Affiliates police their practice

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Revolution

01/04/2008

Best practice is the affiliate marketing sector’s topic for 2008, with experts agreeing that merchants need to set clear rules for ethical trade.

This year promises to be the one in which best practice and discussions on conduct in affiliate marketing come to the fore, with the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council taking the lead. This prognosis comes from TradeDoubler’s head of publisher services, Lee Griffin, who says that: “With Ben Wood, Vizeum’s managing director, elected as chair in January, you can expect to see some great best-practice thinking coming out of this council.” …

Excerpt from article below:

Setting terms and conditions

The most important step, experts agree, is for merchants to create clear terms and conditions for business for affiliates and ensure that these are easily accessible. i-level advises that these ‘Ts and Cs’ should cover the following: how the merchant’s brand can be represented; directions on brand materials that can be used; whether affiliates can write their own copy or must stick to copy issued by a merchant, and SEO instructions, including details such as a ban on trying to direct traffic from porn sites or by using spyware.

“Along with the guidelines, affiliates should be warned of the penalties for not adhering to the guidelines, from removal from the programme to legal action. We then manually monitor the affiliates including any irregular order patterns that could point to abuse by the affiliate generating false orders,” says Mark Creighton, managing director, i-level.

 

Mark-Creighton


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