Affiliate guidelines in IAB UK search marketing charter
Last month, the IAB UK updated its search marketing best practice charter with guidelines related to affiliate marketing. While the guidelines are mainly aimed at search engine marketing companies, the update to the charter is aimed at providing some broad guidelines to these companies to work well with their clients that may also be carrying out affiliate marketing.
One of the first guidelines is that a SEM company must disclose to a client whether they do affiliate work for any of their accounts. A fair point, considering the potential conflict of interest issues that a SEM company might have.
The other key point is related to keywords — often the most contentious issue between brands (clients) and affiliates. If a SEM agency is handling the search marketing efforts for a client, the agency has an important role to play in formulating and implementing guidelines pertaining to keyword use, brand names, messaging/ communication. Effective communication of these with the affiliates is extremely important; while enforcement of these guidelines will ultimately be the responsibility of the client, the SEM company can and must play a proactive role in helping the client with this.
As can be expected, some of these guidelines are very broadly [or loosely] defined. For example, one of them is “SEMCo will encourage / facilitate client and affiliate communication.” Words like “encourage/ facilitate” are open to all kinds of interpretation.
Of course, this is not to criticise these efforts at standardisation in an industry that is still very much evolving— as I recognize the challenges with such an endeavour and getting the different players to change to adopt a common set of rules/ accepted best-practices. I just wish that we are able to evolve the various guidelines to minimize the number of possible interpretations, which as we all know, can get used as per each company’s convenience, defeating the purpose of the whole excercise.
