| Brand protection is a major concern in Affiliate marketing and we stay ahead of the curve on this issue by providing monitoring tools and putting the controls at the retailers’ fingertips. ShareASale understands every Merchant’s desire to protect their reputation; our goal is to work hand-in-hand with our Merchants to provide the strongest brand protection measures in the industry. |  |
- Affiliate screening: Adware, spyware, and software-based Affiliates can be detrimental to your Affiliate marketing performance and might dilute your overall brand. By not accepting these types of Affiliates on ShareASale, we are able to maintain integrity in the network and help to ensure your brand is not misrepresented online or portrayed in a bad light. Affiliate Terms of Agreement.
- Affiliate Agreement: We strongly encourage our Merchants to clearly spell out any rules and regulations specific to their program in their Affiliate agreement. This is the legal binding agreement between the Merchant and their Affiliate partners and could include terms such as PPC and trademark bidding restrictions.
- PPC Bidding Rules: Merchants are also able to lay out a specific list of keywords or phrases they wish to restrict or limit the use of by Affiliates. Listing out regulations on keywords in the PPC Bidding Rules helps Affiliates to quickly see exactly which terms they are not allowed to bid on in a specific program.
- PPC Violations Report: A Merchant is able to submit a violations report to ShareASale against an Affiliate who is actively engaging in a paid search campaign using a restricted keyword (please see the Reporting PPC Violations page to view the full criteria for making a report). ShareASale will review each report, if an Affiliate is found in violation of Merchants’ search policies or restrictions, they will be administered a “strike”. If an Affiliate receives three “strikes” they are permanently removed from the network.
- Merchant Control: Merchants have full control over the Affiliates they partner with and can remove Affiliates from their program at any time. Merchants also have the ability to void out any transactions that are invalid due to trademark/search policy violations.
- Affiliate Link Tool: This tool allows our Merchants to determine what Affiliate a link belongs to. This can be helpful in determining who is bidding on PPC search terms.
- Affiliate Rating: We strongly encourage our Merchants to review their Affiliates and provide feedback along with a +1 or -1. This rating is visible to the Affiliate as well as other Merchants when the Affiliate is a current member or a new applicant to the program. The ratings and feedback provide additional info for Merchants to use when reviewing an Affiliate partnership. Feedback records are visible on any Affiliate’s Details page accessible from inside the Affiliate List report.
- Automated Application Rules: The custom affiliate application rules allows a Merchant to automatically decline (or approve) Affiliates based on a specific set of criteria such as what their overall feedback rating is, location, type of affiliate, etc… See an overview of this tool HERE.
- Payment Summary: Every month of the 15th, a report is generated detailing what is being paid – as well as identifying possibly anomalies that should be researched. This report is available under the Reports tab, listed as “Monthly Payment Review“.
- Transaction Detail Report: This report provides a wealth of detailed information including the page (on the Affiliate site) from which the banner was clicked as well as the specific bannerID that was clicked. This provides retailers with additional visibility into how their brand is being represented on the Affiliate side.
Our goal is to provide our Merchants with the strongest brand protection measures in the industry while giving Merchants full control over how their affiliates are able to represent them online. – David Zelken
Kush A. says
March 13, 2013 at 1:09 pmExcellent post Abby. Used to do what affiliate link tool does manually, but no more thanks to your post!
BrandVerity says
March 13, 2013 at 2:13 pmAbby, your Affiliate Agreement point is excellent. It simply cannot be stressed enough. The more specific a merchant can be about what their affiliate are allowed and not allowed to do, the more likely their affiliates are to maintain compliance.
We recommend getting very particular. For example: requiring the use of negative keywords in PPC campaigns, preventing the use of trademark terms in domains and subdomains, and requiring CAN-SPAM compliant email by affiliates—to name a few.