Affiliate fraud detection is the only way to protect advertisers and affiliate networks from the growing threat of fraudulent traffic, which generates invalid clicks and unauthorized commissions for marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Fraud Detection Techniques
Affiliate marketing, a booming domain of the digital marketing landscape, has proven to be an effective strategy for businesses aiming to expand their online presence. However, with the growth of this sector comes an unfortunate side-effect: affiliate fraud. This deceptive practice has become increasingly prevalent and continues to inflict significant monetary losses on businesses worldwide. Fortunately, with the help of sophisticated tools like IPQualityScore, businesses can detect affiliate fraud in real-time. This comprehensive guide delves into the intricate world of affiliate fraud and effective fraud detection methodologies.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
Before we embark on the exploration of detecting affiliate fraud, let's first comprehend its origin — affiliate marketing. This performance-based marketing tactic involves a business compensating one or multiple affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's marketing efforts. The appeal of affiliate marketing lies in its pay-per-performance model, ensuring businesses only incur costs for actual results. Examples of these models include cost per lead (CPL), cost per action (CPA), cost per install (CPI), cost per click (CPC), and similar metrics.
The Menace of Affiliate Fraud
What is Affiliate Fraud? Affiliate fraud, a corrupt practice within the realm of affiliate marketing, involves illegitimate activities aimed at unethically earning commissions. Fraudsters employ various deceptive techniques, such as generating fictitious leads or sending bad traffic that results in fraudulent clicks — or claiming undeserved sales attribution. This not only leads to undue payouts for fraudsters but also results in financial losses for legitimate affiliates and businesses, causing a detrimental impact on the return on investment (ROI) and brand reputation.
Affiliate Fraud Detection Techniques
Affiliate fraud is not a monolithic entity; it manifests in multiple forms, often making it challenging for businesses to detect and curb. Here are some common ways fraudsters exploit the affiliate marketing system:
- Click Fraud: Fraudsters employ automated bots to mimic human behavior and generate a large number of click events using proxies or VPNs, which can deplete CPC budgets or push down high conversion rates due to fraudulent leads. Bad actors are now generating fraudulent conversions using more advanced anonymized IP addresses like residential proxies.
- Cookie Stuffing: This involves automatically dropping cookies on a user's browser when they visit the fraudster's website. The fraudster subsequently earns a commission when the user makes a purchase from the advertiser. This technique has been harder for fraudsters to execute as most affiliate programs have implemented cookie stuffing protection.
- Content Duplication: Fraudsters often clone the website of a high-performing, legitimate affiliate, and then manipulate search engine optimization to divert traffic through their cloned site.
- Data Theft: Fraudsters use lead forms or malware to steal user data like credit card and billing information — other types of personal data from online breaches, and use it to generate fake leads. Advertisers can verify if their leads have been used with stolen data by deploying a dark web API lookup.
- Click Spoofing: Fraudsters trigger invalid click events even if a user doesn't engage with a link, leading to undeserved commissions when the user later makes a purchase.
Get Started With Affiliate Fraud Detection
The Impact of Affiliate Fraud
Affiliate fraud poses serious threats to businesses, causing direct financial losses by depleting marketing budgets. However, its adverse effects are not limited to monetary losses alone. It can skew analytics, making it difficult to measure campaign KPIs accurately. Moreover, businesses may face legal complications, such as KYC or AML fines, if fraudulent affiliates proceed to the transaction stage. Businesses also risk incurring processing chargeback fees, and might lose money if they offer signup bonuses susceptible to fraud.
Detecting Affiliate Fraud
The first line of defense to prevent affiliate fraud is an accurate risk detection solution. Here are some effective ways to detect affiliate fraud:
Monitoring Traffic Quality
Keeping track of traffic quality is a critical step towards detecting affiliate fraud. Analyzing the source of traffic and logging affiliate IDs can provide an accurate view of the users an affiliate brings in and how many of their visitors successfully complete the conversion stage, such as a registration, form submission, or purchase.
Most fraudulent clicks are generated with an anonymized IP, which is why a proxy detection service is crucial for preventing high risk clicks. Similar services to screen traffic includes VPN detection, which can identify location spoofing tactics.
Leveraging Device Fingerprinting
Device fingerprinting involves creating IDs for the configurations of a visitor's software and hardware, helping detect suspicious activities. For instance, if a configuration is repeatedly detected on your site, it might indicate an attempt at multi-accounting, a common fraud technique. Device scoring can also identify risky behavior like device resetting, GPS spoofing, virtual devices, and emulators.
Behavior Analysis & Bot Detection
Behavior analysis involves tracking user behavior through a series of risk rules. For example, if the number of connection attempts per hour is unusually high, or if form fields are filled out too quickly, it might indicate fraudulent activities due to automated behavior. A bot detection solution can identify non-human behavior that is 99.99% aligned with lead stuffing and similar affiliate fraud techniques.
Protecting Your Business from Affiliate Fraud with IPQualityScore
Detecting affiliate fraud is a crucial step, but prevention is the ultimate goal. With the right tools and strategies in place, businesses can effectively safeguard their affiliate campaigns from fraudulent traffic. IPQualityScore's suite of fraud detection tools offers real-time detection of affiliate fraud, allowing businesses to proactively protect their campaigns. IPQS has over 10 years of experience in preventing lead generation fraud and similar affiliate abuse from bad traffic sources.
Frequently Asked Questions about Affiliate Fraud Detection
What is the financial impact of affiliate fraud on businesses?
The financial impact of affiliate fraud on businesses is significant. According to Juniper, the total loss to advertising fraud, including affiliate scams, is expected to reach $100 billion by 2023. Even for many smaller affiliate networks and advertisers, losses to fraud can exceed $1 million per year.
How can businesses detect affiliate scams?
Businesses can detect fraudulent affiliates by logging the quality of the traffic they bring to their landing pages. Solutions like bot protection can identify non-human clicks generated by proxies or automated behavior, and monitor risk signals based on user behavior.
In conclusion, affiliate fraud presents a significant challenge to businesses leveraging affiliate marketing. However, with an understanding of fraudulent publisher tactics and robust detection tools like IPQualityScore, businesses can effectively protect their affiliate campaigns and secure their revenue.
Implement Affiliate Fraud Detection Software
Install IPQS fraud protection on your network or directly on your own landing pages. If you use an affiliate tracking platform like CAKE, Everflow, LinkTrust, HasOffers, or Affise then our solutions can very quickly integrate into your platform.
