What Is The Role Of Affiliate Fraud Protection Platforms?

By Author: selinsjesse
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Affiliate fraud can destroy your customer’s journey and steal the ROI of the marketing team. Affiliate fraud is a severe issue that can affect your marketing team’s revenue and your company’s reputation. Affiliates are the intermediaries for any businesses operating online.

It is their responsibility to help your company get more users. They earn a commission on every successful sale completed with promotional links. Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. It is a marketing arrangement by which your marketing team pays a commission to affiliates for the traffic generated by them.

Your company’s affiliates will earn a commission each time users make a purchase through the affiliate link. Affiliate fraud is an activity to get users and traffic through unscrupulous activities. Threat actors can destroy the integrity of your affiliate marketing programs.

Malicious actors generate misleading commissions from your brand’s affiliate campaigns. In reality, these actions don’t fetch you any lead or income. Affiliate traps ...
... can demotivate your legitimate affiliate marketers. In affiliate fraud, the legitimate affiliates of your company have a higher likelihood of leaving the campaign midway.

The best way to handle affiliate fraud is to implement trap detection platforms. Here are some essential things to learn about the role of affiliate fraud protection platforms.

What should you know about Affiliate Fraud?
Affiliate fraud refers to denoting clicks, conversions, and traffic of your website in an unfair manner. The sole objective of affiliate fraud is to generate revenue. The working mechanism of affiliate fraud is complicated and affects marketing teams across industry verticals.
It is unscrupulous and unethical behavior that violates the terms and conditions of affiliate marketing. Affiliate fraud is of varied types, and each variety can derail your company’s marketing strategies. It is crucial for modern-day organizations to be proactive with their affiliate marketing campaigns.

Affiliate fraud detection platforms are effective in helping your company address affiliate fraud. These detection platforms monitor your affiliate network and raise alarms during violations. Most companies regularly monitor their affiliate networks for any type of policy violation.
Strategies Leveraged by Malicious Affiliates for Affiliate Fraud
Affiliate marketing is an integral component of your online marketing strategies. It is the best way to get quality leads and traffic. But monitoring your affiliate network for fraud is also necessary. Malicious affiliates rely on several types of methods to offer your marketing team false impressions.

The lack of direct involvement of humans encourages threat actors to create fraud. Here are some ways in which nefarious affiliates can damage the integrity of your affiliate network.

Use of Spyware
It is a common type of strategy used by nefarious affiliates to generate false impressions and clicks. Users unknowingly download adware and spyware programs. Once installed, these programs can compromise the security of your user’s devices. Spyware inflates your website’s traffic figures, which results in fake commissions.

Domain Squatting
Domain squatting is another type of strategy leveraged by nefarious affiliates. It is a method in which the threat actors leverage official-looking domains to mislead your users. Users click on these links and get redirected to the original website.
Cookie Stuffing
Cookie stuffing can result in a severe loss of your company’s marketing budget. In this procedure, the nefarious affiliates place cookies on your users’ devices. It allows unscrupulous affiliates to earn commissions irrespective of the actions undertaken by users.

What are the Common Types of Affiliate Fraud?
If you believe that your company is too small to be affected, then you’re making yourself an easy target. Affiliate marketing can affect any type of company irrespective of their industry domain, turnover, and size. To address and counter affiliate fraud, you should know about its kinds. Some of the common types of affiliate fraud are as follows:

Cookie Hijacking
It refers to the process of the insertion of affiliate cookies with adware through browser extensions. The nefarious affiliates hijack the clickable elements on the websites of the advertisers. The best way to prevent cookie hijacking is by implementing affiliate fraud identification platforms.

Typosquatting
Typosquatting is also known as URL hijacking. It is a type of affiliate fraud where the threat actors use a similar version of your URL to grab traffic from people. In this type of affiliate fraud, threat actors and domain registrars register domains similar to your company.

Violation of Paid Ads
Threat actors use the keywords of your brand to display paid ads on search engines. They also consume the advertising budget of your marketing team. When users click on these ads, the threat actors will get commissions.

The Use of Misleading Deals
It is a serious type of affiliate fraud. The main objective of misleading deals is to grab the attention of your users with fake deals and coupons. When the users click on these coupons and deals, the nefarious affiliates insert malicious cookies.

How can Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) Help to Prevent Affiliate Fraud?
If you want to ensure the integrity of your affiliate network, rely on VPT. VPT can help advertisers and publishers with affiliate marketing compliance. They also offer helpful insights that let you counter affiliate fraud and traps.