I have been thinking a lot about affiliate programs that are on auto approval lately. I think the days of auto approval affiliate programs are coming to an end and will soon either disappear or become rare.
A month or so ago we moved the rest of the affiliate programs we manage to manual approval since most of the applications we were getting were just plain junk. Sites claiming that WordPress.com or Google.com was their domain name and coming from a foreign country was starting to become the norm. Some of these are not exactly who you want to be partners with. These applications on auto approve can easily get bad players into your affiliate program to do harm to good affiliates as well as your brand. You are giving access to trademark bidders, bad ppc bidders, PPV and even spyware.
Lets say a user goes to Google and types in your brand name. They end up clicking on either some ppc ads or a link that automatically puts spyware or malware on the end users computer. That end user is only going to remember typing in your brand name and when they tell friends about your company this is what they will remember, not exactly how you want to be known.
With the FTC cracking down on websites and affiliate programs you should have it in your best interest to know who you are dealing with. Having 1000's of affiliates in your program isn't going to help you with sales if they are not doing anything so why bother wasting time policing them. Just announcing that you have a million affiliates tells serious affiliates that your program isn't performing correctly and you are trying to get sales any way possible. Affiliate programs may be better off having a few hundred or a thousand affiliates that are performing then being stuck on trying to raise the number of affiliates in the program.
If the FTC comes knocking on the merchants door saying this affiliate is doing this and that, the only answer they can give them is that they were auto approved into the program and we didn't know what they were doing. Needless to say this isn't a good answer. The FTC just gave a huge penalty to a merchant and will require them to monitor their affiliates for a few years. Do you want this to happen to you? I don't think so as you can avoid all this by putting the affiliate program on manual approval and carefully screen affiliates. You can either do manual approvals and know who you are working with or pay later. You have to make sure the affiliate uses some sort of disclosure that they are being paid to endorse the product especially if they are doing review sites.
As a business you don't partner with everyone in the world so why should your affiliate program be operated in the same manner. It just doesn't make good business sense. What I see in the future is serious affiliates not joining affiliate programs that are on auto approve. Wouldn't you rather have a serious affiliate then 100 that will never do anything at all? Of course you would. Being on manual approval also gives you a chance to contact an affiliate that doesn't initially look like a good fit and find out how they plan to promote your program. Many affiliates that don't look right on first look, can end up being great performers because you reached out and talked to them.
Out of the top 100 programs in the Shareasale network, 44 are on auto approval. That means over half are already on manual approval. I would bet that by the end of the year that number of affiliate programs on auto approval will be less then 10. I see no reason to have an affiliate program on auto approval except you having no one running the affiliate program or a lazy affiliate manager is in place. One of the programs we use to manage on the Google affiliate network got 300 affiliate applications a week and we would approve maybe 5 if we were lucky.
If we were on auto approval with them that would be 295 affiliates lousy affiliates that would have been in the program. We now have to watch these affiliates and 90% of them wouldn't perform anyway so why have them at all. Just the amount of time we used going through the applications was time we could have spent better helping good affiliates get better or recruit better affiliates. It would waste more time being the policeman by letting these affiliates in and having to monitor them more closely.
Is there a benefit to having your affiliate program on auto approval? Yes, It allows the affiliate to get links up sooner, including the bad guys. If you manually approve affiliates the most it should take is 24-48 hours or so. Is that really a long wait. Odds are if an affiliate is looking to work with a good affiliate program waiting a day or two at worst is not that bad.
Most serious affiliates have no problem waiting a day or so to get approved. If they were smart they already emailed the affiliate manager explaining how they would promote the program. Losing affiliates because you are on manual approval is not really the way it is.
Some managers think that they can go back and remove bad affiliates that slipped in by being auto-approved. That is a bad practice for several reasons the biggest being that by the time you remove the affiliate, they already have links up and now they are mad at you when you remove them and will talk trash about your program. Some affiliates you won't care, others will have better sites that you didn't give them a chance to talk to you about. Also, with the links already out there, part of the damage is already done.
By having your program on auto approve you are not checking to see if websites are any good and if they have basic things like a terms of service, privacy policy, about us, etc. What if an affiliate joined your program, bought a list of emails and sent out a mass marketing email mentioning your company? Now you have your brand name creating spam and maybe even a Can-Spam issue on your hands. Not exactly what you were thinking when you decided to have an affiliate program.
I mentioned a few reasons why if you are running an affiliate program you should think more about how you are approving affiliates. If you are serious about your business you should be serious about your affiliate program as well.
Should it not be the network’s responsibility to make sure that the affiliates they let into the network are legitimate? Once an affiliate is allowed into a network, merchants should be able to assume that affiliates are real affiliate marketers with viable sites, and that the only questions they need to ask would relate to whether or not “my products are a proper fit for this site”, and not “is this guy a thief who is going to get me in hot water with the FTC or other governmental agency”.
