New FTC Advertising Guidelines

Earlier this week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released revised guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials that take effect on December 1, 2009. Among other things, these guidelines say that a blogger that endorses a product or service must disclose compensation received directly or indirectly from the seller of that product or service.

You can review the FTC press release or the full text of the FTC guidelines. If you have questions or need advice on interpreting these FTC guidelines, we encourage you to consult your own legal counsel to help you understand how these changes may affect you.

The Performance Marketing Alliance is a good resource to monitor how these guidelines are impacting the affiliate industry.

Here are some interesting links to some recent press about these new guidelines
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091006-709182.html
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc2009106_866275.htm
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/bloggers-face-11k-ftc-fines-for-not-disclosing-paid-endorsements.html

Posted by Dan Chiss
Manager, Affiliate Marketing

Providing Transparency Into Affiliate Traffic

We recently added a new option to our advertiser UI that is visible on the approved publishers page (Publishers > Approved). Below each publisher's EPC information, you'll see a link named 'View Traffic Sources.'

Clicking on this link produces a summary of the number of times consumers visit your site for each web page that contains your ad. A publisher may place your ads on several different pages, this report provides details on each of the pages that are driving traffic to your site.

The results will appear in a popup window similar to the screen shot to the right.  Here are some common questions we get when we talk about referrer data with advertisers:

What does count mean?

• Count is the number of clicks from a given referrer in the past seven days

What if the publisher doesn't have any clicks?

• You'll get a message stating that no results are available

What does 'No Referrer' mean?

• The link may have been opened in a new window (e.g. by using javascript)
• The user's browser could be preventing the referrer from being passed
• The publisher may be editing the referrer

What should i do if all of a publisher's referrers is blank?

• This isn't necessarily a problem, but you should communicate with the publisher and ask them to show where on their site(s) your ads are being promoted.  You can find each publisher's email address on the right hand side of the screen when viewing your approved publishers.

Regards,
Larry Adams, on behalf of Google Affiliate Network