VoucherCodes – Best Affiliate Programme Optimisation

About VoucherCodes

As the UK’s most trusted voucher website, VoucherCodes.co.uk has been connecting brands with our highly engaged audience of savvy shoppers since 2008. VoucherCodes challenges traditional affiliate marketing models, offering products and exposure options that go beyond a simple discount code, delivering growth at all stages of the marketing funnel. By leveraging our site, app, newsletter and socials, we help consumers shop and save while driving commercial value for merchant partners.

The challenge

The travel sector is one of the more complex sectors within affiliate marketing. Customer journeys are long, fragmented and heavily influenced by external factors, which creates a significant hurdle for brands trying to maintain an efficient and scalable programme. Travel brands face an intense struggle for share of voice in a saturated market, and to stay ahead they often increase acquisition costs and decrease efficiency.

There is also a common misconception that partnering with discount platforms inevitably forces a brand into a race to the bottom, but that isn’t the case.

Because of this, brands often treat voucher sites as a siloed channel rather than a full-funnel marketing partner. Brands need to rethink the affiliate channel and optimise their programmes to shift focus from driving volume to hitting high-intent users at all stages of the purchase journey.

The solution

The strategic approach

Our strategic approach is founded on the principle that affiliate optimisation must deliver genuine incremental value. Through full-funnel exposure across our site, app and social channels, we combine brand-building with traditional performance tactics. Through bespoke solutions, we build strong relationships with merchants to understand their objectives, KPIs and challenges, and proactively adapt strategies to stay aligned with wider business goals. And through commercial optimisation, we run a continuous test-and-learn approach, trialling new promotional opportunities ahead of key trading periods and adapting offers based on partner goals, using minimum spends or rewards to protect average order value and drive full-price sales.

The technology deployed

Our partnerships are driven by our in-house reporting system, which tracks uplifts in sales, market share and overall performance to identify which placements generate meaningful uplifts in acquisition, sales and conversions. We layer on third-party insights to target customers with the highest affinity to the sector, at the moment they are most likely to book, helping to drive higher engagement and sales.

The boldest decision

When partnering with On The Beach we adopted an extensive test-and-learn strategy, combining real-time insights with widespread marketing exposure, moving beyond traditional onsite and email exposure to include paid social, above-the-line and more. We optimised continuously, dialling exposure up or down and adapting offers to drive stronger conversion rates while protecting average order value and margins.

The results

The partnership delivered over 9 million pounds in merchant sales, a 2,156% year-on-year surge, while growing On The Beach’s market share from 2% to 54% within the VoucherCodes travel category. Crucially, 58% of transactions came from first-time bookers, and average order value increased by 16%.

These results validate our full-funnel, data-led methodology. By pairing widespread full-funnel audience targeting with strict margin guardrails, we proved that voucher platforms can drive high-volume acquisition and sales without sacrificing profitability. We don’t just nudge customers to click buy, we combine creative multi-channel exposure with in-house and third-party data to actively displace competitors, safeguard margins and deliver incremental growth.