IAB search marketing charter updated - Affiliate guidelines introduced

The IAB has today launched an updated version of the IAB search marketing charter, following months of collaboration between the IAB, Search Marketing Council and the Direct Marketing Association. The new charter sees a new section dedicated to working with affiliates.

Taken from the charter the new affiliates section include:

• SEMCo will declare to the client if they carry out affiliate work on an account that they manage.
• SEMCo will encourage / facilitate client and affiliate communication.
• To ensure affiliates keep SEM messaging on brand a SEMCo must be proactive in driving communications between the client and affiliate.
• SEMCo and client must provide a clear dispute procedure.
• To create a clear process for affiliates to dispute a declined earned commission.
• To ensure a timely process for communicating any changes to keyword policy between all parties.
• To facilitate better working relationships between affiliates, SEMCos and ultimately, the client.
• SEMCo must publish a point of contact for their affiliate manager.
• Affiliate manager must provide SEMCo with landing page documents to include HTML and appropriate graphics and Flash files.
• To ensure that a SEMCo understands the structure of a landing page to fully optimise a campaign.

Search marketing companies that adhere to the charter can highlight their compliance with an IAB ‘best practise’ icon published on their website and/or additional promotional company infrastructure.

The further development of the charter appears to be another major step in the right direction. As we have discussed on here previously, surely the development of such best practise exercises can only be good for Search Marketing as a whole, but from a business perspective, given that on the whole the only thing that holds many clients back from either further expansion only is perception of online in comparison to other ATL and BTL activity.

PS - SEMCo = Search Engine Marketing Company

Add comment October 17th, 2007