying a one-off.

Usually yes. A creator invests production time before the very first click, which makes a pure performance deal unattractive to them. That is exactly what hybrid models are for: set them affiliate by affiliate with custom remuneration, and cap them if you need to.