Your brand means a lot to you. You’ve worked hard to build it up, and you’re still working to help it shine and get the recognition it deserves. Dynamic online advertising strategies are carefully crafted ad campaigns that are helping you to do just that. Reaching the perfect audience for your brand is possible since so many consumers love to connect with their favorite brands – and find new favorites, too – on social media and across the web. There are, however, a few things you want to keep away from your brand when you’re marketing it online. If you are paying your partners for every sale, lead or install that they help you generate, you must have a strategy to weed out any efforts by unscrupulous affiliates who may try to cheat the system and steal unearned commissions from you. Take a look at some of the risks you may face that can degrade your brand’s advertising campaigns.
Bots
Do you know those affiliates with huge audiences who tell you they can get more clicks and site visitors? Well, maybe they can, but if they’re dishonest, those clicks and website conversions might be due to fraudulent bot activity. In ad fraud, a bot performs an action or series of steps that people would typically do. For example, an affiliate may use a bot to repeatedly click on a link to your website, ‘view’ an ad, or complete an action on your site. If members of your target audience create these actions, some clicks, views, and site conversions will translate to sales, sign-ups, or another desired action. But when it’s a bot doing the clicking, you won’t see any sales or conversions. To make matters worse, you’ll likely end up paying commissions to whoever was responsible for generating those fake actions.
Malware
Devices compromised with malware will send views to an ad or traffic to a site, but there isn’t a person behind the action. The malware generates fake traffic, including some of the 13% of recent traffic from mobile devices and 22% of current traffic from desktop devices that we found fraudulent in the data we monitor at Fraudlogix. Like fraud from bot activity, malware may increase page views and site activity, but it won’t be the profitable kind.
Human Generated Fraud
This kind of fraud does have a real live person behind it, but that person may be working in a click farm or is a fraudulent affiliate. Human-generated fraud can include clicks, sign-ups, installs from malicious sources, and fake leads and sales that an affiliate reports as real to you. Identifying fake traffic and affiliate fraud with solutions from Fraudlogix can help keep your brand’s advertising campaigns running as they should.
Domain Masking
If you want to advertise your brand online in the best way, there are some sites you’ll want to advertise on and others you should avoid. Domain masking is a way of tricking brand owners and marketing managers into advertising on undesirable sites by hiding the site’s URL. People who see your ad on these disreputable sites may find their devices inundated with malware and viruses. That’s not the kind of thing you want your brand to be associated with, and domain masking fraud can waste the marketing dollars you could have spent advertising your brand elsewhere.
Don’t let ad fraud hurt your brand. Protect the relationship between you and your partners by filtering out the scammers trying to game the system and cheat you out of your payouts. At Fraudlogix, we monitor over 300 million apps and URLs and 9 billion unique IPs to stop ad fraud in all its forms. Contact us today with questions or to get started using our fraud protection solutions. Protect your brand’s advertising campaigns from harmful activity with help from Fraudlogix.
