Awin Publisher ID, Explained: How to Find the Affiliate Account Behind a Brand-Bidding Ad

Awin is the largest affiliate network across most of the verticals where brand bidding does the most damage — retail, travel, finance, VPN, DTC. So when one of your affiliates starts bidding on your brand name in Google, the odds are good the trail runs through Awin. And when it does, the entire case against that affiliate comes down to a single number: the awinaffid.

Get that number right and you can hand Awin a complaint they can act on in days — terminate the publisher, reverse the commission. Get it wrong — and most brands get it wrong — and you'll send Awin a value that resets on every click, they'll close your ticket as unactionable, and the affiliate keeps billing you. The maddening part is that the right number and the wrong number sit right next to each other in the same URL.

This is how to tell them apart, find the right one in both of Awin's URL formats, and use it before the clock runs out.

I run AdCrime, which does this resolution at scale. But every step here is something you can do by hand from a redirect chain — no tool required. The point is knowing which number the network can actually act on.

The one number that matters — and the three that don't

An Awin tracking URL is full of numbers. Exactly one of them identifies the publisher — the affiliate's permanent account in Awin. The rest are noise for enforcement purposes. Here's the whole cast:

The awinaffid is the account number an affiliate manager pastes into Awin to find the human being behind the ad. It is the same on every click, every day. It is the smoking gun.

The single most common mistake brands make is grabbing the awc instead — because it's the most visible, most official-looking value on the final landing URL. It looks like this:

awc=42012_1775687497_a1a7e275fd2f9a3d8d6c

Long, specific, impressive — and worthless to Awin, because that token existed for exactly one click and will never be seen again. The awinmid=42012 in front of it is just your merchant ID. The actual publisher number is usually sitting two hops upstream, in the link that did the redirect.

The number that gets an affiliate terminated is almost never the longest one in the chain. It's the short, boring one: a five-or-six-digit awinaffid.

Where Awin hides the publisher ID: the two URL formats

Awin uses two tracking-link formats, and you need to recognize both, because the publisher ID is named differently in each.

Format 1 — the classic awclick.php:

awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=42012&id=509365&clickref=spring-sale

Here the publisher is id=509365. (mid is your merchant ID.)

Format 2 — the newer cread.php:

awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=42012&awinaffid=1944389&ued=https://yourbrand.com

Here the publisher is awinaffid=1944389. (awinmid is your merchant ID; ued is your destination URL.)

Same network, same meaning, two different parameter names for the publisher (id vs awinaffid) and two for your merchant ID (mid vs awinmid). These are Awin's own documented link types — nothing obscure — so the only trick is knowing which parameter carries the publisher in each. When you trace a redirect chain from a brand-bidding ad, the Awin hop is the one routed through awin1.com (or awin.com, or the tidd.ly shortener Awin uses). Read whichever format it is, and pull the publisher value.

If reading a redirect chain hop-by-hop isn't second nature yet, that's its own skill — how to read an affiliate redirect chain covers it across every network. For Awin specifically: find the awin1.com hop, read the awinaffid (or id), ignore everything else.

The ShareASale twist (it's Awin now)

If your chain runs through shareasale.com, you're still dealing with Awin — Awin acquired ShareASale in 2017 and the platforms are now merged. ShareASale links look different:

shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=2244254&u=500562&m=135799&afftrack=...

Here the publisher is u=500562 (m is the merchant, b is the banner, afftrack is a per-click sub-tag). Different letter, same idea: u is the account number you file on. And ShareASale compliance now feeds the same Awin team — so don't be surprised when a ShareASale complaint comes back on Awin letterhead.

One reason this matters: a single coupon operator often runs the same site through both Awin and ShareASale on different clicks. We've seen one domain resolve to an Awin publisher (509365) on one capture and a ShareASale publisher (500562) on another. If you only check one, you only terminate half of them. Read every hop, every time.

How to tell an awinaffid from an awc on sight

You don't need a tool to tell the publisher ID from the click hash — they look completely different. Train your eye:

A real awinaffid is short and boring:

509365      1944389      525789      1957167

Numeric, usually five to seven digits. That's it. If it's short and dull, it's probably the real account.

An awc is long and busy, with a timestamp baked in:

42012_1775687497_a1a7e275fd2f9a3d8d6c
        └─ that's a Unix timestamp (the click's exact second)

The fastest test in the whole game: is there a timestamp in the middle of it? That 1775687497 is the moment the click happened. Account numbers don't carry timestamps; click events do. If you see the pattern digits_digits_hash, you're holding a click, not an identity. Put it down and keep looking for the short numeric awinaffid.

This one habit — refusing the timestamped value and finding the static one — is the difference between a complaint Awin actions and a complaint Awin bins.

Step 0 you can't skip: your Awin PPC policy

Here's the part that decides whether finding the awinaffid even helps: **Awin enforces brand bidding at the program level, not the network level.** Awin's framework is two layers. The network-level Publisher Terms and Code of Conduct cover general fraud and IP misuse. But the specific "you may not bid on our brand name" rule lives in your advertiser program's PPC policy — the settings where you declare, per your program, whether publishers may:

• use your brand name in paid-search ad titles and descriptions (yes/no),
• show ads when your brand name is the search keyword (yes/no),
• bid on your brand plus modifiers (yes/no),
• bid on misspellings of your brand (yes/no).

Reversal and termination authority flows from that policy. So before you ever chase an awinaffid, make sure your Awin program PPC policy actually prohibits brand bidding. If it's left permissive, the affiliate didn't break a rule and you have nothing to enforce. Set the policy first; hunt the publisher ID second. (This is the same "have the contract before the evidence" principle that runs through the whole enforcement workflow.)

What to do with the awinaffid

Once you've got a real publisher ID and a program policy that prohibits the bid, enforcement is procedural. File it through Awin's Compliance process (reachable from your advertiser dashboard; Awin documents its standards via its Compliance hub and Publisher Code of Conduct — confirm the current in-dashboard path, it moves). Give them:

• the awinaffid (the publisher ID — the static one, not the awc),
• your awinmid (confirming it's your program),
• a timestamped SERP screenshot of the ad on your brand term, from the region it ran in,
• the redirect chain showing the awin1.com hop, and
• the program clause the bid violated.

Awin's compliance team reviews brand-bidding complaints and will reverse commissions on a confirmed violation — typically within a few business days, though timelines vary. File each one individually, not in a batch.

And do it fast, because Awin's own terms put a clock on it. Awin commissions auto-validate — under the Access terms, clause 5.6 states each transaction is "deemed to have been approved" at the end of the validation period "unless declined," and the auto-validation period can't be switched off (it's capped at 67 days on Access, and Awin recommends setting it to your returns window plus a few days). Once a transaction is approved, clause 5.7 says you have "no right whatsoever to recover" the commission. In plain terms: a found awinaffid has a shelf life. Decline the fraudulent transactions inside the validation window and the money comes back; miss the window and it's gone, even though you caught them.

So the whole Awin enforcement loop is: prohibit it in your PPC policy → find the static awinaffid in the chain → file with evidence inside the validation window → reverse and terminate. Four steps, and the only hard one is finding the right number, fast, every time.

Mario Vaher is the founder of AdCrime, which scans Google Ads across multiple regions for affiliates bidding on brands they aren't authorized to touch, resolves the redirect chain and publisher ID behind each one, and packages it as the evidence you'd file with the network. If you want to see what's bidding on your brand right now, the first scan is free — or read the full, ungated Affiliate Brand-Bidding Fraud Playbook.