What is compliance and monitoring
Compliance and partnership monitoring are extremely important but often overlooked aspects of working within the affiliate and influencer channels. Digital marketers don’t have the time or resources to be running compliance checks and often find the whole process cumbersome. This is why this task is often overlooked and unprioritized.
However, recruiting affiliates who go on to contravene regulatory or brand guidelines can result in wasted time, effort and money. Similarly, affiliates who mislead consumers can damage a brand’s reputation and integrity. All of which can potentially threaten an entire affiliate program.
This is why using a compliance and monitoring solution can provide an automated service that runs in the background mitigating against these risks.
The solution works by discovering and quantifying traffic sources, reviewing new partnership applications, and analyzing partner content to provide automated and granular compliance reports. Brands can review these reports to analyze, monitor and action compliance risks. The compliance solution then uses this information and AI to build up an understanding which automates the ongoing process and reduces the time of further action from the affiliate managers.
The goal of the solution is to reduce risk and resource waste, while increasing return from partnerships. The use of advanced automation means this can be achieved with minimal effort by marketers, who can spend more of their time on actual marketing.
In addition to the compliance applications, some providers can enable intelligence monitoring solutions on top of this that can unearth new partnership opportunities and insight into competitors within the space.
Other terms associated with compliance and monitoring:
Risk assessment
PPC monitoring
Brand protection
Affiliate assessment
Affiliate and sub-affiliate transparency
Domain profiling
Affiliate/publisher insight
Marketing partner advertising compliance
The purpose of a compliance and monitoring solution
The concepts behind this solution are centered around reducing brand risk, improving ROAS from partnerships and saving time. Enabling a solution that enhances a brand’s visibility into their partnership channels provides a more effective way to work within them. Having the capability to identify hidden traffic sources can improve brand safety and revenue from new partners, while discovering relevant and high-ranking pages could increase ROAS from active partners.
Centralizing and automating such important processes means affiliate, influencer and brand marketing teams can improve visibility into their partner channels without dedicating hours and hours of time. A compliance and monitoring solution works in the background to review content, scan for violations and identify traffic sources at scale. In a channel often featuring hundreds of partners, it’s a crucial step towards an optimized affiliate and influencer strategy.
In short, monitoring what your partners are saying is now an essential part of a successful partner growth strategy.
In addition to brand safety and compliance, intelligently tracking competitors’ activity and new opportunities means marketers can find sparks of inspiration for how to work in the space with new strategies and partners.
Additional examples of compliance and monitoring solutions:
Content and activity compliance tracking
Affiliate content keyword indexing
Traffic data analysis
Competitor activity and brand mentions
PPC monitoring and website statuses
Brand safety checks
Case management and audit logs
How does this solution work and what information does it leverage
This solution uses JavaScript tags to enable the compliance and monitoring solution on the advertiser’s website. The tag is used on the brand website to help with traffic and tracking data. The tags can be deployed as a plugin through a brand’s existing Awin MasterTag. This functionality allows brands to deploy solutions without needing to involve their internal technical teams, saving time and resources.
The Awin Advertiser MasterTag should be unconditionally appended to every page on the site, including the confirmation page, but excluding any page that displays or processes payment information. Once deployed through the MasterTag, compliance monitoring partners will have access to the needed website data to properly load their script and deploy the solution on the brand’s behalf.
Common data points used by compliance and monitoring solutions include:
Traffic and URL data
Keywords and phrases flagged for regulatory violations
Prohibited or restricted terms based on jurisdiction
Benefits of this solution
Identify and track affiliate and influencer sources
Affiliate keyword content indexing
Maintain brand integrity
Remove compliance as a barrier
Find pages focused on event-based marketing (Black Friday, Christmas etc.)
Brand safety
Regulation of branded PPC and guidelines
Competitor and industry insights
Improved ROAS and efficiency through automation
Develop new campaigns and partnerships
Examples of the solution in action
Identify affiliates’ originating traffic sources
Resolve issues via a centralized workflow
