Auto-Approve Affiliates: The Pros and Cons

Your brand’s affiliate marketing program sometimes feels like a neverending to-do list. 

You’re spending time creating branded images for your partners, reviewing commission payouts, and approving affiliates for your program. 

More affiliates mean more growth potential — but reviewing 100 contenders per week from your online application process isn’t sustainable. 

As a marketing manager or brand CEO, you have better things to do. 

That’s why many brand marketers auto-approve affiliates through platforms like Tapfiliate. We’ll walk you through a basic run-through of affiliate marketing, partner recruitment challenges, and how auto-approving affiliates can help you scale your brand. 

Let’s brush up on affiliate marketing basics first.

How does affiliate marketing work?

Affiliate marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy where brands enlist support from affiliate publishers to promote their products and services. As opposed to other marketing tactics, affiliate marketing doesn’t require an up-front investment from brands. 

The relationship is commission-based, meaning brands don’t have to pay affiliates until they score you a conversion, sometimes a click but usually a sale. 

What is an affiliate?

An affiliate is a person, usually a publisher, that makes commissions promoting brands’ products and services. 

That Instagram influencer promoting his favorite set of dumbbells? That’s an affiliate. 

The comedian promoting a cannabis dispensary on his podcast? That’s an affiliate, too. 

Affiliates are paid via commission fees agreed upon with the brand prior. Brands can track an affiliate’s commission through a unique tracking link or coupon code to attribute a sale or conversion. 

Different types of affiliates include: 

• Bloggers
• Coupon websites
• Influencers
• Magazines
• Review websites
• Comparison websites
• Cashback and loyalty websites

Unlock the power of affiliate marketing with our cutting-edge software. Sign up for a free 14-day trial now!

But back to auto-approval. What does that have to do with your brand’s affiliate program? Keep reading to find out. 

Auto-approval explained

A brand could have anywhere from one to thousands of affiliates promoting their brand. If your brand has numbers on the higher end, we’d bet you might auto-approve your affiliates. 

Affiliate auto-approval is an automation of affiliate recruitment. Brands can decide on a set of requirements that affiliate must meet to join their affiliate program, and their application is automatically approved if they meet them. 

What are the pros of affiliate auto approval

Time savings, of course! But the pros reach even deeper.

Faster growth

Every business faces challenges, from slumping sales to high competition. But keeping up momentum, aka scaling, is where a lot of entrepreneurs face a wall. Economics professor Michael Gibbs chalks it up to a resistance to a necessary shift in perspective: 

“As you hit the growth stage, your business needs to become more bureaucratic, dull, conservative, process-oriented, slow, less innovative, and take fewer chances.”

What he’s saying is that you need solid processes and schedules to back up big business moves. You won’t achieve scaling ad-hoc — it needs to be calculated. If you have an affiliate program, auto-approval is one of those processes that you can implement to grow your business. 

Plus, automating the entire process of recruitment saves you a ton of time (more on that in our next pro). 

Heightened efficiency due to automation

You’ve probably automated a ton of redundant tasks within your business operations. After all, you have to if you want to compete with other brands that are scaling. 

While partner recruitment isn’t necessarily redundant, it can be if you’re spending a solid chunk of time approving or rejecting potential affiliates with the same criteria. 

Tapfiliate lets you automate approvals, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. We extend that automation sensation to: 

• Commissions
• Refund and dispute handling
• Affiliate notifications
• Pretty much everything else with our Zapier integration

Customizable criteria

Don’t get us wrong — we don’t want you accepting just any affiliate that hits “apply” to your program. And that’s not what auto-approval is about. Lose criteria are a top reason for poor affiliate program results. 

Instead, you should use performance data to set informed criteria for your program. Maybe your brand sees the most conversions after an Instagram influencer with 10,000+ followers makes a post. Or, you could do better with cashback sites with 5+ years of live time. 

Here are a few more examples of criteria to set up: 

• Wide range of experience promoting products in your niche
• Positive customer reviews with minimal customer complaints
• Proven experience creating content for your target audience
• Certain affiliate types
• Follower types

What criteria do you think will help an affiliate smooth out the buyer’s process? Implement those into your auto-approval. 

What are the cons of auto-approval of affiliates?

Affiliate auto-approval is popular for efficiency and growth potential. In our eyes, it’s a vital automation step to scale your brand. Still, you should be aware of potential setbacks. 

Less control

Even if you spend weeks or months solidifying your approval measures, you still relinquish some control over who actually promotes your products. For example, you might notice an influx of one particular type of affiliate promoting your products when your ideal affiliate gets lost in the sauce. 

But here’s the thing: if you don’t want certain affiliates promoting your products, the right affiliate management platform can help you filter them out. 

Tapfiliate offers auto-approval, but you can decide on certain specifications for the types of affiliates you want to admit into your program. For example, you could limit automatic approvals to influencers with a minimum of 200,000 followers on Instagram. 

Missed opportunities from high-quality affiliates

If you want to find high-impact influencers to promote your brand, we’ve got some bad news. They won’t always come to you. 

Some higher-ticket affiliates might have higher standards and negotiation nuggets that they won’t just give up in an auto-approved affiliate program. 

How do you auto-approve affiliates in Tapfiliate?

Auto-approval on Tapfiliate can be as simple as hitting a button. All you have to do is switch “auto-approve affiliates” on in your settings. 

But don’t forget about the importance of the right criteria. We recommend setting some conditions before you just open the floodgates. That’s why Tapfiliate allows customized auto-approval with filters and conditions through webhooks and our REST API. 

Here’s how to use webhooks to implement filters on your auto-approval settings. 

1. On the left side of your affiliate Dashboard, go to the Triggers tab. 
2. Select “New trigger.”
3. Fill in the requested details, including the triggering event for your webhook. In this case, you’d create a webhook for events like “affiliate added to program,” “affiliate approved for program,” and “affiliate disapproved for program.” 
4. Add filters for each event.
5. Decide between a webhook or a custom webhook (filtered approvals require a custom webhook). 
6. Check your Profile Settings to find your API key. 
7. Return to the trigger page and set your API key in the header field. 
8. Use merge tags to populate data (click the three dots on the right side of the field). 
9. Save your webhook. 

Start your affiliate program 

You might have a clear picture of the type of affiliates you want to promote your brand. 

• What social media channels do they use? 
• What kind of audience do they target?
• How much engagement do they receive on their content?

Consider as many characteristics as you can that link to successful conversions. Then, implement those into your auto-approval criteria. 

Tapfiliate helps thousands of businesses like yours launch, manage, and improve their affiliate programs. Our automated partner recruitment, aka auto-approval, is one of the many ways we support brands in scaling their businesses. 

Ready to see for yourself? Sign up for our free 14-day trial today!

Chrissy Kapralos

Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.