While there are times when I plan ahead, and plan out what products and merchants I want to add to an existing site or a new site, and can apply to merchant programs where there is no real rush in being approved, sometimes I am updating or adding a section to a site (or even rushing to get a new site live, as I recently did just before St. Patrick’s Day), where I come across a product available only through a merchant program to which I am not a member, and I do need to add the product NOW, and if I apply to the merchant’s program and do not get auto approval, I need to go on and use something else, and the likelihood of ever going back later on once approved to that program, and changing to that merchant’s product, is slim.
Auto approval is a big plus to affiliates.
I recently came across a network geared to a significant and currently expanding nice, and their policy is that once they approve an affiliate, you get auto approval to all their merchants. In working with them for a few days now and adding their merchant products first to some existing sites (and later on to a new site built for their niche), this is a real boon, and is making life just a little bit easier.
Vinny,
I certainly agree that there is going to be a move away from the lazy auto-approvals but my issue is that so many companies still have this stupid one-way message in place, don’t call us we will call you…. I’m happy to list LivingSocial as one of those affiliate programs that has stumbled and fallen over as this is the message you get if you are not approved.
Hi David,
After reviewing your application, we have determined that it does not meet the criteria for our program at this time. We wish you the best of luck with your site, and thank you for taking the time to apply!
Sincerely,
LivingSocial Affiliates
This e-mail has been sent from an e-mail address that is not monitored. Please do not reply to this message. We are unable to respond to any replies.
This is not technically a automated response but I really like the personal touch of do not call or contact us… it’s a massive concern if a affiliate program is unable to respond to any replies, are you trying to piss people off?
The do not reply we don’t care mentality it’s very much something that shows an advertiser or affiliate manager really just couldn’t care and is not serious about growing their program… compare that to their competitor Groupon whose affiliate managers and staff are available via phone, email and twitter… before you even are accepted…
The other strange issue that bigger platforms like CJ.com affiliates seem to have setup is the auto-responder saying you are part or have been denied then are later notified of the opposite. The set and forget seems much more common to advertisers than it is to publishers…
Sure there is a change as outsourcing allows for massive growth of spam blogs and ppc arbitrage business models hurt everyone but it should be possible to white list affiliates who have a good track record and proven to follow advertiser guidelines to be auto-approved.
Affiliatehound – In a perfect world that would be the case, some of the networks have not been policing their networks as tough as you would think. Your second sentence “merchants should be able to assume that affiliates are real affiliate marketers with viable sites” has that word “assume” in it and we know that means.
In the Gan network I would come across 25 affiliates a day with domain addresses like 1-223-4rdg-viagra.blogspot.com. You can only imagine what the site looked like. All these applications have $0 epc of course. If you were a merchant would you let these in your program. Not to mention the sites that make my antivirus light up like the fourth of July. It is coming to the point where I have to buy a mac just to do affiliate approvals.
I am saying that the auto approval system is a dying breed and if you can’t wait 24 hours to get approved or you will not wait and need to add the product NOW you can go to and join another affiliate program. (Yes I just said that). This step is also protecting the good affiliates already in the program. I can’t see any situation where you couldn’t wait 24 hours to add a product. I get what you are saying about auto approval, many a night at 2am I would discover a niche and go join an affiliate program and have a site up by morning.
The same way you get auto approved into a program is the same way the bad guys get approved, I use to like as an affiliate an auto approval so I could do what I had planned right away but now that I see it from the other side, it is an affiliate managers job to protect the merchant and keep the program running clean.
I am glad that you found a network that takes the time to approve affiliates like that and I think that’s a great thing. I wish it was that way for all the networks, it would make my job so much easier. There are a lot of bad guys out there and most affiliate applications are not like you who is doing the right thing.
AffiliateHound, I used to trust the networks enough to have most of our merchants on auto approve. Either affiliates are changing their sites and their practices after they are approved by the network, or the networks are not policing the way they used to. We are also auditing all the affiliates in our programs to find those that are using tactics that are against each merchant’s Terms, because specifically a group of coupon sites are now using tactics we don’t allow. Tactics that aren’t fair to other affiliates in addition to being not fair to the merchant. This is currently a bigger problem than trademark bidding or PPC rules violations.
Most of the networks are now the tracking and payment technology and not much more than that.
One would think that networks would want to keep out the 1-223-4rdg-viagra.blogspot.coms, to protect their merchants, their legit affiliates, and their reputations, but I guess cost containment in not allocating resources to fully evaluating prospective affiliates and the lure (at least for some networks) of the rewards of transactions produced by “unsavory” affiliates are just more important.
Maybe there could be a grace period from 2 am to 3 am for “burning the midnight oil auto approvals”.
Well since the affiliate network also owns Blogspot they are probably advertising this as an easy way to get accepted into the network. It isn’t just blogspot though I am seeing the same problems with places like squidoo and other places you can create a free website. 99% of the time I see a Squidoo or blogspot site they are going to get denied.
This problem has become much worse in the last 6 months or so. Once again I appreciate your comments.
Vinny,
I completely agree! Auto-approval for the affiliate world is just a bad move that I see too many programs utilizing just to say their number of users are up. All it takes is a few bad apples to spoil an entire program, why risk it at all? A simple approval process will save hundreds of affiliate marketers time, energy, and money in knowing that they are working with legit companies.