Affiliate & Network Marketing describes the three-way performance-based transaction between a brand, a publisher and the consumer. Put simply, a brand (the merchant) pays a publisher (the affiliate) an agreed-upon fee in exchange for the affiliate connecting the brand in some way with new customers. An industry standard set of cost models guides the transactional relationship between the merchant and the affiliate, but generally the affiliate gets paid based upon some action taken by the consumer, such as a click-through or a sale — called a "conversion," which the tools in this category track and report.