Every business operating over the internet has its fair share of threats and challenges. For the affiliate marketing domain, affiliate fraud is one of the most cancerous issues. Affiliate fraud, like any other type, is deceiving and severely affects your company's bottom line.
It plays with the interests of brands, customers, your company’s affiliate networks, and the marketing team. Modern practices like the best affiliate tracking software can help monitor your affiliate networks to recognize frauds.
In most cases, a majority of your company’s affiliates toil hard to fetch you organic traffic and leads. But there are chances that a small subset of affiliates can turn malicious and steal your commissions. Companies are implementing ad fraud identification platforms to deter nefarious affiliates, and here are some reasons why detecting ad fraud in affiliate marketing is essential.
Affiliate Fraud can Damage your Reputation
Companies thrive based on their reputation nowadays, and no company will like to see its reputation dipping because of affiliate fraud. For most companies, affiliate marketing works like a dream solution and affiliate marketing is a performance-based model, and you only pay commissions for conversions.
Legitimate affiliates fetch you high-quality leads that increase your website traffic and sales. But most affiliate marketing strategies can run into a glaring problem, also known as fraud. Nefarious affiliates, on the lookout for quick commissions, can damage your company's reputation in various ways.
Affiliate marketing fraudsters benefit by taking commissions on sales, and they also leverage cookie hijacking to redirect users and generate false traffic. Affiliate fraud affects a brand’s reputation, drains the advertisement budget, and demotivates legitimate affiliates.
Benefits of deploying Ad Fraud Detection Platforms
Affiliate fraud solutions can monitor and alert in case of fraudulent activities implemented by nefarious affiliates. You can improve your marketing team’s ROI with affiliate fraud detection platforms. In affiliate fraud, malicious affiliates use many methods to earn commissions. Here are some advantages of implementing ad fraud detection platforms.
Real-time monitoring of Affiliate Network
To stop affiliate fraud, you need a real-time platform to monitor fraud. Manual analysis of the data of your website may prove futile in case of large-scale attacks. It also provides a chance for the fraudster to get away with the commissions of your legitimate affiliates.
Extensive Checking of every Piece of Website Traffic
With the extensive online user base, sorting website traffic based on one or two data points may result in false positives. Affiliate fraud tracking solutions are ideal for checking every piece of traffic coming to your website, and these solutions offer you accurate results on tons of data points.
Eliminates Fraud and optimizes your Marketing Team’s ROI
The most significant way that an affiliate fraud detection solution helps is to optimize your ROI. You can secure your affiliate ad spend from nefarious affiliates. By monitoring and recognizing fraudulent traffic, these platforms allow companies to restrict the activities of unscrupulous affiliates. In the presence of affiliate fraud detection platforms, you don’t have to waste money paying for fraudulent leads.
Identifies Cookie Stuffing
Cookie stuffing is a process where nefarious affiliates load modified cookies into your users' devices. When the user buys the product, the malicious affiliate earns the commission. Your company’s marketing team will appear as though they followed the legitimate affiliate’s link. Cookie stuffing can skew cost per conversion on several types of ad campaigns.
No need to worry about Fake Conversions
Whether it is a click or a sale, much affiliate fraud revolves around affiliates faking conversions and nefarious affiliates fake conversions to collect the commission.
Malicious affiliates may also use adware to dupe legitimate affiliates of your company of their commission. In many cases, unscrupulous affiliates also rely on competitor ads to create fraud. By implementing affiliate fraud identification platforms, you can stop the process of fake conversions.
Monitors Misleading Deals
A misleading deal is a strategy of attracting the shopper’s attention by displaying coupons with improper labeling to earn commissions. Shady deals are deceiving and are a preferred method for nefarious affiliates to create frauds.
This process includes displaying attractive deals and ads that never exist. After clicking them, the user lands on an irrelevant webpage. The legitimate affiliates of your company get low conversions.
How do Virus Positive Technologies help you monitor Malicious Affiliates?
Using affiliate marketing for high-quality leads and traffic, rely on Virus Positive Technologies and its advanced tools. The eCommerce fraud prevention tools of VPT monitor your online shop and recognize the latest frauds, and VPT also offers supporting evidence of detected fraud.
