Daily deal purveyor, Groupon, has announced the global roll out of its own affiliate marketing platform, Groupon Partner Network, which already utilises more than 10,000 online content publishers.

PerformanceIN spoke to Groupon’s Sean Smyth, vice president of global partner marketing, who said networks were still being used at present, but he hoped most of the migration would be complete by 2014.

“We will continue to work with selected partners like Zanox and Affiliate Window in the short term, but we expect to migrate most content publishers and their current affiliate programs to GPN by the end of the year,” Smyth said.

What may come as a surprise to some is that Groupon is choosing to not use one of the pre-packaged SaaS platforms from Performance Horizon Group, Cake Marketing or HasOffers. Instead, according to Smyth, it has been developed completely in-house.

Global Availability

GPN is now available in more than 30 countries after successfully coming through its pilot. It comes bundled with real-time reports on daily sales volume, impressions, and click-through rates from anywhere in the world.

Groupon is offering link creation tools too, so publishers can build browser bookmarklets in addition to widgets based on category, geolocation and retargeting. Its open APIs also provide access to thousands of deals from the Groupon marketplace, as well as orders and commissions.

Accurate Reporting

Among the 10,000 publishers are sites like Ebates, Upromise by Sallie Mae, Dealnews, Fat Wallet, ShopAtHome.com and Slickdeals.net. Ebates.com’s own chief executive officer, Kevin H. Johnson, had only good things to say about GPN.

“GPN’s reporting is extremely fast and accurate,” Johnson said. “The tools and features built into GPN help us provide the most relevant Groupon deals for our members – driving greater revenues as a result.”

As an incentive that will run until September 30 2013, Groupon is increasing potential commission levels for affiliate partners for purchases made through their digital assets from 10-12% for Groupon Local, 6-8% for Groupon Getaways and 5-8% for Groupon Goods.