When I first discovered Parul Mehta Bhargava through her LinkedIn newsletters, where she fearlessly calls out industry fraud and shares unfiltered insights about affiliate marketing, I knew I had to have her on Champions of Performance Marketing.
What struck me wasn’t just her expertise but also her refreshing honesty about the challenges facing our industry.
As the CEO and co-founder of vCommission, Parul Mehta Bhargava has been at the forefront of performance marketing in India and beyond since 2008. But what makes her story truly compelling isn’t just the impressive numbers, 500 direct advertiser relationships and four major verticals spanning from India to the US market, it’s how she and her husband, Tarang, built something meaningful when everyone told them to hide their Indian identity to succeed.
In this conversation, Parul doesn’t hold back. She shares the raw truth about network selection, reveals why she built a team working in the EST timezone while being based in India, and drops some serious truth bombs about industry fraud that most networks won’t discuss publicly.
Whether you’re an affiliate looking to choose better networks, a brand considering affiliate marketing, or just someone curious about building a business with your life partner, Parul’s insights will change how you think about this industry.
Check the episode on Spotify.
Or you can watch it on YouTube here!
Q: How did you start getting into affiliate marketing?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: It was by chance, and I did not know about affiliate marketing initially. I was a content writer back in college, and while looking for part-time jobs, I met Tarang, who is my husband now, and started working for him. We founded VCommission together, long before we were married.
My stint with affiliate marketing started as a content writer for the blog firms that he had then. That’s when I got into AdSense earnings, then CPA, then affiliate marketing. So my journey began quite organically through content creation.
Q: What inspired you to launch vCommission, and what challenges did you face?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: When we started back in 2008, we realized that a lot of Indian affiliates were not accepted in Western affiliate networks. When we were starting, our friends told us to change our address and use a dummy US address, saying we would not make it if we continued to use our real nationality. That’s when we thought, “Why is it so?” and started discussing why we don’t get into affiliate ourselves and make a network in India.
We started with the idea of having a platform where Indian affiliates would easily be accepted and get access to global offers.
We began small with a very small team of four people, with me being the front face on the advertiser side and Tarang leading the traffic side.
Initially, we were focused on bringing an affiliate network for Indian affiliates. Then we realized that the Indian market was also growing, and no one was talking about affiliate marketing in India back in 2008-2009. But advertisers, marketing, and e-commerce businesses were growing, and they needed traffic. We thought it would be very interesting if we went out and tried selling the affiliate network concept to Indian brands.
That’s how vCommission shaped up as the first Indian affiliate network back in 2008-2009. For the first few years, we were very focused only on Indian advertisers. Much later, in 2016 or 2017, we started onboarding global advertisers onto the platform. At this point, we have about 500 direct relationships, all managed with no self-serve, and over 100,000 affiliates on the network.
Q: What are the top verticals or product types that are working well at VCommission now?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: At vCommission, we have four major verticals. We call them global business, India business, and India COD e-commerce, and we recently started lead generation and pay-per-call in the US.
Global business is our biggest vertical, where we do e-commerce, travel, hosting, VPN, and software, which we call utility. That’s our biggest and main chunk of business.
After that, it’s India business, which includes e-commerce, travel, and lead generation in India. We work with a lot of BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) clients and education clients. So that’s our second vertical.
Our third vertical is India COD e-commerce, which we started two years back. It’s an endeavor to grow product e-commerce as an affiliate marketing vertical, much like it’s done in the US and Europe. We’re replicating the same understanding that India is a booming market, and e-commerce is growing in India, and product e-commerce on COD, particularly, is booming. So we’re making that very affiliate-friendly and starting different product-wise affiliate offers.
The fourth one is lead generation and pay-per-call for the US market, covering insurance, ACA, travel, and all these verticals, which is an established vertical globally. As we grow the company, we have to keep a balance to service all kinds of affiliates that we get, so we should have something for them, and also meet our aspirational targets of growing year on year.
Q: Was it hard to get advertisers or brands on board for pay-per-call in the US market?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: Interestingly, no. It was very seamless. We have been able to onboard some of the very big direct buyers of the industry while we are still located in India. We have not received any friction on being based in India, though we have an entity in the US where we contract them from, but we’ve not really faced any kind of issues while onboarding clients.
I think US advertisers, especially in the lead generation and pay-per-call space, want more avenues of traffic. We have an in-house media buying team as well for the lead generation and pay-per-call vertical. So we found a lot of acceptance. Everyone was ready to try the traffic, and when they liked the traffic, everyone was ready to increase their caps and payouts.
