Cookie stuffing is an illicit technique for developing an unfair attribution. In cookie stuffing, the threat actors steal the credit of the attribution of others. Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool for driving traffic and leads to your company’s website.
But it can also be ripe for malicious activities by unscrupulous affiliates. A majority of companies nowadays rely on affiliate marketing to get leads and conversions. Affiliate marketing comprises a performance-based model. You use the affiliate’s website to display ads for your products.
When users click on these ads, you pay the affiliates with commissions. Affiliate marketing is a win-win marketing model for the parties. In affiliate marketing, affiliates generate passive income by displaying the ads of your products and services.
You should also be aware of the dark side of this industry. In affiliate marketing, your marketing team won’t have visibility of the platforms used by the affiliates. And this open platform makes affiliate marketing vulnerable to fraud and theft.
In cookie stuffing, your marketing team misattributes sales. The stuffing of cookies can decrease your marketing budget. It can also affect your conversion rates. The best way to stay protected from cookie stuffing is to monitor your affiliate networks.
Overview of Cookie Stuffing
In cookie stuffing, the nefarious affiliates drop numerous cookies in your users’ browsers or devices. The main objective of this fraud is to monetize the sales happening through the browser.
During cookie stuffing, the nefarious affiliates can stuff wanted cookies. They can also overwrite the existing cookies to derail your affiliate campaigns. Stealing commissions from legitimate affiliates is another objective of the threat actors.
It takes money away from those affiliates who brought traffic to your website. Affiliate cookie stuffing harms your company’s affiliate marketing endeavors. The affiliates who have worked hard start to see less profit from the program. The legitimate affiliates will not participate in the affiliate campaigns.
Affects your Brand’s Reputation in the Target Market
Cookie stuffing is a serious type of fraud that affects your organization’s reputation. In some cases, your marketing team won’t even know that they’re using cookie stuffing to monetize sales. The threat actors may leverage some type of extension to enable particular features.
And in many cases, the cookies are dropped directly on the users’ devices or browsers. Nefarious affiliates may drop cookies onto the browser of users without their knowledge or consent. During cookie stuffing, malicious affiliates can steal personal information from your clients.
It can give rise to a data breach. Cookie stuffing can contribute to wasted ad dollars. By collecting the data of the customers without their consent, malicious affiliates defame your brand. The reputation of your brand takes a severe blow. Building brand visibility and identity takes time. To guard against this affiliate fraud, you should know what is cookie stuffing.
The Need for Cookies in Affiliate Marketing
A cookie refers to the information pieces in the browser of your users. Websites can read from and write data with the help of cookies. Cookies play an integral role in helping the website track the user’s browser history. Cookies are also helpful in saving the login credentials of your users.
Your company’s marketing team relies on cookies to attribute lead activities with a specific affiliate. Cookies allow your marketing team to offer the right compensation to the right affiliate partners.
How is Cookie Stuffing Beneficial for the Nefarious Affiliates?
The nefarious affiliates stuff cookies for various intentions. Cookie stuffing can give rise to data breaches. It also helps unscrupulous affiliates to take inappropriate advantages. Here are some ways in which the threat actors benefit from cookie stuffing.
Monetizing the Affiliate Campaigns
In usual scenarios, your marketing team pays the affiliates based on the attribution of cookies. But in cookie stuffing, there is a misattribution of sales. The nefarious affiliates leverage cookie stuffing to earn a commission without sending qualified leads to your marketing team. Cookie stuffing diminishes your marketing budget and ROI.
Tracking the Browsing History
The main objective of cookies is to track and monitor the browser history of your users. In cookie stuffing, the threat actors can monitor the browsing history of your users without their consent. This type of fraud hampers the reputation of your company in the target market.
Collecting the Data of Users
Another objective of cookie stuffing is to gather the data of your customers. Cookies can store vital information like email addresses, payment information, credit card details, etc. Cookies can result in the breach of user data policy. It also affects the user experience of your website.
How can Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) Help with Combating Cookie Stuffing?
VPT offers affiliate management services to help you monitor cookie stuffing in realtime. VPT comprises a data-based publisher profiling and fraud detection platform. It can identify affiliate fraud and cookie stuffing. You can now safeguard your marketing budget with VPT’s monitoring tools.
Pineapple stuffing, a recipe and a holiday tradition that perhaps you might have gotten from your Mum?
Or maybe it came to your table after you have raved about the pineapple stuffing after having it a friend’s house, and his mom gave me you the recipe or perhaps you might just know it from here.
Be it Thanksgiving or Easter, it goes perfectly with ham at Easter and has the potential to replace the cranberry stuffing at Thanksgiving.
It’s a much tastier alternative to the pineapple rings that never quite stayed put and ended up cooking in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Pineapple stuffing is quite easy to make if compared to prepping whole cranberries for stuffing and you can also serve it as a side, however, make sure to try a bite of ham or turkey on your fork along with the stuffing.
It is incredibly moist and delicious!
