To save time at Share Results, we have also developed a tool called the Affiliate Verification Index, or AVI.  This tool presents you with an easily-interpreted visual “score” for each affiliate application, providing a measure of how accurate an affiliate’s account information is – a strong indicator of an affiliate’s intentions.

How to Use the Affiliate Verification Index Score

In addition to knowing that affiliates have been manually screened, the merchants in the Share Results affiliate network benefit from our AVI in other ways. This is and an easy and convenient metric that merchants can use to judge whether an affiliate applicant is a good match for their program.

An affiliate’s AVI score should not be the be-all and end-all, however.  Applications from affiliates who have a low AVI score (1, 2, or 3 out of 5), or who fail on some of the points above when manually checked, can always be scrutinized further. This can also include emailing the affiliate to ask him to please send you an email from the domain they have listed on their application.

In other words, where manual checking lacks the ease and efficiency of the AVI, the AVI misses the human element of the screening process. As in all facets of business, people matter as much as automation, so it helps, then, to enjoy the double protection of both human screening and automated metrics.

What Else Does the AVI Tell You? The Big Picture

If you are consistently getting applications with a very low AVI score, you may have inadvertently set up your program to be appealing to low-quality affiliates.  Consequently, you might want to reconsider whether your commission structure is on the low side, or whether the action requirements to trigger a payout are too lenient.

Fraudsters often aren’t discriminate about affiliate program payouts, as their methods of bringing in leads or sales tend toward being high-volume – reducing the importance of the payout for a single lead or sale. They will also pick merchants and affiliate programs that they can easily generate fake leads for – which is much less work if you pay an affiliate based on a surface-level action such as a click or the filling out of a simple form.

A prevalence of low-AVI affiliate applications may also indicate that you should consider how your affiliate program is being promoted, not to mention how you can make it better appeal to the kinds of affiliates you want to attract. Are the terms of your affiliate program on par with your competitors?  Are you getting the word out about your program in the right industry-related publications and websites?  These are all good questions to ask and should be considered carefully when attempting to create a profitable affiliate program.

The Rewards

Proper attention to approving affiliate applications will help you build a profitable program. You can launch your affiliate program with (or move your affiliate program to) a network such as Share Results to take advantage of both our manual screening process and built-in Affiliate Verification Index, or you can do the manual checks yourself.

Either way, make sure to review each application with care.  Your affiliates are your business partners, and they can be powering part of your company’s evolution – it’s up to you to make sure that the evolution is a positive one.

If you missed Part 1 of this series, read it here.

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