Anura PR Team
Affiliate marketing is a huge business. In fact, it accounts for 15% of revenue in the digital media industry, which equates to $12 billion in annual campaign spend in the US alone. However, a major downside to this lucrative method of selling products and services is that around 45% of all the transactions it generates can be attributed to affiliate fraud.
How are merchants impacted by these affiliate scams? What can they do to protect their precious ad campaign budget? There are steps you can take to sniff out affiliate fraud and stop it in real time. In this article, we’ll cover the strategies you can use to fight affiliate fraud.
How Can Merchants Protect Themselves from Affiliate Fraud?
There are a litany of ways both affiliates and criminal fraudsters commit affiliate fraud. Some of these include typosquatting, using stolen information for purchases, cookie stuffing, and filling out lead forms from spoofed IPs to trick companies into thinking they’re a real visitor. So how can you prevent these and the many other ways fraudsters attack affiliate marketing programs?
Screen Affiliates Carefully
One of the first steps to take to prevent affiliate fraud is creating a screening process that filters potential fraudsters. Build a multi-stage application process that requires a manual approval before the affiliate ever comes on board.
It’s also essential to make your affiliates sign a terms and conditions document. This should spell out precisely what constitutes acceptable activity and what does not, giving you a written record of agreement.
Analyze Each Affiliates’ Traffic And Conversion Trends
A lot of affiliate fraud could be prevented simply by analyzing the conversion trends of each of your affiliates. When certain affiliates produce results that defy logic, that’s a major warning sign that they’re using nefarious marketing methods. Gaming your affiliate marketing system is much harder for fraudsters when you’re watching the patterns of their behavior, so this step alone can go a long way to save money.
Monitor Your Affiliate Traffic
Regularly tracking the minute details of your affiliate marketing analytics will put you in a far better position to catch fraud in real time. Being able to quickly identify a sudden surge in traffic, redirect pages, or questionable transactions that are attributed to a single IP address is the ideal form of protection. Thankfully, it’s all possible using Anura’s easy to integrate solution.
Protect Your Affiliate Campaigns from Scams
Having an affiliate marketing program is a proven way to expand a company’s reach and promote its products and services. However, business owners should take proactive measures to prevent fraud from taking place. The potential earnings as an affiliate marketer are high, creating massive incentives for nefarious actors to take advantage of unsuspecting advertisers. So how can merchants protect themselves from affiliate fraud?
How Can You Detect Affiliate Fraud?
Detecting when affiliates are committing fraud isn’t always easy. Therefore, it’s essential to leverage a solution that uses the power of machine learning. By analyzing hundreds of data points about your affiliate traffic and visitor data, you’ll be able to detect and take action in real time. Even better, Anura integrates with any platform, making it simple to start protecting yourself from affiliate fraud right away.
Prevent Affiliate Fraud From Impacting Your Business
Affiliate fraud costs companies billions every year. Real time detection is the most effective form of protection from this form of digital advertising fraud. Anura gives you a powerful solution for winning the fight against affiliate fraudsters. Our superior fraud detection makes it simple to prevent potential losses without being an expert yourself.
