Huge Time Savings by Verifying Affiliate Signups

As if managing your existing affiliate accounts isn’t time consuming enough, you probably have new affiliates constantly applying to your affiliate program with no way to weed out the bots and scammers or qualify the valuable partners.  Adding additional verification criteria to your affiliate signup process will really cut down on the noise and help you focus on the applicants that will seriously send you quality traffic.  Here are five simple and easily implemented verifiers you can add to your signup process to immediately save you time.

OnVerify

This is an excellent way to add another hoop for affiliates to jump through in the signup process.  OnVerify is a professional and effective way to prove the user is a “human” by forcing them to pick an actual telephone and verify their application by typing in a pin number.  Not only does this prevent bots and spammers, but it also dramatically decreases the number of untrustworthy affiliates as they are unlikely to use a telephone to reveal more about their location.  Setting up OnVerify in your signup process is extremely simple.  Navigate to Customize Application, select “Affiliates” in the settings panel, and enable “Phone Verification” on the very first option.  You will then create an OnVerify account and submit the appropriate information in the form provided on this page.  Learn more on the HasOffers Wiki.

Captcha

Yes we all know Captcha.  It’s that annoying set of almost unreadable letters and/or numbers that you have to retype into a form in order for a “Signup” to complete.  As much as most of us can’t stand dealing with Captcha, it is 100% proven to cut down on illegitimate signups.  Similar to phone verification, as user must be a “human” in order to pass the Captcha test, and no matter how much we love our own bots, we don’t really want the bots to signup up as new affiliates and assigning them to account managers and potentially allowing them to harvest offer information for other purposes.  Here is a great article in the New York Times about Captcha about Captcha.  To learn about implementing it into the HasOffers signup process, visit this wiki entry.

Additional Questions

Basic signup questions across affiliate programs are typically very similar, but by adding your own unique questions you force applicants to put words and thoughts together to explain how they will be an asset to your program.  This immediately reveals individuals that have little or no value.  By requiring affiliates to answer questions such as “Why are you interested in joining our affiliate program?”, “Tell us about your experience as an affiliate marketer?” or “What niche does most of your traffic come from and how long have you been working with that niche?”, you will quickly differentiate serious affiliates with real traffic from newbies or even fraudsters.  This can help you qualify affiliates and even make decisions on which account managers to assign or whether to follow up with the applicants at all.  To add additional question to your signup process in HasOffers, simply navigate to the Customize Application page and select “Affiliate Signup Questions” in the lower right panel.

Custom Signup Process

Take your signup process to the next level by completely developing your own signup experience using the HasOffers API.  This allows you to host your own signup page, improving signup quality and streamlining affiliate acquisition through collecting your own unique data points.

Affiliate Profile Fraud

On top of these great additions to the signup process, it is important to protect your affiliate program from signups that have certain criteria.  Some of these include use of a PO box address, no number in address, invalid email address domain, phone number does not match country, IP does not match State/Region, duplicate Signup, and many more.  HasOffers allows you to rate the importance of each of these criteria to create your own fraud scoring mechanism You can then set thresholds on alerts and blocking affiliates.  This is really an invaluable tool that gives you great information about each new affiliate signup.  Pro Customers and above, learn more about setting up Affiliate Profile Fraud Detection.

Let these verifiers take some of the work load involved in taking on new affiliates.  Don’t let your signups spin out of control with useless spam preventing you from finding the really valuable affiliate partners who are seeking profitable relationships.

Author

A digital marketer by background, Peter is the former CEO of TUNE, the enterprise platform for partner marketing. In 2018, he sold TUNE’s mobile measurement product to Branch, unifying measurement and user experience. He led TUNE’s efforts to bring better management technology and automation to marketing partnerships, across affiliates, influencers, networks, and business development relationships. Follow @peterhamilton