 Setting your own Terms & Conditions
Whether you run an independent affiliate program or use an affiliate network, it's worth spending some time to set your own terms and conditions. Most reputable affiliate networks provide this facility.
Why can't you just leave it to the network?
Networks can provide some basic terms and conditions like outlawing cookie stuffing and other practices which are clearly unethical. However, there are many areas where different merchants will have different requirements so merchants must decide their own policies on several issues.
One common issue is ppc. An affiliate buying traffic on search engines is not necessarily bad. Some affiliates are very inventive with the keywords they target and for merchants they can provide a cost-effective means of outsourcing ppc campaigns.
However, other opportunistic affiliates will simply bid on the merchants brandname which brings you no new customers. Their aim is merely to get between the customer who already intends going to your site, and their direct entry.
As a merchant, you can forbid bidding on your brand or bidding on certain terms, or forbid ppc altogether. It will depend on your individual business and strategies.
You may have special requirements to protect your brand - if you have a quality brand, you don't want affiliates promoting you as the cheapest place to buy things just to get that click through and cookie set.
If you provide a datafeed, you might need to specify the uses for that datafeed or frequency of update.
Having set conditions, you also need to police them. You are within your rights to cancel any commissions to affiliates if they breach your pre-set conditions. You can't cancel commissions if you've not set the rules beforehand.
Won't this put affiliates off?
In the offline world, you wouldn't allow a sales team to act without guidelines or monitoring. If there is a difference online, it's that the anonymous and multi-layered nature of online advertising requires even more vigilance.
As a publisher, when I see an affiliate program that takes any affiliate and allows them to do whatever they want, I am wary. Not only is the merchant likely to be losing money to unethical affiliates, some of my commissions are likely to be diverted. I have dropped several merchants recently because of their failure to run a clean program.
The other end of the scale is the merchant who wants to dictate the exact format and placing of their advertisements. This usually means that the advertisements will fail because the advertiser or agency doesn't have expertise in this form of marketing.
The ideal is where the advertiser knows the affiliate well enough to allow plenty of room to move within their guidelines, and the affiliate has some understanding of the advertisers brand and targets. This tends to happen when both parties are committed to building a long-term, mutually-beneficial relationship.
Perhaps we are seeing a movement from the free-for-all of the early affiliate marketing days to more traditional business relationships where affiliate marketing (cost-per-action) is simply the business model for payment.
Posted by Gayle at February 1, 2008 10:23 PM
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