AffiliateTraction announces affiliate compliance reporting for online retail brands

AffiliateTraction, the largest international affiliate marketing agency, has announced enhanced reporting and transparency for brand compliance efforts through the launch of their new Unity dashboard.

In the last 5 years, AffiliateTraction has been steadily building and expanding the scope of their services in response to the needs of major retailers for whom brand monitoring plays a significant role in offsetting costs, preserving reputation and maintaining profit margin. This effort has led to new partnerships with leading service providers, proprietary technology, and a dedicated team of hands-on professionals who monitor and manage cases when violations occur. These services have now been significantly enhanced through several improvements to their client-side Unity dashboard that displays violation details, suggestions for improvement, historical data, graphs and projected savings, allowing retailers to make better decisions about policies and case management.

As CEO Greg Shepard explained, “Brand compliance is especially important in the affiliate marketing channel. Within other channels it is far easier to keep an eye on how a company may be represented and advertised since there are a limited number of distribution outlets that are more tightly bound to contractual obligations. In the affiliate channel, a retailer may be advertising through thousands of independent websites, often with little insight into their affiliates’ reputations or methods of promotion. This makes an effective in-house effort all but impossible without the added expense and time of having to work with several separate compliance vendors. We’ve brought it all into one place, with added technology and hands-on service, which helps our clients to maintain brand integrity while lowering costs.”

AffiliateTraction’s brand compliance services are extensive and include:

• Search compliance including active monitoring of restricted keywords and trademarks
• Content compliance to ensure affiliate sites do not contain questionable material
• Domain compliance to prevent affiliates from misusing brand names or variations in URLs
• Discount code suppression & compliance to protect margins from codes not intended for the affiliate channel
• Social media content compliance for affiliate promoting through sites like Facebook and Twitter
• Link disruption verification to identify potential problems in the clickstream
• Transaction fraud monitoring to identify invalid sales and commissions
• Product catalog quality control to ensure compatibility with top producing affiliates

Brand compliance is just a part of AffiliateTraction’s comprehensive affiliate channel services which also include multi-network affiliate management, pro-active campaign and publisher development, technical services and creative development. With refinements in technology and process, AffiliateTraction has been able to significantly offset costs, sometimes to such a degree that the savings created through compliance efforts can exceed the agency’s monthly fee for all services combined. A potent example of this is highlighted in a case study of one of AffiliateTraction’s health & beauty clients. With AffiliateTraction’s proprietary code suppression tool designed to allow retailers to selectively exclude some discount codes from the affiliate channel, the brand was able to conclude that 35% of all code transactions recorded utilized codes that were not intended for affiliate use. The resulting unauthorized code transactions were subsequently removed saving the retailer significant costs and improving affiliate channel margins. This, Shepard explained, highlights a key point on the subject of compliance. “Many brands believe that the time and effort involved are not worth the cost. However, it is often the case that compliance can result in significant savings overall, especially with a dedicated team and specialized technology.”

AffiliateTraction also maintains that while other brand compliance options exist from both vendors and networks, the scope and versatility of their services may not be comprehensive enough to properly police the channel. The company cites that networks may also have a conflict of interest since even noncompliant transactions contribute to their cut of affiliate commissions. Network compliance services are also limited only to transactions that are tracked through their domain, making multi-network monitoring fragmented and/or incomplete.

Greg Shepard used an analogy to explain why middle sized to larger brands cannot afford to omit brand compliance from their affiliate strategy, “If we think about the affiliate channel as a reservoir in which all affiliates deposit their referred sales, the retailer without brand compliance essentially has huge holes in the dam preserving the integrity of their efforts. For many deposits, there are significant losses associated through various leaks, whether they are caused intentionally by subversive affiliates or accidentally through insufficient communication, errors or lack of understanding. The reservoir cannot be built and then left to attend itself. Its dam requires maintenance, oversight, and proper engineering. We have established all of these factors in our service, combining advanced technology with a hands-on, individualized approach that is offered nowhere else in the on line marketing industry. Now we have added an advanced interface that gives our clients full transparency into our efforts. This will allow them to make informed decisions on policy and case management in order to better preserve brand integrity and margins in the affiliate channel.”