Now a major player among the various affiliation levers, coupon sites have become a must for performance-based campaigns. Popular with a community of intentional prospects, they often play a decisive role in the act of purchase. For advertisers, however, they can represent a challenge in terms of profitability and brand image control.
How can you take advantage of the conversion power of couponers without cutting into your margins? The answer lies in fine-tuning technical parameters, rigorous partner selection and an “intelligent couponing” strategy.
Why integrate couponers into your marketing mix?
Contrary to popular belief, promo codes are not just used to sell off an offer to close a sale. It’s a flexible lever that meets specific needs.
Multiple objectives beyond conversion
A well-defined couponing strategy can help you achieve a variety of business objectives:
- De-stocking: quickly sell off end-of-life products.
- Acquisition: attract new customers (cold prospects) with an attractive welcome offer.
- Increasing the average basket: define a minimum purchase threshold to trigger the discount (e.g. -€10 from a purchase of €80).
- Sales catch-up: boosting sales during a slack period to meet monthly targets.
- International development: vouchers can be an excellent way of testing an international market while limiting the risks.
The market’s move towards greater value
The promo code market has matured. The major players no longer simply list codes; they are diversifying to offer brands more value. Through white label schemes, media partnerships, editorial or targeted newsletters, they enable advertisers to reach massive, responsive databases.
The SEO upheaval of 2025: the end of reputation abuse
The promo code ecosystem underwent a major transformation on January 22, 2025. In application of its policy against “site reputation abuse” (formalized in May 2024), Google imposed massive manual penalties in France.
This update specifically targeted coupon pages hosted by high-authority media sites(SEO spam). These sections, often managed without any real editorial input, benefited artificially from the power of the host domain.
Reconfiguration in favor of specialists
Three months after this shockwave, the affiliation landscape has been drastically reshaped:
- The decline of the general media: Big names like Le Monde, 20 Minutes, Ouest-France and Le Figaro have seen their visibility plummet in this segment.
- Revenge of the historic players: Traffic has shifted back to sites whose core business is couponing. Specialists such as Dealabs, Ma-reduc.com, BravoPromo and Radins.com have regained top positions in search results.
Transparency and trust: the CPA Quality Label
In the face of these changes, trust is becoming the watchword. Effinity has made an active commitment to this quality approach by becoming a signatory to the CPA Quality Label for coupon sites.
The aim of this label is to promote virtuous publishers. To facilitate their identification on the Effinity :
- An orange certification pictogram is added after the pseudonym of signatory publishers.
- This visual indicator enables advertisers to instantly identify partners committed to this quality charter.
Note: Effinity encourages advertisers to prefer to work with these certified players. However, the platform remains open: each advertiser is free to work with the publishers of their choice, whether or not they are signatories.
Controlling distribution and profitability: technical solutions
To secure your margins with these partners, there are technical solutions.
Manage attribution and last click
Coupon sites often come in at the end of the sales process, claiming the “last click”. To counter this :
- Integrate an engagement tag: this distinguishes whether the site is a “business contributor” (prescriber) or simply a “finisher”.
- Modulate remuneration: adjust commissions according to the role played. A site that initiates a visit deserves higher remuneration.
Blacklisting, whitelisting and deduplication
To avoid margin leakage, advanced use of your affiliate platform is key:
- Whitelisting / Blacklisting: define which codes are commissioned. If a CRM code is leaked, you can technically block commission for that specific code.
- Channel deduplication: make sure you don’t pay twice. If a paying lever was used before the promo code, deduplication allows you to prioritize the most valuable source.
- Single-use codes: generate unique codes for each user to prevent them from spreading viruses.
Personalization: towards intelligent coupons
The future of couponing lies in hyper-personalization. Instead of “promoting everything”, adapt the offer to the context with smart coupons.
These coupons adjust to the contents of the basket in real time. For example, if the basket is around €60, the partner site can push an offer of “€5 off for every €80 spent”. This mechanism encourages the user to add a product (up-sell), thus increasing the advertiser’s margin while covering the cost of the discount.
