Home » SEM » Affiliate Marketing » Avoiding fraud in affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is not free from fraud. The merchant can cheat an affiliate in paying compensation or the affiliate can cheat the advertiser in accumulating more compensation. There are hundreds of sites offering robots to cheat. However, there are ways by which you can track the fraud if there is any in the transaction.

You must know your affiliates: As the first step, you must choose your affiliates wisely by manually vetting affiliate applications to join your program. You can also check out other sites for which these affiliates have gathered leads; and even ask them for references if you think it is warranted. You must gather all the contact details of your affiliates so that you can contact them quickly if something goes wrong. If the affiliate has a newsletter, you can check it for questionable activity, if any. Also, ask for URLs from your affiliates. Keep an eye on the referring URLs from your affiliates. You should mandate that they supply all of them to you; and if there is traffic coming from an unknown URL, take a close look at it.

Monitor your campaign manually: You should ensure that you are receiving quality leads from your affiliates. Though it may not be possible all the time, you can do the checks at the beginning at least. So, check the leads you are receiving. At least, you can conduct a daily check on your top affiliates. If they all have similar properties then you could have a problem. There may be similar spelling mistakes on each lead which would indicate that one person is filling out the lead form many times. Identical IP addresses could also indicate that one person is filling out the lead form several times or getting friends and relatives to do it. You will need to keep doing this manually until you are happy with your affiliates and the quality of leads they are generating.

Build probability models: You can check the conversion rates, activity rates and retention rates through your affiliate channels. If you get the calculation and have the statistics, you can look at probability distributions and figure out which specific affiliate sites are sending you traffic that exceeds these norms. This will help you in tracking fraud.

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