With technology progressing and new ways to trick the system being discovered everyday, fraud is a hurdle we have to keep on jumping over. It’s oftentimes a topic of discussion here and since we have a fair amount of experience with it, we wanted to take a couple posts to let everyone in on what we think is important.
First, we agreed it was important to provide a clear definition of what fraud is. After doing some research, we found a definition on softwareprojects.com we really connected with.
Affiliate fraud is bogus activity generated by an affiliate in an attempt to generate illegitimate, unearned revenue.
Second, we wanted to provide a typical example. One of the most common types of fraud committed is Form-Filling. This is done when a form is fraudulently completed by a person or source with either bogus data or on behalf of others without consent. Lead data is often recycled from other campaigns or at best dated data from the same campaign vertical.
Third, we wanted to touch on the amount of fraud that exists within the affiliate marketing world. FeedFront, Affiliate Summit’s official magazine indicated the average fraud in the CPA segment to be as high as 8%, with some offers/industries experiencing upward of 22% in 2009. That is a lot of fraud and since then the level has been reduced a significantly.
How we deal with fraud
Experience
Many of our specialists here at Diablo Media have been around since the beginning of affiliate marketing. Hell, they’ve been in internet marketing since the beginning of the internet. Over the years, they have helped pioneer the fundamentals of internet marketing. In fact, our founder and CEO, Ben Smith has been developing fraud monitoring and prevention tools for our affiliate tracking software as far back as 2006. Having this type of experience makes it easy to detect fraudulent and unethical affiliate marketing.
Vigilance
We are dedicated to recognizing and preventing fraud through the application of the latest technology solutions. Affiliate fraud is ever-changing and it’s actually great when people try new ways to generate bogus traffic. We quickly detect it and know what to look for next time. Like an all seeing eye, we’re on patrol around the clock.
Technology
Successful relationships start with our employees, but we can’t deny that a large part of their continued success is due to our proprietary affiliate tracking platform. CPA Detective is the cream of the crop when it comes to fraud detection software and once it was integrated into our tracking platform, we nearly eliminated fraud / bad traffic altogether.
Referring back to the Affiliate Marketing Ecosystem in our first blog, by eliminating bad traffic, we’re only left with good traffic to send to our advertisers. Good traffic leads to better results, and better results make for more money. When advertisers want more of our service, we allocate more resources to our publishers to keep on generating good traffic. The good traffic flows back to the advertiser and the whole thing repeats itself.
We can’t emphasize enough how much it pays to do business with an established affiliate network that is on the cutting edge of fraud detection.
Be sure to check out the second part of this series – Fraud Part 2 of 2: Right from Wrong