Two decades of research on affiliate marketing: a systematic literature review

Rapid technological advancements have changed the way of communicating goods and services to customers. Businesses use different channels of advertising to promote their goods and services. Affiliate marketing has become the fastest-growing customer acquisition technique. Despite being a multi-billion-dollar industry, affiliate marketing has not seen considerable attention from the researcher’s point of view. Thus, this research introduces a systematic literature review on affiliate marketing and comprehensively analyses extant literature using different databases. The descriptive analysis infers the year in which the research has been published, the countries where the research has been performed, the research methodology used, and the journals where the literature has been published. The paper features the theories used by the previous researchers and classifies the literature into four major themes. Furthermore, the article also performs a citation analysis of the available literature to outline highly cited studies, authors, and journals using Google Scholar, Research Gate, and SCImago Journal Ranking. Keyword analysis has been imparted using bibliometrix R package to observe the different trends of research. This study enriches the current body of knowledge and concludes with an agenda for future research linked to the corresponding literature gaps.