Running a successful affiliate program requires more than just setting it up. You’ll need to monitor affiliate activities to ensure that the terms of the affiliate agreement are being followed and your interests aren’t jeopardized.
Thankfully, there are several tried and tested techniques and tools to help you with effective affiliate policy monitoring. This article will show you how to use them as part of your affiliate rules monitoring efforts.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Affiliate policy monitoring is the practice of systematically monitoring your affiliate activities to ensure they’re compliant with your brand’s policies and relevant laws and regulations.
- Policy monitoring helps maintain the integrity of your brand and prevents fraud.
- Laying out affiliate terms and conditions clearly and transparently is essential for successful policy compliance.
- The usage of dedicated affiliate management and affiliate policy monitoring tools is essential for maintaining an affiliate program on a significant scale.
Why Is Affiliate Policy Monitoring Invaluable in Affiliate Marketing?
Monitoring the marketing practices of your affiliates is essential for multiple reasons, including the following:
- Ensuring regulatory compliance: You want your affiliates to stick to the established rules of your affiliate relationship, as well as any relevant laws and regulations, such as compliance with copyright laws—failing that might jeopardize your brand.
- Maintaining brand integrity: Monitoring your affiliates can help ensure that they don’t use any content that may damage your brand reputation, directly or by association.
- Preventing fraudulent activities: Without monitoring, your affiliates may resort to activities such as click fraud to earn more money than they deserve.
- Tracking affiliate performance: Affiliate monitoring also helps you track the performance of your affiliates, helping you identify metrics for success, develop a long-term marketing strategy, and guide your affiliate partners.
Best Practices for Affiliate Program Monitoring to Ensure Compliance
To get the most out of your affiliate monitoring process, it’s a good idea to follow these best practices:
1. Identify Goals of the Partnership Program
Identifying the goals of the partnership program before settling on exact terms and conditions goes a long way in determining the ultimate success of your program and compliance monitoring efforts.
For example, suppose you aim to increase your brand’s visibility among a specific demographic, such as Generation Z. In that case, you may want to encourage your partners to pursue a content policy attractive to that audience.
This should be clearly laid out in the partnership agreement, and monitoring should ensure that the right type of content is getting published.
2. Clearly Define Rules and Acceptable Promotional Methods
The exact terms of the agreement should be clearly defined to avoid any ambiguities that may lead to conflicts and debates over what’s acceptable and what’s not. To make the guidelines even clearer, it’s a good idea to provide specific examples of how things should or shouldn’t be done.
These brand guidelines should also describe promotional methods that are acceptable to you and explicitly restrict practices that you believe may be harmful.
For example, most brands place restrictions on brand bidding by affiliates—a practice where an affiliate uses your own brand’s keywords to divert traffic towards their website. However, the exact terms of this restriction need to be clearly defined.
3. Develop a Brand Safety Checklist for Partners to Follow
The term “brand safety” refers to a set of guarantees that your brand won’t appear alongside content that might negatively impact its reputation. For example, most potential buyers might be suspicious of a health/wellness product line if they see its products advertised alongside content promoting health-related conspiracy theories.
To ensure that you’re always on the same page with your potential affiliates, create a checklist that clearly details all practices that you see as unsafe or unsuitable for your brand’s identity. Aside from serving as a reference guide for your affiliates, this will make monitoring easier and help you point out any potential policy violations more easily.
4. Continuously Monitor the Affiliate Program by Using Affiliate Management Tools
Monitoring compliance manually is a difficult job, especially if managing a large affiliate network. With too many factors to keep track of, it’s virtually necessary to use one or more dedicated affiliate tools to track affiliate activity and ensure compliance.
These tools include fraud detection tools, brand protection tools, analytics tools, detection tools, and suites combining these functionalities.
5. Track Affiliate Performance Metrics
The process of monitoring affiliate agreements requires you to track some aspects of their overall activity. These metrics are also useful for analyzing your affiliates’ performance, as well as the performance of your overall campaign.
Keeping track of these metrics, such as clicks, conversion rate, click-through rate, sales revenue, etc., is crucial for monitoring the performance of your affiliate partners and helping you learn if they’re adequately performing on their side of the affiliate contract.
Apart from that, you can use the metrics to gauge how well your entire program performs and make adjustments to the way you manage it as necessary.
Essential Tools for Monitoring Your Affiliate Marketing Program
As we already mentioned earlier, using monitoring systems and tools is essential for any effective affiliate campaign. Let’s go through some of the most useful ones.
1. BrandVerity
As one of the best brand protection suites available on the market, BrandVerity has two main services to offer: web compliance and paid search monitoring.
The web compliance tool performs in-depth crawls on all your partners’ pages on a daily basis, looking for any compliance breaches against your contract, as well as any breaches of regulations from leading agencies in the United States.
The paid search monitoring tool goes even broader—it tracks your branded keywords on search engines.
It detects any instances where they’re used illegally, contrary to your brand policies, or otherwise harmful to your brand’s reputation. This allows you to take proactive steps in defending your brand reputation even outside of your affiliate program.
2. UpPromote
An all-in-one affiliate management platform for Shopify stores, UpPromote is one of the most popular solutions for affiliate program management, with some even considering it the ultimate affiliate marketing software.
This is largely because of its user-friendliness and easy integrations, which make it simple for most business users.
As an all-in-one solution, it also features rudimentary brand monitoring features that should satisfy most businesses. Some of them include a fraud detection tool, which detects and prevents fraudulent signups based on IP/email filtering and tracks suspicious behavior in real time.
There’s also a tool that creates compliant tax and invoice templates based on your location.
The built-in affiliate tracking tools are also helpful for figuring out performance metrics.
However, UpPromote exclusively works for Shopify web stores, which limits its scope.
3. Partnerize
As another all-in-one affiliate management tool, Partnerize offers more robust monitoring tools, based on clever leverage of AI and automation.
This tool allows you to build a custom tracking and monitoring system from scratch, letting its “Protect” feature automatically detect any policy violations or fraud attempts. Thanks to automation, this can seamlessly integrate with other aspects of your affiliate program in Partnerize.
One such aspect is the program’s payment system. Partnerize allows you to develop a custom commissioning structure that automatically pays partners out based on their contributions—integrating it with the policy monitoring tool lets you automatically apply penalties for any compliance breaches.
Let The Pros Handle Your Affiliate Marketing Setup
We’ve covered some of the best practices and tools necessary to keep your affiliate program compliant with your brand policies and regulatory standards. But are you still not sure how to set up an affiliate policy monitoring system?
We’re Vivian Agency—a team of top specialists in affiliate and influencer marketing, who have helped many brands successfully develop their marketing programs since 2018.
If you need help with figuring out how to deploy an efficient policy monitoring framework or any other part of your digital marketing efforts, we’ve got you covered.
Write to us right away, and we’ll respond as promptly as possible—or book a call so we can talk directly whenever you find it convenient.
