Who cares about compliance?

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Performance marketing is complex. It takes time to master and requires significant investment, patience and time. All these things point to both its strength but also a weakness that has often led to it being an easily neglected marketing channel.

Its complexity is often at odds with some companies’ attempts to commoditise the industry, reducing it to a simple plug and play option. They will claim that this approach enables Advertisers to ‘take control’ of their affiliate programme by cutting out the network middle men. They will state networks are an expensive barrier, curtailing an Advertiser’s ability to optimise their campaign.

In commoditising the channel they reduce it to a technology solution which is fine if you’re dealing with simple link distribution via a handful of trusted partners, but what if you want to optimise your campaign and work with potentially hundreds of affiliates? What price the control from additional network functions that these technology companies cannot offer?

In an often misunderstood marketing channel, so compliance probably sits atop that list and concepts that are difficult to master are typically the first to be neglected; after all it will never be the area of affiliate marketing that will draw the crowds in.

I frequently find it baffling how third party solutions, defined by their self management and technology, are often flogged based on cost-saving. Why pay the middleman, often portrayed as a lazy intermediary creaming off precious marketing spend without offering value? Not only is this a gross misrepresentation but it also assumes that in dealing directly with your affiliates you have control and visibility over how they’re promoting you and this in turn means everything you’re paying for is legitimate.

Can any affiliate manager handling a programme with a decent and extensive affiliate base ever confidently stand in front of their boss and say they know how each and every one of them is portraying their brand?

Probably not and whilst this is a natural consequence of dealing with potentially hundreds of brand partners, it also highlights how a robust network compliance function is probably the critical element of any affiliate programme beyond the bread and butter tracking, reporting and payments.

Let’s consider Awin’s compliance function for a minute. We invest a substantial six figure sum in headcount as well as proprietary and third party tools. The team deals with compliance at three stages: on joining the network, on joining a programme and ongoing promotion.

They assess dozens of applications a day, every one of them manually processed, cross referencing dozens of parameters, making judgements based on efficacy and quality. They also need to deal with enquiries from numerous affiliates who believe they have legitimate traffic sources, ensuring the cross-network self-regulatory framework designed to build an industry quality threshold is maintained (note this framework has always been network, not third party, centric).

This effectively means we turn down hundreds of affiliates from overseas who are able to promote in the US, much of Europe and Asia but not in the UK. The cultural aspect of affiliate marketing is an interesting one that a switched on compliance function has to remain vigilant about.

Ongoing they are constantly assessing network quality, removing affiliates on a weekly basis. Prior to every payment there are additional checks and balances. In fact there are dozens of procedures, policies, processes, investigations and enquiries being instigated and investigated every week.

There is a place for third party technology companies as long as Advertisers approach them with their eyes wide open about the additional functions they may now be expected to fulfil. Challenge your supplier to offer you transparency on compliance and rigorously interrogate the levels of protection offered. Failure to do so could mean those initial cost savings could result in damage to your brand and a serious false economy.

View this article live here on The Drum

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