Ecom Access

The affiliates in your network are akin to a vast sales force, and as such, it is extremely important that they maintain the same standards of honesty and quality that your brand strives for. As a result, getting involved in the approval process for affiliate applications is a great way to ensure that your brand ambassadors live up to your standard of quality and integrity.

Why your Affiliate Program Needs Protection
If the wrong affiliates get into your affiliate program, you could find yourself faced with the unpleasant consequences of fraud.  Fraudulent affiliates can be costly, and manifest in a number of ways:

• Stolen credit cards can be used to make purchases on your site after clicking through their own affiliate links
• Traffic can be stolen from rightfully-referring affiliates
• Spamming
• Bots can be used to generate fake clicks or leads for your site

You also want for your brand to be represented in the manner in which you have chosen to represent your business. Allowing an affiliate with questionable content on their website, or even one with a poorly designed site, can cause associations with your brand that affect it negatively.

It is in your best interest, then, to do what you can to guard against these events. One of the first steps you can take is at the affiliate approval stage.

The Basics: The Application Process
When starting an affiliate program, the natural inclination is to get as many affiliates on board as quickly as you possibly can. As with any other facet of business, merchants should be mindful of the trade-off between quality and quantity.

As a merchant or affiliate manager, you are ultimately looking to attract super affiliates-i.e. the cream of the crop. Of course, you don’t want to refuse an application from a novice affiliate who is legitimate, as it is today’s novice who may eventually become tomorrow’s super affiliate.

The Affiliate Approval Process: What to Look For
The vast majority of affiliate applications will generally come from people who genuinely want to promote your product or service. However, some may be would-be fraudsters. The sooner you can intercept these individuals, the better – and the earliest possible opportunity is when you first see their applications.

At this juncture, you can use the information that the affiliate has entered when signing up to your affiliate program, including name, address, email address, and payment information.  Affiliates who aren’t well-intentioned tend to follow specific patterns when filling in this information. At Share Results, for example, affiliate applicants are subjected to a 7 step process before being accepted in our network.

Essentially, account details are cross-referenced with payment details and WHOIS (link) records for any incongruities. Then the affiliate’s site is screened for adult content, language, and to ensure that it’s operational. Should any incongruities exist, the affiliate is contacted directly.

Only after all account information is verified as legitimate is an affiliate admitted to the Share Results network. Once an affiliate is approved, retailers then have the additional choice of whether or not to accept an affiliate into their own program.

Each of these items can be reviewed using manual checks, comparing data entered in different parts of the affiliate’s profile, and calling up the WHOIS record for the domain in question.  This process can be time-consuming, however, so to make it easier for affiliate managers and merchants, the Share Results Affiliate Network actually undertakes this task for them.

In our next post in this series, we will take a look at the Affiliate Verification Index used in the Share Results affiliate marketing software solution to calculate a score to help you find the best affiliates for your program.

Tags: affiliate approval, affiliate programs, affiliate verification index

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