Combatting Fraud in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool to grow your business and make money. However, it is also one of the most vulnerable channels for fraud. Affiliates are looking for ways to game the system and maximise their earnings without providing value. They create fake accounts that act as users and generate fake clicks or impressions to get paid without ever generating any real sales. As an affiliate marketer, you need to be cautious and look into affiliate marketing fraud detection to protect yourself!

What is Affiliate Marketing Fraud

Affiliate marketing fraud is a problem in the industry and can take many forms.

• Advertisers may pay for “clicks” that are not real people. When publishers send their traffic to an advertiser’s site, and the user clicks on an ad but does not buy anything from that advertiser, this is known as click fraud. In some cases, marketers will use bots (fake users) to simulate legitimate clicks from human beings; in others, marketers will pay affiliates to create false accounts so they can artificially boost their statistics—all of which can be detected by analysing web server logs.
• Publishers may work with advertisers who don’t exist: Often, an affiliate marketer, will advertise a product without ever having seen it in person; he or she will take the advertiser’s word for its value and repackage it into a sales pitch sent out through email blasts or blog posts using his or her name as an endorsement of the product being advertised.”

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience’s demographics, interests and buying habits is also important. Do they like to be marketed to differently than other audiences? What motivates them? How do they respond to different types of offers or promotions?

Knowing this information will help you avoid offending potential customers by offering them something irrelevant or unappealing; it will also allow you to tailor your marketing messages more effectively for maximum impact.

Find Your Influencers

Finding your influencers begins with finding influencers that have large audiences. The more eyeballs you can get in front of your products, the better. But as important as finding influencers with large audiences, you also need to find influencers with a specific audience (and/or niche). The reason for this is simple: You want to make sure that when someone clicks through from an influencer’s link and comes to your website or landing page, they are already interested in what you offer because they know the person whose link they clicked on.

Influencers can be from any industry and don’t need to be relevant to your product; however, if they are not relevant, then there’s no point in working with them!

Make an Incentive Plan that Works for You and Your Influencers.

The first step to avoiding fraud is making sure you are paying a fair price. This can be tricky because while product prices vary depending on the merchant and channel, this doesn’t mean you should always choose the cheapest option. Consider the value of the product to your audience; if it’s a good fit for what they’re looking for and will help them achieve their goals, then it might be worth paying more than other options.

Make sure your payment plan is clear and easy to understand — both for you as an affiliate marketer and your influencers. You don’t want any confusion leading them to make mistakes or misrepresent themselves in any way that could get you into trouble with either Amazon or Google AdSense (which will result in losing access).

Red Flags

Affiliate marketing fraud detection is the first step to working against scams. Here are a few simple ways to spot fraudulent activity:

• Keep an eye out for suspicious activity in your account.
• Look out for fake transactions.