Welcome, community! Have you ever encountered problems with moderation? If not, there are two possibilities: either you are too diligent in your work, or you work exclusively with white verticals. In any case, moderation in affiliate marketing is an important process that you can encounter at any stage of work: from registration in an affiliate program to creating another advertising campaign. So, it is worth understanding how it works and what to expect.
Before we start, we recommend you familiarize yourself with an article about fraud, which can be detected during moderation. Moreover, you may not even realize that you have driven low-quality traffic to the offer. So, reading this article is a must!
What Kind of Moderation Exists in Affiliate Marketing?
Let’s first talk about what moderation is in terms of the concept, and most importantly, in our context. Thus, moderation is the process of checking the quality of information, work, its compliance with established rules and standards. If we talk about working in an affiliate program, it is checking the quality of your traffic, compliance with the offer terms, etc. As for advertising networks, they check the quality of creatives and monitor their compliance with the network’s usage rules.
Moderation can be of two types: manual and automatic. Manual moderation is performed by a person who not only checks the information but also makes a judgment. Automatic moderation, on the other hand, is a script, which may be based on a neural network, that checks the information, and if it does not match the program code patterns, it does not pass your ads.
Let us emphasize that within the same project, two types of moderation can exist simultaneously. And if you managed to “trick” the automatic moderation in a hypothetical FB, manual moderation can bring you back down to earth. Precisely for this reason, you always have to disguise certain creatives so that they can evade the attention of not only the neural network but also a person.
What Can Cause Moderation to Block Your Ad Campaign?
When you start an advertising campaign in any network, it undergoes moderation, either manual or automatic. There are certain reasons that can lead not only to the rejection of your campaign but also to the blocking of the entire advertising account. The specific restrictions applied depend on the particular case and should be detailed in the terms of use of the advertising platform.
If we talk about manual moderation, do not forget about the quality of creatives. While you might be able to bypass algorithms, it is much more challenging with manual moderation because a person can check not only the image you add to the ad but also dig deeper, follow the link, and check the quality of the offer.
If we talk about automatic moderation, it can react to the following criteria:
- Whether the offer you are driving traffic to is prohibited. Sometimes it’s not even about a specific offer, but about an entire vertical, like adult, which is banned in most mainstream advertising networks;
- Creatives: aggressive, misleading, with shock content, etc. If it’s clear what’s wrong with an image of some nudity or similar content, misleading is something that needs consideration. It means deliberately deceiving the consumer by promising something through the advertised product that is simply unrealistic to achieve;
- Poor-quality ads and creatives. If your ad is not unique, or it contains errors, then it risks not passing through moderation.
Automatic moderation can also analyze the landing page, which some affiliates forget. So it is quite logical that it also has to meet the requirements of the advertising platform.
Moderation in Affiliate Programs
Regarding affiliate programs, there is also moderation. Its task is to promote the conditions of fair work, where each party gets what it expects: the advertiser – quality traffic, the affiliate – the promised reward.
The first stage of moderation, which almost always occurs, is registration moderation. Many networks allow only those affiliates who have previously communicated with the managers of the affiliate program. This helps to screen out bots, and if the entry threshold to the program is high (for example, the project works with top brands), you may be asked to provide proof that you can guarantee high conversion and overall traffic volumes.
Traffic is also moderated. In particular, it undergoes fraud check. In general, even the fraud check can be automatic. But a thorough advertiser can always request a manual review if there are doubts about the traffic quality assessed by the automatic algorithm.
There are also preventive measures to combat fraud, such as anti-fraud systems, but this is a topic for another discussion.
How to Pass Moderation?
Passing moderation is quite simple: work with white offers and adhere to the requirements of the advertising network, affiliate program. While the latter is indeed quite straightforward, simply requiring you to work diligently, managing ad campaigns is much more complicated because only working with white offers means missing out on a huge slice of the affiliate pie, as the tastiest bits are often (at least partially) prohibited.
In such cases, you need to understand what cloaking is. Fortunately, we have already written about this, so we recommend you check out our detailed review.
You cannot afford to risk your main accounts. Therefore, it is necessary to have your own farm of accounts that you can use to launch campaigns, even if you understand that the chances of passing moderation are extremely low.
Among the key means, it is worth noting:
- Purchasing already warmed-up accounts that can be used immediately;
- Buying accounts for further warming;
- Creating accounts on your own and warming them up later.
Without warming up, an account will simply not work, as the moderation’s scrutiny will be more meticulous than for an account with a history. This nuance should always be considered.
Do not forget to pay attention to creatives. To avoid using outdated or non-unique creatives, it is worth involving designers, or using artificial intelligence. Especially check the quality of the creatives offered by the advertiser themselves. If you see aggressive calls to purchase a product or promises to increase penis size by a shampoo bottle, you can either ignore such promos or edit them: rewrite the text, cover up the “shame,” etc. The main thing is that the result should be a creative that meets the requirements of your advertising network.
Conclusion
Moderation in affiliate marketing sounds quite daunting, especially for beginners. However, it’s always worth looking around, as we see some wild ads every day. Thus, passing moderation with grey, and even black offers, is entirely possible.
Do you have any moderation in Affiliate Marketing stories that you would tell your grandchildren? If they are still on the way, then drop by our Telegram community and share there!
Respectfully, Your Geek!
Comments