Any attempt to take advantage of your company’s marketing potential is referred to as affiliate fraud. It is done by triggering affiliate benefits with bots. In any case, it’s a relationship with an associate in which the other person deceives you into parting with money.
Although affiliate marketing is a low-risk strategy to increase brand exposure while boosting revenue, it has a bad reputation due to fraud. Affiliate fraud is projected to account for 2% of all transactions each year, which may not appear to be a significant amount at first sight. However, this amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue lost each year.
Here are a few measures to stop and expose affiliate fraud, reducing the cost and time of coping with clawbacks and credit card refund policies.
Track Traffic and Program Analytics
If you don’t have a mechanism to monitor your affiliate program actively, it’s challenging to discover prohibited activities. You’ll easily spot a sudden spike in traffic or a suspicious quantity of transactions linked to a single IP address if you monitor your affiliate marketing metrics on a regular basis. Nevertheless, you can use affiliate program tools to assist in this process.
Allow Fingerprinting on Devices
Any visitor to your conversion page has some information on them. Their software and hardware setup is referred to as their digital footprint.
You may build IDs for these settings and see whether anything appears odd using a device fingerprinting module on your site. Consider the following:
Is there a place on your site where this precise configuration may be found? There’s a chance you’re dealing with a con artist who’s using multi-accounting to deceive your system.
You should be alarmed if the device is pointing to FraudFox, Kameleo, Linken Sphere, MultiLogin, and AntiDetect as an emulator. It’s these tools that fraudsters utilize to mass-abuse affiliate programs. When used in conjunction with other data enrichment technologies, you’ll be able to create a relatively comprehensive profile of your consumers in real-time.
It’s worth noting that device fingerprinting is also an excellent tool for preventing bonus abuse, such as in the casino industry or lowering chargeback rates and manual reviews.
Detecting Digital Advertising Fraud
More advertisers, more significant ad expenditures, extended nation focusing, more accessible conversion points, and a diverse mix of ad campaigns would all benefit from improved quality control procedures. IPQS anti-fraud technologies may filter traffic in real-time using clever algorithms that learn from the quality of each affiliate’s traffic as well as the audience’s activity patterns. Riskier affiliates might have stricter filters applied, whereas affiliates with essentially clean traffic can have more lax filters applied.
Create sophisticated business logic that can ban affiliates with average fraud ratings exceeding a specified level and freeze affiliates on specific campaigns they are abusing. IPQS offers a versatile system that can react to ad fraud without interfering with legal traffic.
IPQS can also detect publisher fraud before dangerous affiliates gain access to your network’s campaigns and track links by screening new sign-ups on your network. IPQS can detect affiliate fraud before it starts using a combination of phone verification and email validation.
Consistency is Key
The harsh reality is that scam artists are tenacious in outsmarting the system. The easiest way to avoid fraud is to manage your affiliate program with the same care you would your own. That requires devoting time each week to review your metrics and thoroughly monitor and onboard new affiliates.
Working with an experienced team that can maximize every dollar you spend and has the technology to secure your investment is often the simplest and most cost-effective method to accomplish this.
Reinforce New Terms and Conditions
It’s always a good idea to send out a newsletter to all of your affiliates when you alter your affiliate terms and conditions. Provide a deadline for affiliates to comply with your new requirements with their promotional activities. This will ensure that trustworthy affiliates follow your updated terms and give them time to alter their campaigns. Start enforcing your new conditions as soon as the deadline has passed.
Affiliate marketing is an effective and profitable way to grow your company, generate sales, and boost revenue. To keep your program and campaigns safe from scammers, you must take safeguards and be proactive. Remember to thoroughly screen and engage with your affiliates, monitor your affiliate program’s statistics and user activity, block suspicious IP addresses, and terminate unscrupulous affiliates.