Affiliate ROAS Benchmarks 2025: Performance by Sector
- Charlie Calabrese
- Aug 5
- 4 min read
From Travel to Food & Drink, your affiliate ROAS depends heavily on your vertical. Here’s how to set smarter expectations in today’s landscape.
In the world of digital marketing, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a fundamental metric used to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Put simply, it shows you how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar you spend on a particular ad channel. For example, a ROAS of $5 means you earn $5 in revenue for every $1 you invest.
For years, ROAS has been the north star metric for affiliate programs. But treating it as a single benchmark - regardless of industry, product, or customer journey - is a mistake that leads to poor forecasting, partner churn, and misaligned goals.
The latest PMA Industry Study 2025 drives this point home. While overall affiliate investment reached $13.63 billion last year, not all dollars performed equally. Depending on your vertical, that $1 of affiliate spend could return $5 or $21. Here’s what you need to know about setting smarter ROAS expectations.
Affiliate ROAS Benchmarks Range Widely by Sector
Let’s start with the big picture. Here are the average affiliate ROAS benchmarks for key sectors in 2024.
Travel continues to lead the field, delivering $19 for every $1 spent, a slight dip from $21 in 2021, but still the highest in the report. This strong performance is driven by high AOV (average order value) and relatively long planning cycles, where affiliate plays a major influencing role.
Retail’s ROAS remains solid at $11, though down slightly from $12 in 2021. However, this is still above the ROAS for most paid channels, especially in mid to lower-funnel efforts.
On the lower end, Entertainment & Media and Healthcare & Pharma saw ROAS figures in the $5 to $6 range. This reflects the complexity of conversion paths in these sectors, as well as the evolving nature of affiliate tracking in regulated or attention-heavy environments.
Retail ROAS Varies Even More by Sub-Sector
While the overall sector benchmarks show Travel as the clear leader, the real lesson of the data lies in the nuances of a seemingly "average" sector. The retail category, with its overall ROAS of $11, is a prime example of why a one-size-fits-all approach is a mistake. Because the sector is so vast and contains a wide variety of products, from high-value automotive parts to low-cost food items, its performance is incredibly diverse. Digging into these sub-sectors is the best way to see the true range of affiliate performance. Here’s how affiliate ROAS benchmarks break down across key retail categories:
If you dig a little deeper into the study’s data, you see that Clothing & Accessories is the largest sub-sector by volume, holding steady at $12, reinforcing its strategic value for affiliate marketers.
On the other end of the spectrum, Food & Drink sits at the bottom, with just $5 ROAS. Brands in this category may see more frequent but lower-value conversions, and often face stiffer competition from grocery delivery apps and in-store incentives.
Why This Matters for Your Affiliate Strategy
1. Don’t Compare Pet Treats to Cruises
If you’re in Beauty or Food & Drink, don’t benchmark against Travel or Automotive. Set expectations based on your category norms and the customer journey.
If your CFO is asking why your ROAS is “only $7,” show them that in your sector, that may be outperforming the average.
2. Understand the Conversion Curve
Not all conversions happen at the same pace.
A Travel affiliate might guide a consumer through weeks of consideration before a high-value booking. That long path is still measurable and often produces exceptional ROAS (as high as $19 per $1 spent, according to the PMA). On the other hand, a Food & Drink affiliate may influence frequent, low-value purchases with much shorter lead times, but that frequency doesn’t always result in a high return on spend.
Therefore, how long it takes a customer to convert, and how much they spend when they do, will dramatically affect ROAS outcomes. Attribution models that reward only the final click or those that overlook high-funnel influence often misrepresent the true value of these very different partner types.
3. ROAS Isn’t the Whole Story
ROAS is important, but so is:
Incrementality
New Customer Acquisition
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Cross-Channel Halo Effects
Use ROAS as a directional signal, not a solitary metric.
Smarter ROAS, Smarter Growth
ROAS should guide decisions, not dictate them. Its value comes from understanding the whole picture. The more you understand the relationship between vertical, partner type, product mix, and user journey, the better equipped you are to drive growth through affiliate.
The goal isn’t to chase a mythical "perfect" ROAS. It’s about using the right affiliate ROAS benchmarks for your category, stage, and strategy, and then optimizing from there.
Want to Benchmark Your ROAS the Right Way?
At AIM, we help brands assess affiliate performance with precision — using vertical benchmarks, channel mix diagnostics, and partner-level insights to guide smarter growth.