Honestly, for both lead generation and pay-per-call, it has been surprisingly very good and very easy. It’s just two years into the vertical, and I already see that upcoming as one of the top verticals out of the four by this year’s end.
For pay-per-call, particularly, I feel that our USP stands as a network where we are able to put accepting, hyping advertisers at the top every minute.
The gap that I found in the pay-per-call industry is people try to automate it and not really pay attention to minute-by-minute of what is happening at this moment because sometimes the software also fails you. That’s where we jumped in.
I have a team that works in the EST time zone, which is the opposite time zone for us as a company. But our objective with pay-per-call is that for every call that we are generating, we are trying to make it paid and convert for the affiliate. We are rigorously working towards that. So I think that has stood for us as a USP on that front.
Q: Can you tell us more about your EST time zone team?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: In the EST time zone, we have a team to manage lead generation and the pay-per-call vertical. So advertiser sales, advertiser growth, affiliate sales and affiliate growth, and the network operations. It’s a team of seven to ten people that works only on the EST time zone for lead generation and pay-per-call vertical, because this is a very dynamic vertical.
We are overall a team of about 150 people, and most of them work in the Indian time zone. So this is a special team that we’ve built. Most are still Indians, but they work in the EST time zone.
Q: What are the cost models that you work with at VCommission?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: In different verticals, we have different models. Global business primarily works on a cost-per-sale model, which is mostly revenue share. Sometimes in the utility vertical, it’s cost per acquisition.
We do cost per sale, revenue share, flat cost per acquisition, cost per lead, cost per install, and cost per install plus registration. Because Indian advertisers have a lot of dynamic requirements, and since we are here, we are able to custom build that for them, in the Indian business, we have a lot of different models.
In India, in COD e-commerce, we work on a cost-per-acquisition kind of model, which is almost to the tune of 40 to 50 percent of the product price, but it’s a flat payout so that media buyers can easily calculate their ROIs.
For lead generation and pay-per-call, we work on a cost-per-lead or cost-per-conversion call model.
Q: How do you use AI at VCommission?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: I think AI is a very overused term now. I feel AI was always there. We were constantly training our systems.
Since we come from the affiliate industry, we’ve had experience with tracking; we’ve seen how it has evolved and how our systems now provide us with a lot more information than they did 10 or 15 years ago. But yes, AI has now become like a mass product. It’s available for everyone.
We use AI in many different ways, and personally, I’m a fan of AI. I feel that AI can really help you do a lot of things at a much faster pace. From writing emails to taking assistance in writing emails, if you really know what you want to put in that email, whether it be internal to a client or to a colleague, it’s very easy to put your feelings into words now.
I think AI can help analyze a lot of reports from different angles.
For me personally, I use AI to learn a lot of things. I think in the entrepreneurship world, we talk a lot about mentors and friends. I think AI is a very good mentor if you really put time into researching, asking the right questions and kind of brainstorming with it.
So I really feel that it can be very helpful. Obviously, as an entrepreneur, if I used to take two hours to make, let’s say, a proposal or presentation that I wanted to put forward to either a client or my team or whatever, now that can be done much faster.
For our media buying side, I feel there is a lot of innovation and a lot of controversy over whether something is right or wrong, but there are AI tools that do it for you, and the way ads are built and the way people are making different creatives.
So, I feel that AI is all around; everyone is using it in different ways, which is very interesting, and it’s a very powerful tool that can help you achieve whatever you’re trying to accomplish in life. So, if someone is trying to save time, AI can help them do so. If you want to learn, AI can help you learn. So it’s very interesting.
Q: You mentioned having an internal media buying team. How do affiliate networks use media buying teams without competing with affiliates?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: Honestly, Tarang and I started as media buyers ourselves back in the day, and when VCommission started growing, there was a big discussion that we didn’t want to compete with our affiliates. We are in the business of affiliate networks, so there’s no way we can do media buying ourselves on live brands and advertisers that we are working with. So we stopped doing that way back in 2012 or 2013.
We re-established our internal media buying team about 18 months ago. What we are primarily doing now is understanding new advertisers that we onboard and creating success stories or benchmark metrics so that we can roll it out to affiliates.
For example, the India COD e-commerce vertical that we recently started. This is a very new vertical for the Indian affiliate industry. Though it is very interesting and the numbers can be very huge, if we don’t tell affiliates what a particular product’s CPA is going to be, what its return rates are, and what the profitability they can expect realistically per product is, we cannot gather enough interest. So we started doing internal media buying for such products so that we can test, build benchmarks, and then give it over to affiliates to scale.
