Tye DeGrange, CEO of Round Barn Labs, explains why partner marketing is the most misunderstood channel in performance marketing, and how to measure attribution and incrementality when your “media” is a human relationship.
I wasn’t on this one. Adam Fitzgerald, our enterprise sales director, filled in for me alongside Jessie. But after watching the replay, I think it’s one of the clearest explanations of affiliate and partner measurement we’ve had on the show.
Tye DeGrange has worked in performance marketing for about 20 years, including time at Amazon, eBay, and Commission Junction. He started Round Barn Labs 11 years ago when startups kept asking him the same questions: How should we think about affiliate? How do we get CAC under control? How do we manage all these channels? The name honors his family’s ranch in Sonoma County. “DeGrange” loosely means “from the barn,” and he says the handshake-and-integrity values of ranch life shaped how the agency works.
What is partner marketing and why is it underrated?
Tye puts affiliate, influencer, and partner marketing in one bucket. They’re different versions of the same ecosystem.
“When it comes down to it, a lot of it is matchmaking. You’re taking a brand, you know, Nike, Atlassian, HubSpot, whatever it might be, and connecting it to a great creator, influencer, review site, deal site, YouTube influencer.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
Most people hear “affiliate” and think coupon sites. Tye counts about 15 different partner types. Depending on the business, partners can drive 5%, 10%, 20%, or more of revenue, or of leads in B2B. Many Round Barn Labs clients say it’s their most efficient channel.
“I talk a lot about how it’s the most misunderstood and most underrated performance marketing channel out there.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
He also thinks the timing is good for partner marketing because trust is at a low point. He mentioned data showing big drops in trust in government and the media. Brands can’t just buy a front-page ad and expect people to believe it. A recommendation from a creator or a review site feels more like advice than advertising. On this show we’ve called it the “trust pandemic,” and partner marketing is one of the few channels built to deal with it.
What do brands get wrong about affiliate and partner marketing?
The biggest mistake, according to Tye DeGrange, is treating partner marketing like paid search or paid social.
“It’s not programmatic. You’re not setting bids and budgets and pumping creative in and stepping back and letting the algorithm do a lot.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
Affiliate is often more of a payment mechanism than a channel. An influencer, a review site, or even a media buyer paid on CPA can all count as affiliate. So it works across many channels, and that takes more work.
His checklist before launching a program: Do you have product-market fit? Is your conversion rate healthy? Do you know which competitors are already in the space? Do you have someone reputable with real hours each week to run it? You may be managing hundreds of partners, and he called it “a lot of cat herding.”
Then give it time. Tye says a year is a reasonable window. And don’t set it and forget it. In the programs he reviews, he often sees no regular partner recruiting, no cleanup of applications, no plan to get approved partners active, and no adjustments for seasonality or commission levels.
How should you approach attribution for affiliate marketing?
Tye’s first step is surprisingly simple: agree on what the words mean. Teams say “attribution” and mean different things. For him, it’s assigning credit across your marketing touchpoints, with an agreed model and an agreed attribution window.
“It’s just shocking how many people are relying on last click.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
In partner marketing, last click is especially risky. Some partners will look far better than they really are, and others will look worse. If your payouts are last-click and you’re recruiting upper-funnel content partners, those two things don’t match. You’re probably overpaying someone.
The basics come first. That means correct UTM parameters, network tracking that’s been QA’d (pixel, API, or batch), and payouts that match your attribution model. Round Barn Labs uses multi-touch views from networks like impact.com to see where partners enter the journey and where they close. Then you compare that with your own data: CRM and MQL/SQL stages in B2B, or cohort and repeat-purchase analysis in ecommerce. Your affiliate network, just like Google and Meta, has its own version of the story, and it usually over-counts.
“The other thing I think people get caught up in is they let perfect be the enemy of good and they don’t get anywhere.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
How do you measure incrementality in partner and influencer marketing?
Tye’s definition is the cleanest I’ve heard:
“If this tactic or channel or partner was removed, would you have still gotten that purchase or lead or that action anyway?”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
Answering that requires a comparison, usually some kind of holdout test: geo holdouts, audience splits, or PSA-versus-branded ad tests. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) helps too, and it has become much more accessible. Tye named Paramark, Haus, Measured, Northbeam, and Recast, and said Paramark CEO Pranav Piyush has done good work on using MMM to plan where holdout tests should run.
There are a few catches. MMM usually needs a lot of spend (Tye cautiously mentioned around $1 million a month), three or more sizable channels, and enough history to look back on. Affiliate adds another problem: you usually pay after the action. An off-the-shelf MMM will see that you paid for a conversion and conclude it worked. So the model has to be set up differently, ideally with partner impression data. Tye says Round Barn Labs is working with networks to get that data, and that some large retailers are already adding it to their models for both affiliate and influencer.
And because partners are people, you can’t just switch them off the way you would a Google campaign.
“You’re not just turning on and off Google or Meta. You could be taking money away from someone’s pocket.”
— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs
Give partners a heads up, hold them accountable, and test together. He says the partners with enough volume to justify a test usually want to prove their value. He also warned against overreacting the other way. Writing off whole partner types, like all coupon sites or all software partners, skips over a lot of nuance.
Tye’s partner marketing tech stack
For tools, Tye mentioned impact.com for affiliate, PartnerStack for B2B SaaS partnerships, Creator.co for influencer management, and Paramark, Haus, Measured, Northbeam, and Recast for measurement. His caveat applies to all of them: you still need a sound strategy and people who know how to use the tool. As Jessie put it, garbage in, garbage out.
The bigger picture
What I like about Tye’s approach is how honest it is. Attribution is never going to be perfect, and incrementality testing costs more time and money than most people expect. Sometimes the better move is to fix the basics first. But partner marketing works on trust and relationships, and that’s harder for competitors to copy than another round of bids.
That connects to how we think about data at BDEX. Measurement is only as good as what goes into it. If your tracking is broken or your audience data is full of bots, no model is going to give you a clean answer. Get the foundation right, test steadily, and keep improving.
Connect with Tye: Find Tye DeGrange on LinkedIn, learn more about Round Barn Labs at roundbarnlabs.com, and check out his podcast, Always Be Testing, and the RBL Flywheel newsletter.
Work with BDEX: Want audiences built on real people, not bots? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the episode: Authentic Trust in Partner Marketing (Affiliate & Creator Marketing)
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
