Affiliates are not the enemy.

Granted, the potential peril of affiliate marketing is well-known: affiliates who use search campaigns to earn commissions can challenge your internal SEM efforts. And unless you have a comprehensive and well-monitored search policy, they can even drive up bid prices, block ads from showing up and earn commissions on sales that likely would have converted anyway.

But they are not the enemy.

With the right structure, strategies and monitoring, affiliate marketing can play a vital and profitable role in reaching customers.

Rather, affiliates can and should be a key player in your search marketing mix. In fact, with firm ground rules, smart strategies and well-executed monitoring, affiliate marketing can play a vital and profitable role in reaching customers.

Affiliate programs stand apart from more traditional ad campaigns in their cost-effectiveness. Rather than forcing you to spend copious amounts of money up-front – without guarantee of results – affiliate programs only require you to pay when affiliates accomplish your action of choice. This structure protects against lost investments and ensures a better ROI.

Developing a top-tier affiliate program starts with smart structure and reasonable guidelines. In short, you want to promote best practices without handcuffing your affiliates or limiting their ability to be creative:

• Trademarked Keywords should be off-limits at all times – There’s no reason why you should pay an affiliate for a sale generated by a customer looking for your brand name. This type of sale would convert 99.9% of the time anyway.
  
  
• Trademarked Destination URLs should be prohibited – Using these URLs may give the false impression that an ad is yours, rather than your affiliate’s. It may also prevent your ad from showing up at all, since Google and other engines don’t allow ads to use the same destination URL. (The only exception to this rule is when affiliates structure their destination as www.affiliatesite.com/merchantsite, as this tells the user they’re being directed to an associate site.)
  
  
• Use Non-Competing Keywords – Create a list of top-performing keywords for affiliates to bid on. Your combined ads can lead to page domination, limiting your competition’s ability to show for these keywords and greatly improving your conversion rate.

Once these guidelines are in place, the next step involves monitoring your search efforts to make sure affiliates play by the rules. A good defense starts with understanding exactly what you’re up against, so be on the lookout for the following ways affiliates might try to sidestep your watchful eye to earn easy commissions:

Monitor search efforts to make sure affiliates play by the rules, and make sure you know what you’re up against.

• Day Parting – Commonly used by affiliates to display prohibited ads at times they think affiliate managers aren’t monitoring them.
  
  
• Geo-targeting – Used to hide forbidden affiliate PPC campaigns by excluding the locations a program’s affiliate manager will be monitoring from.
  
  
• IP exclusion – Another way of hiding banned ads.

You may also want to consider arming yourself with tools that protect against these deceptive practices, especially since these tools can cut the time needed to monitor affiliates in half. In particular, software has been developed that monitors keywords from different IPs addresses, different times of day and even different places around the world, helping ensure your affiliates behave and deliver as they’re supposed to.

With the right structure and knowledge of what to monitor, you’ll be well on your way to creating mutually beneficial relationships with your affiliates. Remember, affiliates aren’t the enemy. Too often, the usual suspects – SEO, PPC, Analytics – steal the spotlight when it comes to building the ideal marketing mix. But when implemented properly, affiliate marketing can be a profitable contributor, extending your reach and helping you create a comprehensive, truly integrated marketing program.

Adam Bezinski is the Affiliate Marketing Manager at Acronym Media.