Wondering how influencer collaboration with brands works?
Affiliate click fraud has emerged as a significant concern for businesses today. This deceptive practice can drain your advertising budget, reduce campaign effectiveness, and erode trust in your affiliate partnerships.
In this insightful guide, we will highlight the detrimental impact of affiliate click fraud and provide you with essential strategies to spot, tackle, and prevent it.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates for driving traffic or sales to their website.
These ‘affiliates’ promote the company’s products or services through unique referral links. Their end goal is to earn a commission for each successful conversion they generate.
Affiliate marketing is a win-win scenario—it allows companies to expand their reach and offers affiliates an opportunity to monetise their online presence.
What Is Affiliate Fraud and How Does It Work?
Affiliate fraud refers to fraudulent activities that strive to manipulate or exploit the affiliate marketing ecosystem for personal gain.
Fraudsters employ various tactics such as fake leads, cookie stuffing, ad stacking, and even using bots to generate illegitimate clicks or conversions.
These deceptive practices can result in businesses:
- paying commissions for non-existent or low-quality conversions
- wasting their advertising budgets and diluting the effectiveness of affiliate campaigns
Examples Of Affiliate Click Frauds
#1 Cookie Stuffing
In this form of affiliate click fraud, the fraudster places affiliate tracking cookies on a user’s device without their knowledge or consent.
These cookies then attribute any subsequent conversions to the fraudster, even if the user did not actually interact with their affiliate link.
As a result, the fraudster earns commissions for conversions they had no role in generating.
#2 Click Farms
Click farms are operations where individuals or automated bots are hired to repeatedly click on affiliate links to generate false traffic and inflate click counts.
This artificially boosts the appearance of engagement and can deceive advertisers into thinking their campaigns are successful. However, this traffic is often non-converting and lacks genuine user interest.
#3 Ad Injection
Ad injection involves injecting unauthorised ads into websites or applications, often through browser extensions or malware.
These injected ads can override legitimate affiliate links and divert potential commissions to the fraudster. Users unknowingly click on these injected ads instead of the intended affiliate links, resulting in lost commissions for genuine affiliates.
Effective Strategies to Prevent Affiliate Click Fraud
Strategy #1: Monitor Traffic Quality
Regularly monitor the quality of traffic coming from your affiliate channels to identify suspicious patterns or anomalies.
To do this, you can set up advanced analytics and tracking tools and gain insights into the legitimacy of clicks and conversions. You can also use IP blocking and device fingerprinting techniques to detect and filter out fraudulent traffic.
Strategy #2: Leverage Affiliate Verification
To maintain affiliate transparency and trust, implement a thorough verification process for affiliate partners that includes:
- Building a robust onboarding program
- Conducting background checks, reviewing their websites or promotional methods, and verifying the traffic sources to ensure they adhere to ethical practices
- Setting clear guidelines and expectations for affiliates
Strategy #3: Implement Click Validation
Implement click validation mechanisms to ensure that clicks coming from affiliates are legitimate and not generated by automated bots or fraudulent sources.
You can use tools and services that:
- track user behaviour
- validate clicks against suspicious patterns
- filter out invalid clicks in real-time
Strategy #4: Utilise Multi-Factor Authentication
You can strengthen the security of your affiliate program by implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA). Using this strategy creates a mandate for affiliates to verify their identities using multiple authentication factors (e.g., sending a password and a unique verification code to the affiliate’s registered email/mobile for instance).
Strategy #5: Engage in Continuous Monitoring and Auditing
To be able to keep an eye on affiliate behaviour and ensure legitimacy:
- monitor affiliate campaigns and conduct audits to identify any signs of click fraud
- analyse click-to-conversion ratios, click patterns, and suspicious spikes in traffic
Key Takeaways
- Affiliate click fraud is a valid concern for businesses today as it can drain budgets and dampen customer trust.
- When implemented transparently, affiliate marketing rewards affiliates for driving traffic/sales through referral links. However, instances of affiliate fraud are rampant, which involve deceptive tactics such as fake leads or cookie stuffing.
- Expert-approved strategies that can prevent affiliate click fraud include monitoring traffic quality, verifying affiliates, implementing click validation, using multi-factor authentication, and engaging in continuous monitoring and auditing.
Working With M&C Saatchi Performance
At M&C Saatchi Performance, we conduct thorough compliance checks on all affiliate partners so that you don’t have to worry about working with ingenuine content creators.
If you are looking for bespoke strategies for your affiliate program and want to safeguard your affiliate investments, please reach out to us.