We also do internal media buying for lead generation and pay-per-call buyers because there are some buyers who say they’re not comfortable working with network distribution or our affiliates yet. For the initial caps that we get, they say they want us to do this through our internal media buying.
Then later on, when the relationship develops, they open up to more affiliates. We clearly tell advertisers that this is internal media buying and this is affiliate traffic, and with transparency, things are really able to move smoothly.
So primarily our internal media buying teams are for these two verticals. We don’t do mainstream, and we don’t compete with our affiliates. That’s how it works for us.
Q: What strategies can you share for affiliates to optimize their campaigns and get profitable with offers?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: Julia, I feel that affiliates themselves are very smart. I personally don’t think I can give them any strategies to scale the traffic. However, what I mostly encounter in these discussions is affiliates talking about the money they lost or the money they did not receive, often due to a poor choice of network or campaign.
I feel my expertise personally lies in that area where I can guide affiliates on how to choose an affiliate network and how to choose the right campaign.
And the rest, of course, are the best media buyers themselves. They know how to use their media to turn it profitable.
In my honest opinion, I believe that affiliates still chase the highest payout. And I think it has been talked about a number of times by a number of people that this is a very wrong strategy. This is suicidal, and payout is not the only metric you should be looking at. Still in 2025, I feel that’s the only point on which affiliates are judging a network.
They’re so good with their traffic. They’re so good with media buying. Why can’t they just split test and see who is giving them the highest EPC? Why can’t they just have patience and see who is paying me on time? And why can’t they just try to get access to a network’s leadership and see who is accessible, who is responding, and who is really ensuring that any of my problems are acknowledged and solved?
So I think this is one area where I probably would speak tirelessly to affiliates and say that: choose a good network, choose a network that has been around, and choose a network that you know is able to handle things for you rather than just thinking, Okay, I’m getting the highest payout here and this is the only network I want to be working with.
Q: How does the approval process work for new affiliates at VCommission?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: For us, the affiliate process is very simple. We have an extensive affiliate form. And if an affiliate really takes the effort to fill out our extensive form, we accept most of the applications into the network.
Most of our major advertisers are well-known brands, so all our campaigns feature recognizable company names. These brand campaigns require a two-step approval process.
First, affiliates get accepted into the VCommission network. Then, they must apply separately for specific brand partnerships like Shopify or AliExpress. During this second step, we review their traffic sources and marketing methods. We often contact them directly to understand their promotion strategy and ensure their traffic methods comply with each brand’s specific requirements and guidelines.
This dual approval system helps us maintain quality standards and protects our brand partners from inappropriate traffic or marketing practices.Retry
That’s how the approval process works. As affiliates ourselves, I feel that entry into a network should be easy so that you have access to what that network has to offer.
So that’s our concept: sign up for our network. Our sign-up form is already a little bit complicated, and we know it. It is intentional in a way. And once you fill it out, you’re automatically approved. We approve almost 80% of the applications that we get.
There are certain programs that are not high risk; they’re not sensitive. They get access to all those programs. They get access to browse through our dashboard. The affiliates get to see all the brands. They get to see all the different tabs. They can contact us via WhatsApp from within their panel. And for the sensitive ones, they will have to apply again. And that’s how we start the relationship.
Q: How important is tracking for your network and users?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: For me, it’s the topmost priority. I believe one of the main reasons we receive our cut as a network, which is part of our business model for both affiliates and advertisers, is tracking. We know how to handle our traffic. We know how to handle the commissions. Our team knows how to display them. We know how to quality check.
I think the tracking platform is the most important asset for an affiliate network.
Interestingly, we’ve had this discussion many times internally that we are a 15-year-old company now, and we have such a huge team. We also have a tech team, by the way. Why don’t we build an in-house tracking platform? It will save us a lot of money.
But I don’t think Tarang and I align with that thought. We are a marketing company; we are not a tech company. And for a marketing company to keep up with the tech compliances that keep coming up, I think that is the most important factor that a network should rely on, rather than building its own tech.
Obviously, if one of your founders or your founding team is tech savvy and they can keep up and they are very confident that they will not let clicks drop, fair enough. But I feel for us, we take tracking very seriously. We take pride in knowing the platform that we use probably more than their team does. We get into the very nitty-gritty of how the platform is tracking.
So I feel, and like I said, this is one of the most important key metrics of vcommission that I get because of the way I handle traffic; I take that commission. So we at VCommission take tracking very seriously.
