How do you manage and communicate with your affiliate partners to ensure quality and transparency?

We believe in hand holding our affiliates from signup to promoting the links/banners, to training them to be more effective affiliates and publishers. It's part of what sets Experience Advertising apart in the affiliate program management game.

Affiliate should be communicated with on a weekly basis at the least. You can check in with them or send them affiliate newsletters to keep them up-to-date on all the company news happenings and new promotions. You can ask them for a phone call or to get on a video call to discuss the partnership, and working together more closely.focus on building the relationship with each and every Affiliate and and it will pay dividends.

If you are in a position at all, to create your affiliate partner agreements with a summarization of the legalese, this can be extremely beneficial for smaller publishers who may not have the time/ability to engage lawyers OR those where your language is not their first. Additionally, if you operate a program with terms that are more unique, make sure you are clearly defining these terms upfront and early with partners, especially with those who will be more highly impacted by the unique terms.

The first thing to avoid is asking or expecting the #1 spot on the homepage. Why? Because too many affiliate managers ask this of their affiliates. If you want to stand out, ask what other pages and channels deliver more sales.

One thing I find helpful (which I literally just spoke about in the live stream webinar I delivered yesterday) on my profile is to : - Set clear terms and terminology (what is and isn’t allowed with actual examples) Keep it simple and concise and talk to your partners when you onboard them! - Have a brand onboarding process helping partners understand where and how your brand should be displayed

Don't overthink it - be open, direct, clear for both sides - give your terms, and ask for their's, discuss, put it on paper and move on.

Everyone is an influencer. Or so they think they are. We teach influencers how to be affiliates and teach affiliates how to be influencers. Our expectations are clicks and sales. We want the best quality promotions if they participate in product reviews or sponsored campaigns through our affiliate channel. We want them to be on time with drafts and final posts and we want them to use affiliate links. This is how we are measured.

The best way to set clear guidelines and expectations is from day 1. This can be done during the program set up through your TC's but also within your first communications with your publishers via email/phone. During this period you can also share any other incentives that you feel would be relevant to your publishers that will drive program results in the early stages.

Expectations should be clear before affiliates even apply or join your program. Once they do join, these expectations should be again reiterated and shared with them. Miscommunication usually happens right off the bat, if you can nail the first few interactions your whole experience with affiliates is much cleaner.

Here are some options for tracking/network providers based on your industry If you're in SAAS (and on a small budget/) FirstPromoter is great, lots of flexibility and integration options. Rewardful is definitely a good second choice and their recently appointed CEO is creating great content. If you're in SAAS (and have a budget (1.5k+ per month) Partnerstack - The OG of SAAS affiliate/partnerships, great service, payments are handled by them If you're in Ecom Impact ShareASale Awin CJ If you're on Shopify Checkout Superfiliate and Social Snowball they have a great setup and it works great with Shopify

At JustCall, I use FirstPromoter which has been an effective supporter of our growth efforts for the last 5 years. We've paid almost $1M in commissions to 1000+ affiliates to date. It also offers our affiliates visibility in the campaigns they run. It's not as expensive as other players in the market and integrates with most payment providers.

This is at the center of managing an affiliate program. Results shown in data is the outcome of having great working relationships with the affiliates. Taking the time to connect with each affiliate and understand how/where they are positioning your product creates the opportunities to test new strategies or placements where both sides win. Share the business objectives with affiliates and they can provide valuable feedback to compete better in your industry. Having reliable data feeds that report accurate data is a must.

Use Affiliate Network or Affiliate tracking solution for clarity, precision and timely reporting - every Affiliate will have their own access, and you will have less manual work. Google Analytics is not suitable for precise Affiliate marketing results tracking - as too many errors and data discrepancies occur, and also you can't give access to the Affiliates - thus it would create a lot of manual work for you. GA is a support tool for your internal reporting / tracking.

If you want to stand out as an affiliate manager, share some of the data that you're allowed to share with your partners. Let them know what channels drive more sales whether it is newsletters, social media, blog posts, etc... If you have data on other landing pages, show which ones have better converting results.

In my experience, tracking and reporting with partners and clients is a vital part of a successful affiliate campaign. I think it's important to regularly connect with partners and run through the campaign data, whether that be performance, brand positioning, any changes to the product/service etc. Regular communication on campaign performance allows both parties to identify best-performing partners, narratives and creative, which is key to growing and scaling any affiliate program.

