How do you cope with fraud?

[Adam80Johnson]

Hi!

Do you have fraud issues?
I got a message from my affiliate network manager that there is fraud in my traffic.

Have you ever been in similar situation? Which tool is not costly but good at fraud detection?

 

[ExpertMobi.com]

hi! if you are confident that you worked with a good traffic source it is a problem on the network side. try to ask your AM for detailed reports to understand clearly why your leads have been rejected.

 

[Graybeard]

I got a message from my affiliate network manager that there is fraud in my traffic.

What does that mean EXACTLY?
Click-fraud or payment fraud for example?
Furthermore; what are the specifics?

 

[FireAds]

I can tell you how it looks from Advertiser/Affiliate Network side.

We usually check the traffic carefully for any additional frauds. If it is natural and it's just one or two frauds, we usually contact the Publisher and ask to explain himself and we react accordingly. Fraudulent leads are removed from the Publisher's account and Advertiser is informed about the situation. Sometimes advertiser asks us to block traffic from specific Publisher.

On the other hand, there are situations such as fresh Publisher who starts with frauds. Such behavior is not allowed in our Network and usually it ends with instant ban.

So, even though I don't know your Partner, if you have good relations, they should inform you about the problem and you will both act accordingly. There's no need for special tools because:

A. They won't work well without information from Advertiser (which you won't get as they are classified)
B. They cost a lot (third-party system or working hours of professional developers team).

Summing up, I suggest to keep in touch with your Partner and ask them if they see any pattern, so you could block fraudulent part of your traffic.

 

[pritishmizzle]

For Adam's question about tools to use which are cost-effective at detecting fraud traffic/ VPN traffic etc., you should have a look at Anti-Fraud Solutions | Eliminate Fraud | FREE Fraud Prevention Tools and Block fake leads and fraud sign-ups and also if you are collecting email addresses/phone numbers on your landing page you should probably use https://emailoversight.com or http://xverify.com

Usually habitual/already complained traffic/consumer identity is automatically blocked and those details are forwarded by fraud monitoring systems like Fraudlogix: Ad Fraud Solutions for RTB & Affiliate Marketing (which is already integrated with TUNE) or Consumer Identity Management Experts | Infutor Data Solutions to the network or the advertiser. Also, If it is the payment processing fraud where it is credit card submit offer and it is fraudulent, then also the payment processors give a report why the payment was flagged as fraudulent and advertiser has that report with them.

Then the network/advertiser gets in-depth of this and sees what were the flags and then take a call to tell the pub about removing particular sub-id which are creating issues or if it is severe then advertiser usually asks the network to block the publisher.

And as a publisher, if you get information from network/advertiser that your traffic is fraudulent then ask for a detailed report about it and they should probably not have any problem giving you the necessary information. So that you can analyze at your end too what went wrong and show the same information to your traffic provider and ask for a refund or mitigate something.

 

[Graybeard]

I block most of the non-human traffic even thought I am stuck paying for it.
The only thing that matters to me is my landed cost Landing page-> CR ->to the *offer*
When is exceeds a reasonable cost I stop buying from that traffic network.
Only 2% or 3% of the traffic is qualifying right now but is is cheap popunder traffic so the low quality is expected ...
Garbage traffic is not fraud -- it is garbage traffic

 

[RedTrack.io]

You can try bot detection filter in your tracker.

In RedTrack we have a Fraud Report feature for that. It's based on FraudScore algorithms. In the report bad clicks fall into various categories like attribution (clickspamming, cookie stuffing, etc.), baddevice (hijacked, etc.), blacklist (like IPs associated with known Botnets/ Adware), datacenter (traffic from known cloud platform providers) and proxy.

Ping me for more details

Aksana

 

[CPAHub]

I can tell you how it looks from Advertiser/Affiliate Network side.

