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Daisycon

How to detect and prevent click fraud in affiliate marketing

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Click fraud in affiliate marketing involves manipulating tracking systems to generate fake clicks, allowing affiliates to earn commissions without driving genuine customer actions. This not only results in financial losses for advertisers but also creates an unfair playing field for legitimate affiliates. Detecting and preventing click fraud is essential for maintaining a healthy and effective affiliate marketing ecosystem. In this article, we will delve into what click fraud is, how to spot suspicious activity, and the steps Daisycon takes to safeguard its network. Additionally, we’ll explore useful tools that help combat fraud and ensure fair commission distribution.

What is click fraud in affiliate marketing?

Click fraud in affiliate marketing involves manipulating the affiliate tracking system to generate fraudulent clicks on affiliate links, creating the illusion of genuine traffic or engagement. Affiliates using this aim to earn commissions dishonestly, without driving legitimate customer actions like purchases or sign-ups. Here are the primary methods used to perpetrate click fraud in affiliate marketing:

  • Cookie stuffing: Affiliate place tracking cookies onto users’ devices without their knowledge using pop-ups/under or scripts. If the user makes a purchase on the merchant’s site later, the affiliate gets credit for the sale.

  • Last click hijacking: In this form of cookie stuffing the tracking cookie is injected on the user device just before he places his order with a purpose to replace a previous cookie from a legit affiliate and get rewarded the sales, this is done by using scripts or misleading clicks: triggering an affiliate click without the consumer knowing he will be redirected to the advertiser by closing a pop-up or an extension for example. This happens when the consumer is currently on the advertiser website.

    • How to identify click fraud?

    Auditing your affiliate campaign should be done on a regular basis, as an advertiser you need to be aware of which affiliates do promote your campaign and how, this starts by the approval of new media on your campaign, check the applications and if any doubts contact the affiliate to ask him more details before approving him.
    There are also some KPIs that you should look into:

  • Conversion rate: A high click rate combined to a really low conversion rate is the first indicator for cookie stuffing, check the conversion rate per affiliate and compare those to your average. For affiliates delivering a huge volume of clicks it is also good to compare the monthly amount of clicks with their overall visits per month.

  • Click-to-Conversion Time: A really low click-to-conversion rate could be an indicator of last click hijacking, a very long one could also be the sign of cookie stuffing.

  • Click patterns: Check if the clicks have strange patterns or not like clicks made in the middle of the night or unusual spikes on some days of the week.

    • When you have any doubts about an affiliate you should contact him to get more details about his promotion details, if you are still unsure you can always report your findings at Daisycon that will take the needed steps.

    How does Daisycon prevent click fraud on its network?

    This all starts with the subscription of a new media to our network, every new registered media need to go through a technical check and a manual check by one of our professionals.

    Some specific types of media do also need to agree to follow specific code of conducts and fill specific forms to describe in detail how they promote campaigns, this to make sure the affiliate delivers enough transparency and will be compliant on the campaign specific rules.

    We also have some tools that make sure a media can’t overwrite another affiliate cookie and are looking into the possibility to deploy this as a default for some media types like Toolbars, extensions, technological partners, display or retargeting.

    We also have a quality control team that uses data and the metrics explained above (and more) to check the performance of each affiliate on a network wide level through an automated dashboard.

    Finally we also use the feedback of our network of advertisers. When an advertiser reports some concerns about a media we will check on all advertisers on which the media is active.

    Tools to prevent Click Fraud

    Daisycon, as a network offers different technological solutions that could help you with some challenges that you may encounter:

  • Assist overview: This statistical view gives you a clear view of the engagement of each affiliates on your campaign, a really low ‘first contact’ rate or high ‘win’ rates could be an indicator of fraudulent click activity.

  • Promotion code attribution: Tracking and attributing sales based on the use of unique promotion codes allows to make click fraud irrelevant.

  • Shopping cart pixel: The best option to prevent last click hijacking, this solution will lock the attribution of a sale to the affiliate that generated a cookie before a consumer places an item in its shopping basket.

    • In some cases changing the attribution method, like going from last click to first click might be a solution but this might have an impact on much more than the click fraud only.

    Interested in how Daisycon could improve the quality of your affiliate marketing campaign? Just let us know by filling the contact form and we will recontact you.

    Conclusion

    What can be seen as an ‘illegitimate promotion’ for one advertiser doesn’t always mean that every other advertiser using the same affiliate will experience the same. Every campaign is unique regarding what affiliate mix is being used or attribution technology deployed.
    When benchmarking your affiliate campaign, always make sure that your ‘key’ affiliates are fairly rewarded and that your commission is aligned with your growth goals.