6 Best Solutions to Help You Avoid Affiliate Fraud in 2024

Affiliate marketing generates a significant percentage of the overall income in the field of digital marketing.

It has evolved into the foundation of several businesses, especially those in the retailing industry. 

Numerous brands claim that affiliate marketing produces a substantial proportion of their re-commerce earnings, even months after they launch their programmes. 

In fact, there are multiple ways to succeed with affiliate marketing if deployed correctly.

Regrettably, there also exists a threat of illicit behavior, including affiliate fraud, which can reduce your income and weaken your advertising efforts.

Affiliate fraud counts among the serious problems that are on the increase. Recognizing the multiple techniques used by corrupt individuals and unlawful affiliates, on the other hand, can help protect you from them.

To help you out and stay vigilant, in this blog, we'll define six key strategies you could use to avoid affiliate fraud. So, let's begin!

6 Expert Tips to guide you in averting affiliate fraud

If affiliate scam artists are trying to target your company, you need a full-fledged approach to assess the authenticity of your preferred partner. Your prevention and detection solution must ideally follow the following strategies.

Without any further ado, let’s dive right into the six helpful tips to help you prevent affiliate fraud. 

1. Keep track of the site traffic

According to Juniper’s Future Digital Advertising,  Artificial Intelligence & Advertising Fraud 2019-2023, advertisers’ total loss to fraud will rise to $100 billion by 2023. And most of it is owing to affiliate scams.

Now, one of the tried-and-true methods to prevent affiliate marketing fraud is to monitor the traffic to your partner’s site. 

Check that you have software in place, which enables you to record affiliate Id numbers, giving you a clear picture of the number of users they deliver. You must also recognize what percentage of their viewers successfully complete the conversion phase.

Here is an example of how SEON Sense filters out good affiliates from the bad ones, depending on accepted or refused transactions.

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Each vendor brings in subscribers whose exchanges are accepted, evaluated, or refused, as shown in the screen capture above. Of course, your fraud protection platform can automate the above three outcomes.

But the key purpose is, after logging each conversion, you'll have just enough information to start isolating decent partners from the bad.

However, what can you do when you aim to prevent bogus traffic from entering your structure? You can investigate device fingerprinting.

2. Use device fingerprinting

Each user who visits your conversion site will bring some information with them. It's referred to as a digital presence, and it involves the software plus hardware setup.

You can generate IDs for such combinations to see when something looks shady using a device fingerprint identification subsystem on your site. Here is an example:

Is this identical configuration already present on your webpage? Then, it is likely you have met a fraudster attempting to deceive your system through multi-accounting.

Is the device pointing to a fraud-detecting emulator such as FraudFox, Linken Sphere, Kameleo, MultiLogin, or AntiDetect? Well, these count among some of the tools of choice for fraudsters who deploy bots to mass-abuse affiliate programs.

When blended with some other data enhancement tools, you possess the ability to create a fairly comprehensive portfolio of your subscribers in real time.

It should be noted that device fingerprint recognition is indeed an excellent tool for combating extra abuse, such as in the gambling market, as well as for lowering chargeback prices and manual evaluations.

3. Monitor user behavior

A set of risk guidelines is used to track behavior in fraud prevention. A risk score is incremented or decremented each time user information is compared to the guideline.

A standardized IP assessment is by far the most excellent illustration. Is the IP address of the user directing to the identical location as seen in the address of the account holder? Real user monitoring can also help in detecting fraud behavior and anomalies.

However, the regulations can be made much more advanced:

• How many tries did they attempt per hour to connect?
• How quickly did they fill out the areas of your sign-up form?
• How much was the mean time required for them to transit from visiting your converting page to checking out?

There is really no limit when it concerns risk regulations, and possessing a talented squad of fraud-detection managers could indeed make a massive difference. 

Of course, this assumes that your forgery management platform makes it possible to develop risk guidelines physically – or to receive recommendations via an ML aka machine learning tool.

4. Consider terms and conditions while benefiting from data

Do you remember whether you recently looked at your affiliate program agreement? 

One method to close gap areas and protect against affiliate scams is by keeping your company's terms and conditions updated. A good lawyer can spot vulnerable aspects that you might have overlooked.

Closely connected to the above point, advertisers must ensure that any adjustments to your terms and conditions, irrespective of how minor they are, are communicated to affiliates. When new conditions are introduced, enforce them strictly.

When it comes to combating affiliate fraud, the raw available data to you is perhaps the most advantageous factor. Details from referring web pages, affiliate marketers, IP addresses, GPS location, device fingerprints, transaction patterns, and other sources are useful transaction indicators. The knowledge is accessible; make use of it.

Now, you may ask yourself, what can I do since I did not consider retaining data in the past – believing it would be of no use. Well, there’s a solution for that as well! You can develop a data recovery plan to recover and restore lost data.

So, you've revised your terms and conditions, are prepared to impose them, and understand what statistics you ought to scrutinize. 

At this juncture, your greatest priority is to build a schedule for managing your affiliate program. Set aside sometime each week to review reports and look for suspicious behavior.

5. Track records

You must definitely contact the company for testimonials. Do not really believe the reviews that they post on their homepage. 

In order to know more regarding how the scheme worked for other customers, request your affiliate partner for the email addresses and names of individuals you can approach. However, do not be put off when you see some poor feedback. A few people simply aren't cut out for certain programmes. 

Things would most probably be fine since there are more positives than negatives. You could also use such testimonials to learn what steps to take or what to avoid. Again, if you are required to pay a membership fee, it is possible that you are dealing with an online marketing fraud or a cross-channel marketing programme.

When you have certain queries or issues, you ought to be able to reach the affiliate partner's customer support team. They also should offer marketing assistance for their merchandise. A legitimate business will always aim for your success since it will improve its performance if you're doing well. It must own a toll-free contact number as well as an email account for customer service.

A better test is to send the firm an email including some basic concerns. If it ends up making them a long time to give a response, you should reconsider proceeding with this enterprise. If they have communication problems, it is possible that they have other internal problems as well. 

Finally, check for the track record. The firm's history should reveal whether or not they are reliable. Examine their homepage to see whether you can find sufficient information.

A decent affiliate programme has a proven track record and has been in operation for a long period of time. If it's a great program, it'll be around for several months.

6. Check payment methods 

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Any affiliate agency's credibility can be assessed by performing a quick internet search. 

Grievances and customer feedback from irate victims are unavoidable when it comes to a well-known fraud. Even a handful of bad reviews should be sufficient to steer you away from it.

Again, a scam might be an affiliate program, which pays implausible commissions which can be easily compared to get-rich-quick ploys. There are valid affiliate initiatives that provide a good return on investment. Payouts could be considerable, but certain conditions must be fulfilled. Consider staying away from those programs that provide a commission without any restrictions.

Errors occur, but not all strange behavior or anomalies that take place inside of your affiliate programme necessarily indicate that you are dealing with a cyberattack. However, it is better to steer clear of suspicious activities and stay cautious.

If the same user exhibits inappropriate activity or disregards your company's terms and conditions on a regular basis, it's probably better to drop them. You would not want to jeopardize your complete affiliate programme or make a loss because of one incautious, malevolent, or money hungry participant.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing serves as a well-known, powerful, and efficient method of expanding your business, promoting products, and increasing revenue. 

However, it is critical to take precautionary and proactive actions to safeguard your program and initiatives from fraudsters.

We discussed six methods for preventing affiliate fraud in this post. 

Do you have any queries about stopping affiliate fraud? Please leave your feedback in the comment thread below!