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Affiliate Fraud can be extremely damaging to a business. It can cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue and hundreds of hours in investigation time.
Affiliate fraud is most common with CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and CPC (Cost Per Click) campaign types. However, the potential of fraud should not discourage a company from building out an affiliate channel. The majority of affiliates out there are honest and legit. With the proper business practices and tools, fraudulent affiliates can be identified fairly easily.
DirectTrack’s unique fraud management tools can help weed out bad affiliates. Since 1997 we have ran our own affiliate network called DirectLeads focused on CPA programs. Over the last 10+ years we have dealt with every type of fraud, and we have applied that knowledge towards features and reports in DirectTrack that will help you combat fraud.
Here are just a few of the key features that will keep the bad guys out:
- Collaborative Fraud Reporting:
We have created a central database for reporting problematic affiliates. Using DirectTrack you benefit from the experiences of hundreds of other DirectTrack clients by being notified when a potentially fraudulent affiliate sign’s up for your program.
- Website Review:
As affiliates sign up and list the websites that they intend to promote your offer(s), you can restrict affiliates from only getting credit from those websites that you have approved in their account. You would then receive notification if an affiliate is sending traffic from an unauthorized site.
- Affiliate Signup Protection:
Some bad affiliates have written scripts to look for affiliate programs and auto-sign up to programs multiple times to try and sneak into your program. To combat this, you can turn on to add an image validation box on your sign up form so affiliates can't auto generate signups. You may also set up criteria to auto-deny applications that you feel are associated with fraud such as certain domains, email addresses, country locations, and IP Addresses.
- Pending Affiliate Approval:
Within each pending affiliate application, the system will automatically provide warnings why the affiliate may be fraudulent. For instance, if the country location that they have specified doesn’t match their IP address, or if they have signed up in the past and have been denied.
- Fraud Reporting:
Should an fraudulent affiliate slip by your approval process, there are detailed reports for you to break down their activity to find illegal activity. You can run reports to see exactly where affiliate traffic is coming from, find bad lead & click referrals that are not matching up with the affiliate's site(s) or your campaigns. There is also a report that breaks down clicks and leads by time stamp and IP address so you can look for duplicates or inconsistencies.
- Tracking Pixel Authentication:
This enables you to type in the domain your tracking pixel is supposed to be loaded from, so if DirectTrack detects the pixel from being loaded from an unauthorized domain, you will be notified. In addition, Network clients will be happy to know that you can set up the system to automatically validate that the pixels on your advertisers confirmation page has not been removed.
- FraudMeter:
FraudMeter is a point system to rate your affiliates based on their fraud potential. The points are set up using your own criteria and weight scale. For instance you can assign points to an affiliates account based on higher conversion rates or EPC differ from the overall average, affiliates using unregistered website referrals, affiliates who have only been active for a select number of days, and many more. The purpose of this is for you to be able to see a report of affiliates who have a high fraud score so you keep a close eye on them to prevent potential problems.
As you can see, our years of experience and client feedback have enabled us to build out a complete fraud management solution in DirectTrack. We also offer consulting to affiliate programs that have a problem with fraud or are simply looking for education on best practices. Contact us for a free demo of DirectTrack and the fraud management tools.
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Contact A Rep:
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Pittsburgh, PA 15220
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