A number of publishers in the affiliate marketing space have come together to form a brand new Publisher Board in a bid to chat openly about the industry’s growing challenges and opportunities while issuing new practices to improving the affiliate channel.
The Publisher Board is a working group of publishers represented across a large range of website types, including cashback, voucher, content, comparison and more.
Upon announcing the news, the Publish Board has released its first statement — Best Practice Guidelines for Advertisers to ensure advertisers are compliant and assisting in improving revenue while encouraging more publishers to utilise affiliate marketing to effectively monetise their website and content.
Standard operating practices
The Best Practice Guidelines for Advertisers covers standard operating practices and guidelines that advertisers should be adopting to ensure transparency to all affiliates involved in a program.
The guide breakdowns down three important areas: tracking and de-duplication, commission and payments and finally validation — all of which have been heavily prominent as a number of internal and external factors have impacted how these parts are managed across the channel.
For instance, with affiliate tracking, the guide suggests that advertisers should be using cookies that are written and read as first-party or server-side tracking of events and transactions in conjunction with current browser privacy restrictions. Meanwhile, with commissions and payments as best practice, all approved transactions should be paid to the affiliate no longer than 60 days after validation.
“It’s great to see collaboration across publishers and groups such as the Publisher Board producing useful guides. It seems very relevant to how we work and Webgains support initiatives which help the industry navigate through challenges such as GDPR and ITP,” said Ami Spencer, Group Head of Network Development at Webgains in response to the Publisher Board and Best Practice Guide for Advertisers.