Please find below the minutes from the IAB Affiliate Council meeting last week. I aim to discuss some of these issues in more detail on the blog shortly.
Research project
- Distinction made between “headline stories”, that we can gather quite quickly, and more complex examples that would better be demonstrated through case studies.
- Headline stories, examples
i. Do consumers spend more through the affiliate channel?
ii. Do sales convert quicker if an affiliate is involved?
iii. What level of display exposure do merchants receive through affiliates?
- Case studies – covered further in the next section
Actions
- – IAB to look into how we collect data for headline stories
Information on IAB site
- Feeling that information needs to be reviewed and updated
- IAB stated that case studies are requested and more than welcome to be hosted on their site
Actions
- - MB to review current copy and report back on what needs refreshing
- – Council members to make suggestions on what case studies we would like to see
- – Networks, agencies, merchants and affiliates to provide relevant case studies to the IAB for feature on their site
Affiliate Representation
- Discussion around how affiliates are currently not demonstrating the full range of their promotional activities to merchants
- Currently when approving an affiliate on to their campaign, all a merchant generally sees is a (sometimes inaccurate) list of URL’s and occasionally a short description.
- From a merchants point of view, this limits the transparency that they have on how affiliates are promoting them and potentially leads to situations where affiliates are wrongly rejected from their campaign
- From an affiliates point of view, this means they are not able to fully outline what they do which can lead to them being pigeonholed (as explained here)
Actions
- - IAB to draft some copy to display on the site and to be available to networks which outlines why it is beneficial to affiliates to demonstrate their activity better
- - Networks to look at ways that affiliate profiles could be displayed within the interface
Merchant transparency
- Discussion around whether merchants need to provide affiliates with more transparency over certain aspects of their campaign
- These include what activity affiliate sales will be deduplicated against, whether a closed brand bidding group is in operation etc
- General agreement that this is a positive for the industry but uncertainty about whether merchants can be made to give this information
Actions
- - Council members to provide ideas around what they would like to see made available to affiliates
- – IAB to then draft copy to be hosted on their site explaining to merchants why this information is useful and best practice would be to provide it
AOB
- It was asked what council members would like to see addressed going forward
Actions
- - Council members to feed back to MB on what they would like to see being put on the agenda
If anyone has any questions, please drop me an email or reply on the blog if it’s a wider query. Be good to see some discussion around what we’re attempting to cover.
