A Guide for Affiliate Marketers: How Click Fraud Affects Affiliate Marketing?

by Pankaj Mittal Digital Marketing - SEO, SEM, SMO (Free & Paid))

There's no dearth of hackers and scammers in a digital advertising world comprising a multi-billion-dollar market. The sheer size of this market tempts fraudsters into practicing nefarious activities to steal private information and money from advertisers. This is where the phenomenon of ad fraud comes into being.

Thinking that ad fraud did not exist from the advent of digital marketing is a myth. Despite their existence, these frauds did not harass advertisers and publishers before. In recent years, advertising frauds are gaining traction as the RTB or real-time bidding model is extensively adopted.

Amongst the most dangerous types of ad fraud, PPC (pay-per-click) or click fraud gets noticed as the most common obstruction to initiating a successful PPC campaign. Here in this post, you will learn how click fraud affects the 21^st-century affiliate marketing domain.

Introducing the Concept of Affiliate Click Fraud: What’s it?

Affiliate click fraud happens when a bad actor does not approach Google to buy legitimate traffic, and the bad actor signs up the affiliates, thereby generating traffic. The concept is simple: the fraudster already knows that they get paid each time someone clicks on that ad.

Driving traffic in the right way is apparently more expensive. Thus, criminals look for shortcuts. And that’s where affiliate click frauds come into the picture, impacting the affiliate marketing universe. Now that you have understood its concept – let’s move on to how click fraud protection services come into being. You first need to learn how these frauds impact an eCommerce business.

Outlining Several Ways How Affiliate Click Fraud Hampers Affiliate Marketing Performance

When affiliate ad fraudsters enter the business equation, they can generate more dollars from advertising networks and publishers.

Cybercriminals worldwide congregate on the popular blackhat forums to share methods & provide services from where they can purchase approved publisher accounts. So, advertisers, marketers, and merchants should understand that intentional affiliate fraud is an integral part of e-retail sales channels. It’s also a threat to revenues for partners in a channel.

But who sends you the fraud?

✔     Competitors:

A competitor pays individuals to click on merchants’ advertisements, and that merchant will pay for the click without earning a single real sale from fake clicks. These fake clicks quickly drain ad budgets.

✔     Affiliates:

Affiliate advertisers seek the easiest ways to make money and implement methods for fraudulently generating conversions. Affiliates use proxies to complete offers or recruit professionals.

✔     Professional Fraudsters:

They get hired by fraudulent affiliates & marketers to drive fraudulent conversions with the stolen credit cards & bots, mimicking the real human customer.

There are multiple ways how affiliate click fraud can impact a campaign – here’s introducing the most crucial ones.

#1 Fraudulent Charges

If executed methodically, affiliate click fraud can extract money from ads spent each day via fraudulent clicks. As predicted, these damages will witness an upsurge in the next 1-1.5 years, so the damage will worsen with time.

#2 Wasted Forthcoming Advertisement Expense

Decisions based on the data will only be as great as the data quality analyzed. So, affiliate click frauds can waste more forthcoming ad budgets on fraudulent traffic. Thus, identifying whether your business gets affected by such frauds is important.

That’s where the decision to hire ad fraud detection companies is sensible. By doing so, you can ensure that you are keeping more expenses for the future. In addition, you will have more faith in the data and campaign moving ahead.

#3 Your Daily Limits Reaches Faster

Your business budget isn’t infinite. So, there’s a chance that you will put a limit on the campaigns. When a business gets impacted by affiliate click fraud, it reaches limits faster, and overall, it negatively affects your company’s bottom line.

#4 Distorted Data

When an impostor sends IVT or invalid traffic, you will receive distorted data. For a business, it becomes challenging to identify how effective the campaign is and whether or not the conversion rates are impactful.

#5 Potential TCPA violations

You might have a campaign geared towards lead generation. But getting affected by affiliate fraud won’t secure the right amount of leads. If the fraudster routes fake leads that include real-world information (such as phone numbers, names, etc.), the business will be guilty of TCPA violation. A single TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) can result in more than a thousand dollar fine.

Generate Real Business Clicks & Convert More

A massive portion of ad fraud gets prevented via advertiser diligence. Virus Positive Technologies lets your business create individualized post-click landing pages, turning actual clicks into conversions.

Being a pioneer in affiliate fraud management services, VPT also helps you gain the industry’s advanced analytics dashboard for monitoring KPIs. The ad fraud detection company identifies the threat areas and develops solutions for ad fraud detection, tracking, monitoring, and analyzing affiliate networks.

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Created on May 25th 2022 01:41. Viewed 376 times.

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