General Guidelines
Discount codes Policy
We encourage affiliates to contact us for exclusive voucher/discount codes and additional incentives.
Affiliates may only promote codes that are provided through the affiliate program (either through our account or directly from the Affiliate Manager).
We reserve the right to withhold payment of commission if unauthorized voucher codes are used in an affiliate sale. We appreciate that consumers may use voucher codes that they have found via a site other than that which is awarded the sale and this will be investigated before decisions on commission payment are made. Any affiliate found to be displaying unauthorized codes may also have their commission set to zero until the code(s) are removed.
Where voucher codes are issued with an expiry date this should be clearly displayed, and codes should be removed or explicitly marked as expired after this date unless you are advised otherwise. Any affiliates displaying expired codes without marking them as being expired may be suspended from the program. Please also ensure that you observe the IAB voucher code best practice guidelines.
Affiliate PPC Guidelines
The Hut Group operates a strict policy on Paid Search activity. These Terms and Conditions are applicable on any advertising platform, including, but not limited to, search engines, advertising networks and social media placements.
These Affiliate PPC restrictions apply to and include The Hut Group parent site, its sister sites and any of its subsidiaries.
Domain Names / URLs
Purchasing or operating any domain name which is confusingly similar to our brand name, it’s misspellings or similar variations is prohibited.
Affiliates are not permitted to use brand (including variations and/or misspellings) as a sub domain:
I.E.
Unacceptable : http://Zavviaffiliate.com
Acceptable : http://affiliate.co.uk/Zavvi
Copy
Affiliates are prohibited from:
· Using the term “official”, “TM”, “Partner” in their adcopy.
· Using brand terms in their ad copy unless given prior consent by The Group PPC Department.
Keywords
Affiliates are prohibited from bidding on brand terms, permutations and misspellings without written consent from The Group PPC Department.
In order to avoid any keyword matching issues, affiliates must add the following keywords as negative broad match to any and all Paid Search activity:
· Zavvi
· Zavvi.com
· Zavvi.co.uk
Landing Pages
Affiliates are not permitted to perform direct linking PPC activity to any of the Groups sites; this includes use of any of the Groups site brands within page or search engine display URLs.
Affiliates are prohibited from passing products directly to the shopping basket on our site(s). The action of placing the product in the cart must be instigated by the consumer and take place on our domain.
Site Specific Guidelines
In addition to the General Guidelines outlined previously, when working withZavvi.com, affiliates must add the following terms as negative broad match to all PPC activity on any platform:
{Zavvi + .co.uk & .com variations}
Unless prior written consent is granted by the Group PPC Department, affiliates are not permitted to bid, or appear, on hybrid brand searches.
I.E
{“Zavvi + (product)”, “Zavvi + voucher”, “Zavvi + discount”, “Zavvi + offers”}
Any affiliates found contravening any of the above conditions will be contacted by the Group PPC & Affiliate Teams and anyone in breach of these conditions may have their commissions declined and face suspension from the program. The Hut Group, in cases of persistent rule breaking, reserves the right to decline commissions accrued from the activity.
De-duplication Policy
All affiliate sales are de-duplicated against other online advertising channels using a local cookie on the merchant platform. De-duplication channels include :
• PPC Brand
• PPC Generic
• Email Advertising
• Direct Partnerships
• Price Comparison
• Display & retargeting advertising
• Other Affiliate Networks
Any queries may be addressed to the network or the specific program contact.
The In House Referrer Scheme
Existing customers who have already purchased from The Hut Group will be sent an email explaining the referral scheme and how they can earn credit from driving new customers to the site.
For example:
Existing customer logs into their account on Advertiser and goes to referral section.
Existing customer creates link to Advertiser to share on social media.
New customer clicks on that link and makes first purchase on Advertiser either by entering referral code at checkout or after an automatic discount has been applied after clicking on a referral link.
Existing customer receives credit to spend on Advertiser as a reward.
All referral sales will be de-duped against affiliate sales and there will be a slight change to the usual last-click method of tracking in certain circumstances:
If a new customer uses a referral code or link then clicks an affiliate link (within 30 minutes of the first click), this sale will be attributed to the referral scheme
If an affiliate link is used 30 minutes or more after the referral link is clicked and no referrer code is redeemed then the affiliate will still be awarded the last click and receive commission for this sale
Note: Whenever a referrer code is used, the sale will not track via affiliates.
Social Content Creators
All affiliate content on social media must be ASA compliant, read the ASA Guide here. If you wish to use affiliate links within your Instagram Stories and other social channels, use #ad as a valid identifier to be ASA compliant.
Awin has a one-page website - Paid for Advertising - which explains how free content can have a commercial relationship attached to it. This can be linked to by any affiliate in order to make your readers aware of how affiliate links work. If you have any questions on this please speak to your account contact. More information here: https://www.awin.com/gb/news-and-events/industry-news/affiliate-links-on-instagram-stories.
Cookieless Vouchercode Tracking
Advertiser uses cookie-less voucher tracking for some of our influencer partners. This means that the transaction is always attributed to the publisher who is given the exclusive voucher. When the voucher is used, transactions will be tracked regardless of whether a click has happened or not. Please speak to your account contact for more information.
Validation Policy
Advertiser validates in-line with their returns policy which is 28 days with a look back window 31 days.
CSS
Only standard shopping activity to be used by CSS partners with brand terms negatively matched in adherence to program terms. Performance Max activity should not be set up and could result in 0 commission and suspension from the programme if this activity is found in place.
Any queries may be addressed to the network or the specific programme contact.
