An Introduction to Affiliate Compliance
Affiliate marketing programs have the potential to add great value for a company, but a few competent scammers can quickly and vastly reduce their profitability. The technical sophistication of abusive affiliates often far outweighs the merchant’s reciprocal knowledge, allowing marketing fraud to run rampant.
This guide aims to provide extensive information about fraudulent affiliate tactics so that merchants can better understand how affiliate abuse operates, the impact of it on a company, and methods for detection and prevention. We hope that this guide can serve as a step towards an overall reduction in affiliate abuse by granting merchants a deeper understanding of the ways that unethical affiliates manipulate the system.
At BrandVerity, we provide merchants and affiliate managers with tools to detect online brand and trademark abuse. Two services, PoachMark and the Affiliate Watchlist, grant clients effective management tools for their affiliate programs by detecting affiliate abuse of paid search policies and creating a continually updated list of affiliate abusers. If you have any questions or are interested in partnering with BrandVerity, please contact us.
With access to a near-infinite number of platforms and partners, and an ever evolving technology and regulatory landscape, a brand's need for a holistic compliance approach is paramount, something that ASDA is fully aware of.
For marketing and legal teams in regulated industries, monitoring for compliance online is difficult and time-consuming. Manually monitoring thousands or even millions of pages across multiple affiliates, partners, and/or third-party sites is nearly impossible and leads to critical content being missed. Introducing BrandVerity’s automated Web Compliance solution, which empowers marketing and legal teams to ensure airtight compliance of online content and offers. Our solution provides companies with a comprehensive and efficient way to identify content compliance risks and take action immediately.
As I write this, I’m working from home, as is the rest of the BrandVerity team. For some of us, that means juggling how to home school our kids during the workday. For others, it translates into having their dogs in their laps during video calls. All in all, though, we are a lucky group to be able to have jobs that enable us to work from home. Our gratitude goes out to those who are not able to do the same, yet are helping our communities function as normally as they can, from healthcare and hospital workers to those at our grocery stores and pharmacies.
You think a competitor is abusing your trademark in the copy of their ad. You’re a little rusty on Google Ads Trademark policy. You seem to recall something about how Google doesn’t allow trademarks in the ad text, but they can use them in the display URL. You go to the Google Ads support page that describes what is and what is not allowed, and by the end of reading it, you are more confused than you were before! Don’t worry! You are not alone. Many smart people have read and re-read Google’s policies on trademark and come away with more questions than answers.
When I speak with prospective customers about the benefits of our paid search monitoring solution, one thing I commonly hear is: “We don’t need automated software; we are already monitoring and remediating issues manually.” Another common refrain is: “Our agency handles all of that.”
Credit: Mandy Jansen
After our recent post on threats and risks in coupon code channels, we figured it would be useful to follow up with some insight into how companies can monitor coupon codes. We believe that these methods, though somewhat limited, can help a company at least start to get its codes in check:
We’re living in a golden age of digital marketing. As consumer behaviors shift, the pace of digital transformation has quickened across many sectors – pushing marketers to invest more than ever before in various digital channels and affiliate programs as a way to generate growth. In 2022, affiliate marketing spend in the US alone is expected to reach a record high of $8.2B. Meanwhile, paid search is being forecasted to hit a global market spend of $136B by the end of this year.
After another year of pandemic reverberations delivering relative unpredictability, and a fair degree of volatility, it’s curtains for 2021.
