Affiliate marketing can be a great way to advertise your business, generate more website traffic, and gain new customers. The affiliate marketing industry is growing steadily, and hard-working affiliates can help you see the business growth you’re looking for. That is, as long as there’s no ad fraud involved.
When an affiliate marketing program is going strong, chosen affiliates promote your products and special offers to their loyal followers. It’s a win-win – they bring in more leads and sales for you, and they’re compensated for bringing in those new clicks, sign-ups, and orders. But as affiliate marketing increases in popularity, the chance of running into fraudulent activity increases, too. That can be bad news for your business and the ROI for your affiliate program.
What is Ad Fraud?
Ad fraud in the affiliate marketing industry is action that isn’t what it appears to be. Instead of being generated by interested consumers, as it should be, it’s ad traffic and site conversion that comes from bots, data centers, compromised devices, and other unscrupulous sources. The clicks, app installs, leads and sales that it brings in are fake. They do not and will not lead to any legitimate sales or customer base growth, and allow affiliates to misrepresent their influence. Common fraudulent affiliate actions include:
- Lead fraud
- Click fraud
- Sales fraud
- App install fraud
Ad fraud can be a huge headache for you and your team and can leave you scrambling to make up for lost time and money. Protecting against affiliate ad fraud is crucial to the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.
How to Detect Affiliate Ad Fraud
Affiliate ad fraud may be obvious in hindsight, once it’s clear that that sale didn’t go through or you find out that bots are a large part of an affiliate’s supposed audience, but there are actually ways to detect ad fraud before it wastes your time. Some signs that ad fraud may be taking place is the detection of: inconsistent browser sessions, IP addresses from data centers, bad device reputations, geo mismatches, and over 40 different anomalies in organic traffic patterns and online behavior we’ve identified at Fraudlogix.
Working with fraud detection experts can help prevent unethical affiliates from hijacking your affiliate marketing campaigns. Our fraud-fighting solutions will allow you to block high-risk traffic, identify fraud as it happens, monitor changes in affiliate performance, and get detailed analysis of transactions on your site.
According to our recent data, 11.9% of the total ad traffic we monitor was found to be fraudulent. To protect against ad fraud, detect it before it becomes a problem with our affiliate fraud solutions for businesses and affiliate managers.
Stop Ad Fraud in its Tracks
At Fraudlogix, we fight ad fraud in all its forms. We develop custom fraud prevention solutions for the unique needs of each of our clients. Sign up now for a free test or contact us to let us know how we can help you detect ad fraud. Keep ad fraud from hurting your affiliate marketing campaigns with affiliate ad fraud detection solutions from Fraudlogix.