Q: How important is split testing in affiliate campaigns, and what should affiliates test first?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: So, Julia, I will give you a network’s perspective here. Again, like I said, media buyers know what they do best. What I see mostly is affiliates’ split testing for their profitability. In my opinion, when a media buyer starts with us, what we tell them is to test for advertisers’ profitability, even if it is breakeven or even if it is a little bit of loss for them initially.
I take it as my responsibility to get it covered overall. But let’s not make anything a short-term stint because, like I said, we work with a lot of brands, and a brand’s profitability or a brand’s longevity on VCommission is a very big priority for us.
So what I like to tell them is that they need to ask themselfs if the traffic is it profitable for them if they getting X as my payout, something like:
“What percentage of X am I making as my payout or my profits, and is my media buying profitable?”
What I like to tell them is to make sure that traffic is converting for the brand. If it’s converting for the brand and if the brand likes their quality, it is going to increase the payout eventually; it is going to give them caps.
So think about that angle first. Make sure that the brand likes your traffic because it is the one that is giving us the budget, and the money is flowing from there. So let’s have a strong hold on the starting point, and I think once that’s figured out, then we’ll see affiliates even scaling up to a million dollars a month.
Q: How do you ensure advertiser and affiliate security, especially around fraud detection?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: So I have a very different take on fraud, to be honest.
I feel number one, fraud and disallowed media are two different things.
As a network, we have to stop both. But I believe in calling a spade a spade.
So when we talk about running a network, what we have to do is safeguard brands from disallowed traffic, the traffic that they don’t like, and also safeguard them from fraudulent activities, like probably cookie stuffing or unintentional cookie injecting.
And I think the fraud bit is something that we at VCommission take very, very seriously. If you’ve seen my LinkedIn, I’ve gone out and written some newsletters about the fraud that is going on. But these are the things that I don’t see networks talking about. We in the network community say we don’t like fraud, but what are we doing about fraud? We will not talk about it.
There are presentations for advertisers, which, honestly, everyone sends to us so that we can use this tool and this technology. But number one, and the most important point that you need to explain, is what is fraud? What are you stopping? What are you against?
So I’ll tell you an interesting thing that I’m seeing in the industry right now. It’s been going on for almost two years. I don’t know how, but there’s a particular script that affiliates call retargeting scripts. They get it placed on the advertisers’ websites in their header or footer. And that injects cookies, which can override even organic transactions and turn them into affiliate transactions.
And I’ve seen so many top global advertisers have that script on their website. I don’t know how marketing managers or affiliate managers are placing it on the brand side.
Our postbacks and pixels are mostly placed on the checkout page or the attribution platform, but these are the codes that brands are actually placing on their sites, which are overriding the cookies, and no one is really talking about it. I don’t know why.
So obviously, when you ask me about fraud, we actually vet and audit the brand’s websites to make sure they don’t have those scripts and everything before accepting them when we’re onboarding, because it’s our reputation at the end of the day. Not only their reputation, but it’s ours as well.
Q: What piece of advice would you have for a new affiliate starting in affiliate marketing?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: For someone who wants to start and doesn’t know what to do, my advice is that your affiliate manager is like your best friend in a network. Build that relationship, communicate clearly, and focus on understanding the brands and campaigns rather than just chasing the highest payouts.
Q: What problem would you like to solve in the affiliate marketing space?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: There are several problems I’d like to address.
First, the communication issue – I see so many situations where people don’t respond to emails or messages, whether it’s affiliates not responding to account managers or vice versa. This lack of communication creates a lot of problems in our industry.
Second, the reputation issue.
Many people still think affiliate marketing is about spam or bad practices, but that’s just a small piece. There are so many smart affiliates who know how to use their budget effectively to bring conversions and sales to brands. It’s a shame that the industry got this reputation.
Third, tracking and attribution challenges. These remain significant issues that need better solutions and more transparency across the industry.
The industry needs better education, more transparent communication, and clearer standards to help it mature and gain the respect it deserves.
Q: Where can people get in touch with you and VCommission?
Parul Mehta Bhargava: People can reach out to me on LinkedIn, where I’m quite active and share insights about the affiliate marketing industry. You can also visit our website to learn more about VCommission and our services. I’m always happy to connect with people in the affiliate marketing community and discuss industry trends and opportunities.
Ready to work with a transparent affiliate network that prioritizes long-term partnerships? Connect with Parul Mehta Bhargava on LinkedIn to discuss your affiliate marketing opportunities with VCommission.
- LinkedIn: Parul Mehta Bargava
- Website: VCommission
Don’t miss this interview; below you can find the entire video interview (and we encourage you to subscribe to Champions of Performance Marketing as well to keep in touch with the latest interviews!)
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