There's a whole host of different affiliate tracking platforms you can use, from something as simple as a UTM link to entire platforms designed to monitor every click, sale, view time, etc. from affiliate traffic. Depending on your needs, find one that lets you monitor what is most important to you (traffic, clicks, sales, another action, etc.). Make it extremely easy to share these results with the affiliates, or use a platform that allows them to monitor their own results. Depending on your affiliate structure, sending monthly updates on your top performing affiliates and sharing their content can be a great way to promote collaboration and competition within your program.

For the technical aspect, it's essential to use an affiliate platform. At the very least, this provides access to a tracking and invoicing system for partners. Additionally, the platform typically has an established network of partners, making it easier to establish partnerships with them.

You should use video calls to meet each affiliate personally and welcome them to your affiliate program or affiliate network.

Building the relationship with your affiliates is the best thing to do. They shouldn’t be transactional relationships. These should be actual personal friendships in my opinion.

In terms of communicating with affiliates - The simplest answer here is to be where your affiliates are and communicate in the style they prefer. Not everyone wants to jump on calls, some prefer emails, some prefer having access to a group like slack, discord, skype or whatsapp/telegram/signal, some like getting on zoom and meeting face to face The key here is to find out what their prefered method of communication is and agree a schedule for when you will next reconnect.

At Experience Advertising, our agency, we send weekly affiliate messaging to all the affiliates we manage. We pride ourselves on having the best looking and sounding affiliate newsletters in the industry. Our affiliate managers are very friendly, and they encourage phone calls with our affiliates. We seek to become best friends with all of our affiliates. This is called building the relationship.

Get on as many calls as you can with affiliates - helps build relationships and foster trust. Think of them as an extended part of your team.

I always like to get the affiliates on the phone be it one to one or a group Zoom call. Making a personal connection with them really motivates them to take action which often is a problem in any affiliate program.

I am a strong believer in offering multiple ways to communicate with affiliates from detailed resource centers to Facebook Groups to on-on-one Zoom calls. Meet the affiliates where they are and communicate based on preference.

At Experience Advertising, our agency excels in crafting and distributing weekly affiliate communications to all managed affiliates. We take great pride in creating affiliate newsletters that are visually appealing and engaging, setting a high industry standard. Our affiliate managers are known for their approachability, actively encouraging phone conversations with our affiliates. Our goal is to foster deep, friendly connections with all our affiliates, a strategy we view as essential in building strong, lasting relationships.

Everyone is invited to our 10-year-old Facebook group, which has more than 2,000 members. There, we promote our campaigns and targeted educational posts for affiliates. We want them to learn best practices, have an opportunity to ask questions and be part of a community that supports each other. When they need personalized attention, we offer one-on-one audits to help them achieve the next level of success.

Relationships are everything with affiliates. I make sure to try and catch up with my key partners at least once a month just to make sure we are always aligned and keep that open dialogue always there. If you talk regularly when things are going well, it's easier to ask for improvements when things are more challenging.

There are some great compliance and fraud management tools out there that can automate these processes very easily as you scale such as Rightlander, IntegriShield and Anura to name just a few!

The biggest compliance/fraud issues tend to arise around paid search, order fraud (ecom), and affiliate code leaks. For paid search, put very clear T&C info about how any affiliate doing paid search on trademark keywords with their affilaite links will be removed immediately, void of commissions, etc. An easy tool to monitor this is brand verity. Order fraud is when affiliates will make orders through their own link/code, and then cancel them to try and earn commissions. Having a commission delay in place is a simple way to prevent these fraudulent orders from resulting in commissions. Affiliate code and link leaks are a major pain. It results in huge commissions to be generated and attribution errors. Safelinks is the easiest fix!

Monitor and enforce compliance - but don't micromanage. It's important to follow the guidelines, and today the tools in the industry can cover a lot of that, while you can focus on building trust and open communication.

Would also suggest penalties such as removal from your program, lowering of commission rates, or deduction of commissions based on the severity of violations. If this is a publisher that drives high volume to your program or if the violation is not severe, consider lowering their commission rates or deducting commissions. If this is a publisher that doesn't drive high volume and/or the violation is severe, consider removing them from the program.

Our biggest complaint is paid search violations. I've been using Brand Verity since the beginning and it works well to find those willing to skirt the rules. No one "accidentally" starts to bid on trademark terms. It's a clear and intentional action, whether it happens the day they are approved or three years later. If they are a content-based partner, they get a warning. If they are a habitual problem in other programs, everything is voided immediately, the commission is moved to 0%, and if there is an opportunity to report negative feedback, we do so.

As Razvan has pointed out - a three strike system isa pretty good fit for managing compliance within the Affiliate space. Utilising tools such as Rightlander will provide you with plenty of security against any unethical or uncompliant behaviours that would sit outside of your program guidelines.