Keep tabs on affiliate behaviour that drives up your CPCs and results in paying affiliates unearned commissions.
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Rachel Lamberts
Christian SickThe first signs of affiliate fraud are recognisable when affiliates show an unnatural growth in affiliate sales. affiliate sales. These are usually generated very quickly after the start of the cooperation and continuously expanded. At first glance, it is not obvious how these affiliates generate the sales. Critical questioning of the
affiliate as to how the sales were being generated can provide a first clue. But affiliates with few sales can also be fraudulent. It always helps to have a critical look at the affiliate KPIs and to question discrepancies directly.
There can be many reasons why affiliate sales increase. However, the reasons should be explainable. On the one hand, sales can be driven by the merchant and on the other hand by the affiliate. Question the figures and enter into dialogue with the affiliate. If the reasons are not sufficient, you should question the partnership.
Brand bidding is when affiliates place their own ad on the merchant's brand. Brand misspellings are also used to circumvent brand protection. The affiliate ad appears next to the search results of the brand owner. The affiliate's goal is to gain the traffic of the foreign brands and to set a cookie. The affiliate then receives a commission for this traffic.
Brand bidding goes one step further than brand bidding. The original ad is copied 1: 1 by the affiliate and placed on the search engines. For the search engines there are now two identical advertisements, the original advertisement of the merchant and the 1: 1 copy. However, the search engine only ever displays one ad of the merchant. In X% of the cases, the affiliate's ad is delivered. The user himself does not notice this, but the affiliate sets a cookie which guarantees him a commission. Ad hijacking is clearly referred to as fraud.
Unfortunately, it is very time-consuming to keep an eye on affiliates, as the Internet offers a multitude of possibilities to become fraudulently active. For example, regions can be excluded or included using GEO targeting so that the advertising is not displayed to the merchant. Smaller search engines are also very popular to commit fraud. There are a number of other options. An automated monitoring solution can save a lot of time here.
Whether brand bidding is allowed is regulated in the terms and conditions of the respective affiliate program. Every merchant should ask himself what benefits he can get from brand bidding. The benefit for the merchant should be that new customers are generated through new channels. Every merchant should generate traffic using brand names himself.
In principle, you can prevent brand bidding in affiliate marketing. First of all, the customer terms and conditions in Affiliate Marketing have to be adjusted in accordance with the law. The terms and conditions also regulate the use of trademarks by search engines. Through automated monitoring, affiliates can then be tracked down for the brand keywords.