GeekArm Organic Web Marketing Blog

Pervasive Affiliate Traffic Fraud

How pervasive do you think Affiliate traffic fraud is on the large networks?

I can assure you it's out there, and BIG TIME. Merchants, if a network tells you they have hundreds of thousands of Affiliates you should be scared, not impressed.

I'm damn proud of the job AvantLink is doing to battle Affiliate traffic fraud. For starters, take a look at this article written by our CEO Scott Kalbach: Affiliate Abuse Uncovered in 2009. Keep in mind we're an Affiliate network who does not claim to have "a million plus publishers". That's because...

1. We authenticate every application for ownership, and check Affiliate sites against siteadvisor.com and other helpful resources to insure they are above board.
2. If the Affiliate doesn't apply with a site that holds value in the form of unique and compelling content and/or services, then we deny. It's that simple. This does NOT exclude the little guys. Show us the goods and you're in!
3. We closely monitor any spike in Affiliate traffic and sales, and require full disclosure of traffic driving techniques from Affiliates who fail to send any referrer URLs with clicks. Periodic blank referrers are expected, but not 100% blank referrer data.

Now, if we're finding the crap we find...what is going down in the larger networks who seem to be just fine with letting any and every Affiliate have access so long as they've completed the application?

Mitigating traffic fraud is a constant battle for us as we continue to find perpetrators injecting cookies, spamdexing or otherwise trademark bidding on merchant or brand names. We're committed to a level playing field, despite what that will cost us in terms of immediate revenue.

When busted and questioned about their traffic these Affiliates have packaged responses, as if they were taught how to respond. And they LIE without hesitation. One just told us they were sending traffic via email marketing campaigns exclusively, yet 100% of the clicks came from Internet Explorer. Hmmm...

Unlike some of our competitors, we're proving it with our actions. The long term integrity and sustainability of the cost per sale Affiliate marketing industry is what we're focused on. But unfortunately the companies right now with the most influence in our space are littering the perception and friggin' it up for everyone by looking the other way, or otherwise failing to maintain quality control in the Affiliate traffic moving through their networks.

No company names, but digest this:

Recently a high-profile merchant migrated their Affiliate program to us from a well known and respected network. As you can guess, tons of Affiliates came on board with the migration to continue promoting the merchant...because they crank. So far we've busted several of those Affiliates who migrated with the program on rogue techniques outlined on Scott's article linked to above.

So again, I'll ask: How pervasive do you think Affiliate traffic fraud is on the large networks?