Forefront in Combating Affiliate Fraud
One of the issues that you have to confront in affiliate marketing is how to detect and prevent fraud conducted by your participating affiliates. Affiliate fraud has become a serious and significant issue in online marketing. There will always be a sneaky affiliate who would try to pass you a fraudulent transaction or steal from other affiliate earnings. Being committed to curtail this malpractice should be one of your priorities to maintain a quality and parasite-free program.
Big companies had already addressed this concern in their own ways. Google and other networks, are suing their affiliates for fraudulent use of their system. LinkShare had launched their 'Project Athena' to combat affiliate fraud. DirectTrack had developed their FraudMeter technology which reports fraudulent activity patterns across many touch points.
As someone who is relative smaller and newer in the affiliate industry, information is your main arsenal against this practice. Many of these unscrupulous affiliates had been in the industry for some time so you can expect them to be smarter and equipped with latest innovations to get past your security checks. Vigilance and constant education is the key to safeguard your program from fraudulent transactions. In most cases, it is important that merchants also share their experiences with these fraudsters so everyone would be educated thus preventing these unscrupulous individuals to prosper in their trade.
The battlefront in the war against fraudulent transactions is at the Affiliate Approval Process. By carefully reviewing all affiliate application to join the program, you are able to preclude these affiliates from entering your program. The option of auto-approving affiliates is discouraged as you are just opening a wide door for these perpetrators to do their trade against you. Best practices in screening affiliate application to join program are: reviewing publisher website, identify if the content is matching to your products/services, be wary of clone sites, referencing the Whois database, sorting the applications by IP addresses, identify billing information to see if multiple accounts are having identical information, check feedback from other merchants and verify website traffic claim.
If suspicion arouses regarding the affiliates, it would be best to contact them and get to know the nature of their affiliate activities. Rejecting affiliates based on your suspicion is within your jurisprudence. Losing out on the potential commissions to be earned by rejecting suspicious affiliate entities is not a concern especially if your program security and reputation is at stake. There are enough legitimate affiliates in the industry who can generate your desired target revenue so you don’t have to worry about rejecting hundreds or thousands of suspicious affiliates.
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