Informational
How To Monitor Affiliate Activity – For Financial Brands
John Ta
August 28, 2025
6
MIN READ
If you’re a major financial brand launching or running an affiliate program, you’re probably here because monitoring affiliate activity is hard. However, financial affiliate marketing is an incredibly lucrative space, sized at approximately ~$10B. Given that it’s such a well known and high performing channel, it’s no surprise that averting and mitigating compliance risk is one of the key blockers to growing a successful financial affiliate program.
I’m John, one of the founders at Affil. Our AI compliance reviews approximately one third of all credit card content being produced today and ensures it meets credit card marketing guidelines.
I used to write about credit cards and travel extensively, publishing over 200 articles. In doing so, I truly understood the pain points as an affiliate and started to piece together where the biggest struggles were in financial affiliate marketing as a whole.
One of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to financial affiliate marketing is how you keep track of what your affiliates are saying and doing. It’s not just a matter of knowing where your brand is being mentioned; rather, there are several rules and regulations that need to be followed:
Now, this is just one side of the coin. These guidelines and entities also essentially enforce affiliates to keep their content up to date.
For example, if Affiliate Site ABC advertises a credit card with a lower annual fee than what they ended up applying for, then there’s technically an argument to be made for false/misleading advertising. It gets significantly worse if that incorrect information is out and displayed near an actual CTA where an application action could occur.
After launching their affiliate program through a network, most brands go about handling affiliate activity in three ways:
The general problem across the board though, is how you effectively keep track of all affiliate content being produced and then also how you effectively ensure quality compliance. Hiring an external agency doesn’t change that problem; they just ask the same question here, one click down from the brand.
In today’s ecosystem, affiliates are typically expected to submit their own content for monitoring and then someone is expected to label this manually.
No matter how you handle the compliance process, understanding where your brand is being mentioned on an affiliate’s site is one of the most important steps before doing any actual compliance work. Otherwise, you don’t know where you’re looking for issues.
A quick math exercise here: an affiliate like The Points Guy has 10,000+ URLs.
While it’s possible that it’s been automated, having The Points Guy submit 10,000 URLs independently seems like a lot of burden/work. When I was a writer, I only submitted about 80-90% of the stuff I produced, and I only wrote 200 articles. If The Points Guy forgets to submit even 1% of content, that means there are 100 articles that aren’t being currently monitored—not particularly good.
This math exercise gets even worse when we consider the scope of all affiliate content out there. If we assume there are 100,000 URLs about credit cards, then I think it’s generally safe to say that there are a sizable number of them not being monitored.
Yes! There are plenty of scraping tools out there that will essentially go through an entire site and find all the important key words. For example, you could have it crawl 1,000 different sites to find the word “American Express.”
Robots.txt isn’t even an issue because as the compliance monitor, your affiliates should be giving you full access to find everything.
The problem?
Although some affiliate networks have compliance/brand monitoring tools built in house, we don’t think there’s any actual AI being used for scraping and here’s why: current compliance processes with networks (from what we’ve observed) still require affiliates to submit content themself, which places the burden on the affiliate.
If an affiliate goes off the rails, then it’s going to pretty hard to actually figure out that content, unless it’s manually found by random chance or discovery.
Let’s first be clear: scraping/crawling isn’t anything innovative. There are many solutions that can go through a whole site and find you all the URLs. The question then is, how do we find what’s relevant to us for monitoring… and that’s where AI comes in.
Building on the Amex Platinum issue, here’s how a “keyword” based solution might find articles with an Amex Platinum mention. You might have some dashboard that explicitly lists all the possible permutations of the card:
Alternatively, you could just tell an AI to: “identify if the following quote has a mention of the American Express Platinum Card.” What this now allows us to do is go through a massive list of URLs and precisely find all the articles that mention an Amex Platinum.
Why is this important?
For starters, this means an affiliate realistically doesn’t have to submit every article they’ve written. While it’s useful as a double check, gone are the days when a writer needs to email some compliance middleman to add it to a spreadsheet.
Going deeper into this, no one needs to read through an article to label it manually for the cards present in the article. This is an enormous time saver.
Finally, this means keyword identification is no longer a thing. There’s no reason to try and list 25+ combinations of the Amex Platinum when you can put it into one prompt.
Yes. Given scrapers can basically extract all the information being displayed on a page, it means that AI can essentially find all the important regulatory info and ensure that it’s being properly displayed.
When it comes to credit card marketing, we’ve generally noticed the most important disclosures are broken down into the following categories:
While every site generally differs in how they display these disclosures, we’ve discovered that it’s pretty important to make sure we can track them down. AI again can generally look at these three types of disclosures and identify where they generally fall into.
Affil’s compliance AI can not only find all of an affiliate’s content, but also label it accordingly by the products mentioned and disclosures present.
Affil was designed by listening to customer needs first and one of the first pain points we discovered was this challenge of figuring out what needed to be monitored. For sites with 20,000 URLs, it was pointless to do full compliance scans on all 20,000 when only 20 had relevant products on them to be audited.
While affiliates still generally submit content to us for review, we use it as a backup/verification mechanism as opposed to the sole source of truth. This has essentially allowed us to get a bird’s eye view on affiliate activity.
If you’ve taken anything away from this article, it’s that having a robust affiliate monitoring program is incredibly important. You’ll need a two fold strategy for this:
Whatever you end up using (whether it be Affil or not), make sure it can also accurately identify products being mentioned in the article without too many false positives.
But, if you’re ready for an out of box solution that can deal with your affiliate monitoring needs, book a demo call with us!