Significance Of The Best Affiliate Tracking Software In Preventing Affiliate Fraud

Modern-day companies engage affiliates to attract traffic to their websites and boost online sales and metrics. But affiliate marketing is prone to various types of fraud. Fraud in affiliate marketing is an eyesore for your marketing team.

You are more than happy to pay affiliates who create value for your brand. But it stings to pay commissions to threat actors who take advantage of your affiliate program by leveraging fraudulent practices.

Digital advertising is encountering turbulent times thanks to the advent of affiliate fraud. While affiliate fraud is a reality nowadays, its repercussions on publishers are severe. Affiliate fraud affects your brand’s reputation.

It can drain ad budgets and act as a hindrance to your marketing team’s performance. Affiliate fraud also affects spend optimization. Fraud in affiliate marketing is hard to identify. You need specialized brand protection solutions that will monitor your traffic in real-time. Like any other fraud, affiliate fraud is deceiving and affects all stakeholders.  

Overview of Affiliate Fraud and its Repercussions

Ad fraud refers to stealing traffic, conversions and clicks with the sole objective of generating revenue. During fraud, the threat actors steal the commissions of your legitimate affiliates. Despite putting in all the hard efforts, the legitimate affiliates of your company don’t receive their commission.

Many companies believe that affiliate fraud only affects the advertising domain. While it affects advertisers, affiliate fraud has far-reaching repercussions. Affiliate fraud can erode trust between your marketing team and its affiliates.

The mistrust between these two parties may negatively affect your campaigns. The best way to check affiliate fraud is by implementing affiliate marketing tracking. It will help you track and identify threats in real time. Based on the findings of these tracking platforms, you can take swift action.

Types of Affiliate Fraud

You should know about the types of affiliate fraud to counter them properly. Here are some of the most common types of affiliate fraud.

Click Fraud

Click fraud involves the cost-per-click ad model. Affiliates receive a commission based on the number of clicks the ad receives. Malicious affiliates generate numerous false clicks to create fraud. Nowadays, most threat actors infect the devices of your users with malware.

By infecting your users’ devices with malware, they are creating click fraud on a larger scale. By generating fake traffic, click fraud increases the illegitimate revenue of the fraudsters. Click flooding is a highly advanced type of click fraud. Click flooding refers to the situation where a fake traffic source transmits fraudulent clicks to inflate volumes.  

Domain Spoofing

Domain spoofing is another major type of affiliate fraud affecting its stability. It happens when malicious affiliates represent themselves as publishers in the buying process. As a publisher, you expect your affiliates to work hard and post the ad on premium platforms.

But with the help of domain spoofing, nefarious affiliates post your ad on low-quality platforms. In this type of affiliate fraud, threat actors don’t always represent themselves as publishers. Nowadays, malicious affiliates are designing fake websites to make them look like suitable platforms for advertisers.

Domain spoofing also refers to disguising a website. It is a serious type of affiliate fraud that may affect the revenue stream. 

Cookie Stuffing

Cookie stuffing occurs when nefarious affiliates use numerous third-party cookies from various advertisers and install them on the visitor’s browser. When the visitor clicks the link and buys a product, the nefarious affiliates will earn a commission.

Cookie stuffing deprives the legitimate affiliates of your company of their commission. Cookie stuffing can also create mistrust between the legitimate affiliates and your in-house marketing team leading to conflict.

Ad Injection

Ad injection refers to a type of affiliate fraud where malicious affiliates use compromised browser extensions and plugins. Malicious affiliates rely on malware to insert ads when the visitor browsers through your website.

They insert ads to cover the content of the website. In ad injection, fraudsters also rely on automated scripts to replace the existing ads operated by your legitimate affiliates. During ad injection frauds, the nefarious affiliates steal the commission that demotivates your legitimate affiliates.

Ad fraud can assume various types. The best way to guard against ad fraud is to deploy the best affiliate tracking software. The best tracking software will raise red alerts during violations. It will also keep track of your website traffic.  

Affiliate fraud is a harsh reality for modern-day brands. It can create conflict between your affiliates and the in-house advertising team. Thanks to affiliate tracking platforms, you can secure your affiliate network.

How to prevent Affiliate Fraud with Virus Positive Technologies?

Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) is one of the top ad fraud detection companies. VPT can monitor your affiliate network and raise alerts during any type of violation. VPT also identifies any type of fraudulent activity and issues red flags. VPT is your one-stop option to get helpful insights to stop affiliated fraud.