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.