As affiliate marketing grows more and more important for Advertisers to leverage their consumer reach, traffic fraud poses a constant threat when trying to scale. Recent stats predict that sometimes as high as 45% of all affiliate traffic coming into a brand’s website is deemed to be potentially fraudulent.
Fraudulent affiliate activities cheat your business and legitimate affiliates out of valid earned commissions and cost marketing programs billions of dollars as they deploy increasingly sophisticated tactics to work the loopholes in affiliate program tracking and compensation validation processes.
Staying one step ahead is crucial for protecting your revenue streams, safeguarding your program’s reputation and saving time and money to filter and fix when fraudulent sales occur.
This guide explores the cutting-edge fraud prevention measures available in the market allowing you to combat fraudsters and maintain a competitive edge as your program scales.
Traffic fraud involves generating fake traffic to online landing pages, inflating the number of views, clicks, or conversions. This not only skews performance metrics but also drains marketing budgets and damages reputations.
The most common forms of traffic fraud include:
Fraud prevention tools can help you mitigate incoming fraud in your affiliate program – but often you’ll need to test a few before discovering which one’s provide the most accurate results for your program.
You’ll want to make sure that the fraud tools you engage with can harness the power of advanced machine learning algorithms and have access to and utilise big data analytics to identify and neutralize even the most intricate of incoming fraud traffic patterns.
You’ll want to look at the companies that have been TAG certified.
TAG is a leading global initiative fighting criminal activity and increasing trust in the digital advertising industry. It is the first and only Information Sharing and Analysis Organisation (ISAO) for the digital advertising industry. TAG was created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and works collaboratively with companies throughout the digital ad supply chain.
Here are some of the key features you want to look out for when deciding what platform to use for your affiliate program fraud detection and prevention measurement. The important thing to remember is that you’ll want to partner with a business that you can trust, who understands the impact and effect of managing large volumes of incoming traffic and affiliate fraud and that has a robust infrastructure to support your program at scale.
These are just a few of the considerations that you may want to look at when choosing a fraud detection tool or service provider to stamp out traffic and affiliate fraud before it ever reaches your business or service teams.
While there are many fraud detection systems available in the marketplace, one of the tools most used by brands like QuinnStreet, Smart Financial and MGID, to name a few, is Anura.io. We asked their CEO Rich Kahn, to give his essential tips to stay ahead of traffic fraud.
Here’s a list of actionable steps he shared:
Fraud is something we all have to live with when investing in growing our online marketing, but with the right tools and preventative tips in place it can be effectively managed and even stamped out. If you’re struggling to manage fraud right now all our readers can access a FREE TRIAL of Anura’s platform to test what percentage of traffic might be fraudulent in your affiliate program.
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