About four weeks ago, I applied to the affiliate programs of several merchants in the diet and weight-loss category. The New Year is here, the biggest time of year for this market. A few were automatic approval, others were manual and approved me within a few days. One particularly large merchant just approved me yesterday afternoon, on January 2. In theory, to have this website up and running in time for January 1, I had to have it completed a few weeks ago. This slow merchant may not make it onto the site for the short sweetspot of the diet market.
For years, I’ve been a strong proponent for manual approval of affiliate applications. I’ve seen a lot of fraudulent activity that would have been easily avoided if a person had simply looked at the application. Likewise, Jeff Molander commented recently on some industry research by Shawn Collins indicating alarm to the fact that “36 percent of marketers “auto approve” (take anyone off the street) affiliates a la 1996.”
In the above experiment, however, I saw the frustration that I’ve heard time and time again from affiliates:
An affiliate starts a project and is looking to build up a new website, or a new section of their website to promote a new category. They may have traffic for this category, in which case their urgency is a little higher, or they may have an idea of how to generate traffic for this category. As they build up the site, they look for programs to promote and sign up.
Immediate focus turns to the merchants who auto-approve applications. They want links and products immediately so they can work them into the new site. It’s a crap-shoot whether the manual-approve merchants get the application approved in time to keep the affiliate’s attention and be included in the project.
That’s representative of a significant group of affiliates who don’t maintain a single large website. They look for opportunities and act quickly with small projects. Each project may take off, or it may not. Perhaps only 10% of them work, which is why they must work quickly and be able to move on to the next. This is one of the areas where affiliates provide a service that merchants cannot perform for themselves. A merchant who is slow to approve will miss out on these opportunities.
I still think that manual approval is best, as long as you review applications very quickly. Any delay loses affiliates at an increasing rate over time, with the losses starting almost immediately. But it is difficult to keep up with the large number of useless applications. And how do you know from an application what sort of affiliate you’re dealing with? There’s no way for the affiliate to express in that application what they’re going to do for that merchant.
For that reason, I think the whole approval methods need an overhaul. A different method should be considered, Auto-Approve with Delayed Review. Auto-approve all applications to catch all opportunities and postpone the manual review on a much smaller set of affiliates, the ones who produce traffic and sales. Scrutinize any new affiliate activity, like an increase in traffic or the first sales. At this point, the merchant now has some real information on which to base the review.
Make it clear in your acceptance email that this method will be employed, including the criteria to be used in the review.
The affiliate solution providers could definitely provide better tools around this method. Their tools are not designed for the particular workflow of monitoring the newcomers. A tool that allowed auto-approval but created a review queue of just the affiliates who become active, when they become active, would cut the work involved in reviewing affiliates down by probably 80% or more.
This tool would provide a list of the newly active affiliates in the past n-days, showing precisely where the clicks are coming from (referring URLs) and their IP addresses.
Further, applications should be supplemented with a free-form text field where the affiliate can describe exactly what they would like to do for that merchant. Like a cover-letter on a job application.
Affiliate managers could spend their time examining only the affiliates who matter. New affiliates get the linking resources they need with zero delays. Those are two ingredients of a healthy affiliate program.
