Beyond Affiliate Fraud: which traffic is your affiliate generating?
CHEQ
|Marketing | May 03, 2022
Affiliate marketing is broadly used as part of a marketing arsenal to help drive demand. Since it can help growth in several ways, this tactic has become crucial for companies. Today, sources say that 81% of brands around the world are using affiliate programs to increase their exposure.
Another good indicator of its importance and impact is that the industry is growing year after year. As recently published in Forbes, a study by Statista shows that the spending on affiliate marketing is expected to reach $8.2 billion by the end of 2022.
Types of Affiliate Programs
As you know, there are different types of affiliate programs, but they usually have a similar framework. Being unattached, related, or involved, affiliates will mostly provide their space to generate traffic and, as you should expect, revenue.
In terms of compensation, the programs are usually based on a rate attached to leads generated, click-through rate (CTR), downloads of an asset, and driving traffic to a website page. In any of these cases, the goal is to help you generate awareness and demand for your company.
Real Users Only
One big problem, however, is that, regardless of the type of affiliate you have and the type of tactic they use, you must be sure they are bringing real users only to your company, and not “users” who will never convert.
What are never-converting users?
We say “never-converting users” because indeed they never do. They can be malicious – coming from mal-intentioned human users – or suspicious – with non-human attributes and behaviors. For you, they represent the same: a type of traffic that has no ability or intention to make a purchase.
We are talking about bots, fake users, click farming, and other types of Invalid Traffic (IVT) coming from the Fake Web directly into your go-to-market strategies.
Beyond Affiliate Fraud
We all know affiliate fraud is a big problem. There are several methods a malicious affiliate can use to create false attribution and claim commissions from sales it didn’t actually promote, like cookie stuffing and brand poaching.
However, even affiliates who are not purposefully trying to inflate their commissions can be unintentionally generating Invalid Traffic.
Simply because today, IVT makes up to 40% of all web traffic. It is scary, but nearly every marketing funnel, campaign, and operation is being impacted by it to some degree, oftentimes in very harmful ways.
With that in mind, it is crucial to be sure of the type of traffic your affiliates are generating.
Shining the Lights On with Go-To-Market Security
It is important to gain control of your partner programs. Today, organizations that run and invest in affiliation programs are mostly in the dark about all aspects of traffic origin and user authenticity.
If you can’t have greater reporting and due transparency around your affiliates and the traffic they are generating, you will end up spending money on the wrong ones.
That’s why you need to shine a light over your affiliates and visualize the reality of what is going on with your programs. For it, we recommend you to try a Go-To-Market Security Suit like CHEQ.
CHEQ allows you to shine a light on affiliate marketers in your network, monitoring, blocking, and removing invalid traffic and bad actors from it, as well as understanding which affiliates are the ones worth working with.
If you are interested in understanding more, Click here to Request a Demo.
