How Can The Best Affiliate Tracking Software Help Prevent Affiliate Fraud?

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Affiliate fraud is impacting digital advertising in an adverse manner. Affiliate fraud is the practice of viewing, clicking and generating false interactions within an affiliate campaign. The sole purpose of affiliate fraud is to earn money directly or indirectly.

Modern-day companies leverage affiliate marketing to attract traffic to their websites. Affiliate marketing is suitable for improving metrics and boosting sales. Your marketing team will always find it easy to pay for affiliates who create value for your brand.

But it hurts to pay commissions to threat actors who leverage fraudulent methods to derail your affiliate campaigns. Digital advertising is experiencing volatility, thanks to the advent of affiliate fraud. Affiliate fraud executed on a larger scale can affect your brand’s online reputation.

It can also make you lose loyal customers. Fraud in affiliate marketing is difficult to recognize. It is essential for affiliates to deploy the best affiliate tracking software that will monitor their traffic in real-time. Affiliate fraud is deceiving and can dent your marketing team’s budget big ...
... time.

What is Affiliate Fraud, and how does it Affects Legitimate Affiliates?

Affiliate fraud refers to stealing conversions, clicks and traffic with the sole objective of generating revenue. While executing fraud, threat actors steal the commissions of your company’s legitimate affiliates.
And despite putting in all the hard efforts, the legitimate affiliates of your organization don’t receive their commissions. Any business or company that invests in digital marketing campaigns should know about affiliate fraud. Numerous companies believe that affiliate fraud only affects the advertising segment.

Affiliate fraud has far-reaching repercussions and can erode trust between your brand and its affiliates. The affiliates working with your brand are its vocal advocates. Affiliate fraud can result in lost revenues. With an ad fraud detection platform, you can thwart the actions of threat actors.

How can Affiliate Fraud Affect your Brand’s Reputation?
When paying for marketing, it is obvious that you want to grow your profits. Malicious traffic driven by affiliate fraud gives the appearance of engagement or popularity. Increased affiliate fraud-driven clicks won’t lead to actual purchases.
You tend to pay for affiliate marketing that doesn’t yield any results. You have to waste your marketing budget with no return on investment. Nefarious affiliates can hurt the performance of your marketing campaigns. They can also compromise your customers’ data and taint your brand’s image.

Risk Factors Associated with Affiliate Fraud
In a usual affiliate marketing program, your marketing team entrusts the affiliates to promote your company’s products. And when the affiliate fetches your conversions, you pay them. Affiliate fraud aims to cheat your business and legitimate affiliates out of conversions and money. Nefarious affiliates involved in the fraud mislead your customers. Here are certain risk factors associated with affiliate fraud.

Wasted Ad Budget
Nowadays, affiliate ads are the backbone of any marketing campaign. Affiliate fraud wastes the budget of your marketing team. During affiliate fraud, you tend to pay malicious affiliates instead of legitimate ones. Wasted ad budget can affect your marketing team’s operations.

Erodes Trust
In affiliate frauds, you pay malicious affiliates. It erodes the trust between your company’s marketing team and the legitimate affiliates. Affiliates with top-notch performance will leave your affiliate program midway through fraud. Companies are deploying eCommerce fraud prevention monitoring tools to safeguard the integrity of their affiliate network.

Unable to Retain Loyal Customers
Affiliate fraud can result in mistrust between your brand and customers. Affiliate fraud can also hijack your customers’ data. During affiliate fraud, you will notice fewer conversions.

Types of Affiliate Fraud an Affiliate Tracking Software Solution Detects

An affiliate tracking software platform can identify a range of affiliate frauds. Here is a list of some common frauds an affiliate tracking software solution can identify.

Domain Spoofing

Domain spoofing is a serious affiliate fraud that can affect your affiliate marketing campaign’s performance. It occurs when malicious affiliates represent themselves as publishers during the transaction.
Your marketing team will always expect legitimate affiliates to post ads on reputed platforms. But with domain spoofing, nefarious affiliates will post your ads on substandard domains. Domain spoofing can affect your revenue stream.

Click Fraud
Click fraud revolves around the cost-per-click model. Affiliates receive commissions based on the total number of clicks. In this fraud, malicious affiliates generate false clicks to create fraud. Click fraud is a serious type of affiliate fraud that needs your immediate attention.

Injection of Ads

In this type of fraud, threat actors leverage compromised browser extensions and plugins. Nefarious affiliates rely on malware to insert ads when your visitors browse through your website.

How Virus Positive Technologies help you Monitor Affiliate Fraud?

The brand protection solutions designed by VPT can protect your brand’s reputation. VPT monitors your affiliate network extensively and raises red flags during violations. It can also identify any type of fraudulent activity on your affiliate networks. VPT also offers insights to stop affiliate fraud.