As an affiliate manager focused on maintaining and monitoring compliance, you may be:
- • Evaluating affiliate partners to ensure they are trustworthy.
- • Looking for methods to manage compliance risks related to affiliate content.
- • Seeking tools that make compliance monitoring easier as your program scales.
- • Encountering challenges from compliance teams when expanding partnerships.
Monitoring compliance risk effectively means ensuring that all affiliate content meets regulatory requirements and aligns with your brand's standards. This is vital for safeguarding your reputation, building customer trust, and avoiding regulatory penalties.
For fintechs and banks, the task is particularly complex due to shifting regulations, changing product offerings, and the high demand for trustworthy customer interactions that comply with legal standards.
The Risks of Non-Compliant Practices in Your Financial Services Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate marketing is an effective client acquisition method because it taps into the impact of credible voices such as influencers, bloggers, and respected media sites.
Having trust in these sources is crucial in the highly regulated financial sector, where protecting consumers is of highest priority. Financial businesses need to make sure that all of their advertising material is truthful and open in order to establish and maintain that trust.
As you build or extend your affiliate network, you must manage two key risks that can jeopardize your brand and client trust: fraudulent activity by dishonest affiliates and non-compliant practices by respectable partners.
Tackling Fraudulent Affiliate Practices
A major challenge for fintech companies in affiliate marketing is the threat posed by fraudulent affiliates who manipulate programs for their own benefit.
These affiliates might fake ownership of legitimate websites, use bots to drive fake clicks and traffic, or flood the program with low-quality leads. They can also misrepresent your financial products to boost their own results.
If not identified early, such fraudulent affiliates can lead to wasted marketing spend, legal liabilities, and a damaged brand reputation, eroding customer trust.
Another risk comes from affiliates leveraging hidden sub-affiliate networks, placing your brand on undesirable platforms and making compliance monitoring difficult, further compromising brand integrity.
Non-Compliant Content from Legitimate Affiliate Partners
Although the threat of fraudulent affiliates is real, the majority of partners are typically credible and have spent years building a trusted following and consistent traffic. They are usually well-versed in complying with financial regulations and brand standards.
However, mistakes or miscommunications can still lead to non-compliant content. While managing a small group of affiliates makes monitoring easier, scaling up complicates oversight, increasing the risk of affiliate violation and affiliate non-compliance going unnoticed.
This can attract regulatory attention and, worse, damage customer trust and the brand's reputation if violations become public.
Limitations of Manual Monitoring in Branded Search
Manually monitoring affiliate compliance is difficult, particularly for detecting unauthorized brand bidding. This deceptive practice involves affiliates or competitors bidding on branded keywords to drive cheap traffic and boost profits, while hiding their activities to evade detection and penalties.
Common methods for masking these violations are:
- • Dayparting: Affiliates schedule their ads to run during late-night hours when brand managers are less likely to notice violations.
- • GEO Targeting: Ads are shown only to users from specific geographic regions, excluding those where brand managers are located, making it nearly impossible to identify violations through manual ad copy monitoring.
- • Redirecting: Affiliates set up redirections for certain GEOs or devices, leading users to a website without the affiliate link. This makes it difficult for brand managers to trace the source of the violations or identify the violators.
These tactics can drive up CPC, lower CTR, and lead to overspending on low-quality traffic, all while harming the brand's image. Businesses soon recognize the need for more advanced solutions to track branded keywords.
Although manual monitoring may be a starting point, it is typically inefficient and ineffective because:
- 1. Inability to Cover All Scenarios: Manually monitoring branded search terms requires significant resources. For example, if you have 30 branded search queries to monitor, and need to check them every two hours from different GEOs, search engines, and browsers, the scale becomes unmanageable. You would need a large team working around the clock to keep up.
- 2. Partial Visibility: Manual monitoring can never guarantee full visibility. Even the most thorough checks will only capture some violations, often missing those that are strategically hidden.
- 3. Time-Consuming Evidence Gathering: After identifying violations, managers must collect evidence—such as screenshots or URLs—to confront the violators, which further consumes valuable time.
- 4. Continuous Monitoring and Follow-Up: Managers must not only monitor for new violations but also track the activity of affiliates flagged for suspicious behavior, adding another layer of complexity to manual monitoring.
Given these limitations, manual monitoring may serve as a basic starting point but is rarely cost-effective or comprehensive. For a more thorough approach, especially when handling large volumes of branded traffic, automated monitoring tools are a better option.
The Advantages of Automated Monitoring with Bluepear
Recognizing the limitations of manual ad monitoring, many companies turn to automated tools like Bluepear for more effective and efficient management.
Automated ad monitoring tools like Bluepear offer several advantages:
- • 24/7 Monitoring Across All Platforms: Unlike manual methods, automated tools are not restricted by human capacity or working hours. Bluepear continuously monitors branded traffic from both desktop and mobile devices, across various GEOs, browsers, and search engines. This capability allows for comprehensive checks on thousands of search engine results pages (SERPs) daily, covering all branded ads.
- • Cost and Resource Efficiency: Automated monitoring eliminates the need for a large team dedicated to manual monitoring. Bluepear not only saves time but also reduces costs, allowing companies to allocate resources to more strategic tasks.
- • Detection of Sophisticated Fraudulent Techniques: Tools like Bluepear are capable of identifying complex fraudulent affiliate practices and hidden websites that manual methods might miss, ensuring thorough compliance monitoring.
- • Efficient Evidence Management: Bluepear automatically collects all necessary evidence—such as screenshots, URLs, redirects, and affiliate IDs—and compiles them into customizable reports, making it easy to present findings to violators.
- • Real-Time Alerts: Automated tools provide real-time notifications of violations, enabling companies to act swiftly and prevent unnecessary CPC expenses and overpayment for traffic that has already been acquired.
Conclusion
In affiliate marketing, monitoring compliance necessitates a proactive approach to risk management from both fraudulent actors and non-compliant affiliates, especially for fintech companies and banks.
Although manual monitoring could be a good place to start, it is far from enough to handle the intricate and ever-changing problems of the modern digital marketing landscape.
A more thorough, affordable, and dependable option for keeping an eye on branded search terms, guaranteeing compliance, and safeguarding brand integrity is provided by automated solutions like Bluepear.
Adopting automated ad monitoring is not an option for fintechs or banks seeking to protect their affiliate programs and uphold customer trust; it is a must.