We usually check the traffic carefully for any additional frauds. If it is natural and it's just one or two frauds, we usually contact the Publisher and ask to explain himself and we react accordingly. Fraudulent leads are removed from the Publisher's account and Advertiser is informed about the situation. Sometimes advertiser asks us to block traffic from specific Publisher.

On the other hand, there are situations such as fresh Publisher who starts with frauds. Such behavior is not allowed in our Network and usually it ends with instant ban.

So, even though I don't know your Partner, if you have good relations, they should inform you about the problem and you will both act accordingly. There's no need for special tools because:

A. They won't work well without information from Advertiser (which you won't get as they are classified)
B. They cost a lot (third-party system or working hours of professional developers team).

Summing up, I suggest to keep in touch with your Partner and ask them if they see any pattern, so you could block fraudulent part of your traffic.

Well said! Don't look any further. This is the correct answer. Most if not all networks will do the same as described above.

 

[Adam80Johnson]

hi! if you are confident that you worked with a good traffic source it is a problem on the network side. try to ask your AM for detailed reports to understand clearly why your leads have been rejected.

I did it, thank you. They really gave me the detailed report, however I would like to be able to see do my campaigns have fraud or not, before getting such news from my manager.

 

[Phill AdsBridge]

Hi @Adam80Johnson !

Try our Anti-fraud feature. It was developed by our tech team and it works on the basis of unique algorithm. We analyze incoming traffic by 10 metrics to get the most accurate results. You can see this information in the statistics report and then use it when setting up bot-filter.

This feature is available on the 14-day free trial, Starter subscription tariff and other subscriptions

 

[FrankPushmaster]

Well there are really lot of antifraud tools on the market. Basically you can find out which system does your affiliate network use and which metrics do they analize to flag fraudulent requests. Then just go with the tool that has same or similar metrics and which pricing suits you.
Also it's always important which traffic source do you use since fraudulent stuff really varies from one format to another

 

[Graybeard]

That's a lot of poppycock (hogwash|hoodoo)!

1. Set your webserver (Apache|Nginx|other) to use HTTP/2.0 Protocol.
2. Deny any click-out (or form submit [POST]) to obsolete browsers not using HTTP/2.0.
3. Draconian measures maybe but they work ...

Downside: You will kill the Search Engine indexing robots too as collateral damage. So, limit the script to landing pages there you (want|need) no SEO on and deny indexing that directory in the robots.txt

If you don't know how to administer a server and program this --too bad!
What can I say? Hire a professional or learn it yourself --like I had to

I am sure that the bots will adapt to this and you will need a modified or new solution in short time. Welcome to the *internets* aside: Headless Chrome has become an internet virus that I now believe was an intentional time bomb issued to wreak havoc on the second tier ad networks Thanks Google

Traffic networks *should* be doing this for you, IMHO -- they don't because it would decrease their volume dramatically and they would have to raise their prices paid to both publishers and advertisers.
Part of the fault is your own -- you are trying to buy traffic cheap and make money.
SEM ad networks; Google Ads, Bing Ads, Social Media Ads (as a group) scrub their traffic but are relatively expensive.

Would I pay double the price for clean traffic -- sure thing!

 

[RichAds]

Recommend you to try ad networks with high level of anti-fraud security.

For example, RichPush works according to the OLAF regulation on the protection of financial transactions.
We ask for all the necessary documents and care about the safety of our customers.

 

[AnastasiaTitova_kma]

It depends on the traffic source, it happens that competitors intentionally do it (if you are in the leading positions), or the traffic source can intentionally drive customers to increase your CR, and you would invest even more in it.
If you work honestly with an affiliate network and trust them - we recommend you to show all your screenshots and the source of your traffic, there is can be favour from their side. The affiliate network often has average system performance indicators for each type of traffic source. There are no ready-made tools that can calculate fraud in traffic sources

 

[NicoleW]

First of all you should ask your manager to share some screenshots with proves of the fraud traffic
Also you need to have your external tracker with all of your sources. With this data you will be able to identify bot and proxy traffic