Affiliate Fraud

[Disciple67]

Hmm, my thread at http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...rum/33963-starting-own-affiliate-program.html isn't getting much traction so maybe this is a better forum for it.

Basically, I'm thinking about starting my own affiliate program for some eBooks but have concerns about affiliate fraud. What are all the tricks out there?? Can't seem to find a comprehensive listing and analysis...I would think that such material would be very helpful! And not to the fraudsters, either, since the more disseminated criminal methods are the better protected others would be....

I'm really concerned because as an affiliate myself I've had merchants quit the likes of ShareASale and other big names over alleged fraud! I'm really flabbergasted since I thought the whole advantage of such networks was the protections involved. So now I'm really curious, more than ever, what these tricks might be!

Please advise. Thanks!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Sorry no one has answered and I don't have an answer either.

You'll find a bunch of different posts that will give you insights though. (Some are older but still current.

Click advanced search top right. Enter fraud and then select titles only.

 

[zomgmike]

The biggest one we use is a lag period between the close of the sale and the affiliate payout. In our case, we use 90 days. 60 days is probably long enough. So a sale that closed today, July 29, would not be paid until October 29. In doing so we can significantly reduce the likelihood of fraud and increase the difficulty of doing it.

Another option would be to require ID verification for your affiliates.

 

[BoostAffiliates9]

If you are just starting your affiliate program, there are some minor things that you can do to monitor things such as just using Google Alerts for your brand name keywords and biggest ranking keywords. That will do a lot right there.

If you want monitor more, try trackur, spyfu, brandverity. You'll want to utilize many of these tools. I know brandverity is the big one to watch over affiliates but I've interviewed most of the popular software like that and found that they weren't as user friendly as the competitor's trying to steal their business. . .

Also, if you really want to get big into tracking ads and major detection of affiliate fraud, try RiskIQ, they were started for the financial sector, they are a bit more expensive, but the most comprehensive tool out there.