Affise and Adv.Cake Team Up Against eCommerce Ad Fraud

How to avoid overpaying publishers for orders or leads they didn’t bring to you?

Preferences in the affiliate marketing industry gradually start to move towards advertisers who didn’t want to spend money on clicks. People strive to pay for confirmed orders only, which are supposed to generate revenue. Still, there are instances where advertisers overspend because of the way some publishers generate sales.

Here at Affise we’re in the permanent and serious battle against ad fraud. Our pursuit of a cleaner and more transparent industry has led us to a partnership with Adv.Cake. Their products can help you to detect and monitor several types of fraudulent behavior, report on cheating publishers, and save budget on affiliate marketing.

Secure Your Affiliate Channel

There are several types of fraud in affiliate marketing: fraud that focuses on schemes, that find users who were already on the verge of making purchases (cookie-stuffing, Toolbars, etc.), and brand bidding.

The first type of fraud we’re going to look at consists of several types of fraudulent behavior:

• Third-party websites commonly generate “malicious cookies” when user reaches his page. After the cookie settles by providing user a tracking code without his permission, he will be carrying the malignant bug to every other visited website. If you buy a product that is linked to a fraudulent affiliate marketing strategy, you will be giving a commission to a seller, who provided you only with a tracking code instead of promoting the product;
• Third-party code on the advertiser’s website which replaces cookies, and tags the user with affiliate links without his permission. When someone buys a product on the website the commission will be given to the publisher whose tags were received by the code installed on the website;
• Some extensions in browsers may be used by publishers to change tags in links for affiliate tags. This action attributes the order to the publisher, not to the advertising campaign. Technically, this type of order belongs to other sources and shouldn’t be paid.

Adv.Cake AntiFraud solution helps to detect such publishers, their tools, and behavior patterns. Data are shown in a structured way in the personal account after gathering statistics from publishers. Thanks to that, the advertisers could monitor their affiliate channels in real-time.

Adv.Cake provides statistics about each publisher so you could easily find who is using malicious scripts or other types of fraud. Also, you receive statistics for orders with violations. Thereby, you can use it for further reconciliations with affiliate networks and exclude such orders from overall payment.

There are different types of fraud accepted in various countries and mostly it depends on the market conditions and their advertising rules. Adv.Cake can set up AntiFraud service monitoring for each market of advertiser’s activity based on the recognized conditions.

The second type of fraud is brand bidding. It means using brand keywords in contextual advertising campaigns by publishers. The main idea is to redirect the user to the advertiser’s website with affiliate links through contextual ads in search engines. Publishers can either redirect users to the advertiser’s website or use their resources for the first redirect, and place affiliate links to the advertiser’s website on this resource. Searching for products in search engines by brand names implies that users already know about advertiser’s products and would buy them regardless of the advertisement itself. However, publishers who use brand bidding place ads that are more noticeable and reattribute orders for which the advertiser should pay commission.

Moreover, such publishers increase stakes for contextual auctions. It makes this type of campaign more expensive for advertisers themselves.

Adv.Cake Brand Bidding Monitoring tool is based on the search bots which execute queries in search engines. These bots upload data to the Adv.Cake account in a structured way so you could see how exactly brand bidding violation happened. What exact keywords, browser, and device were used, and which one publisher placed such advertisement.

Brand Bidding service can be used to monitor different types of search engines in various countries in most kind of languages at the same time.

Adv.Cake Case Studies

Adv.Cake works with over 160 companies globally. Let’s take a closer look at several of their cases.

Xiaomi — Statistics distortion

Publishers of affiliate networks had actively used Xiaomi brand context by appropriating orders from this source. As a result, the advertiser believed that his own branded advertising did not work and wanted to disable it. Xiaomi had requested to perform a check from Adv.Cake.

As a result:

• 50 unscrupulous publishers from 6 affiliate networks were blocked, and all their orders were canceled;
• The problem with traffic cannibalization has been completely resolved, and contextual ads statistics were displayed correctly.

MyToys — Retargeting code spoofing

MyToys’ specialists had checked the performance of their website and selected choosing product cards to be reviewed. While switching between pages in the URL the affiliate tags automatically appeared. The advertiser decided to apply for Adv.Cake solutions to fix the problem.

As a result:

• 39 publishers from 7 affiliate networks were blocked;
• Adv.Cake helped MyToys to immediately found one of the affiliate networks which had payment of $50,000 per month while delivering fraud traffic only.

Yves Rocher — Domain typosquatting

Experts of Yves Rocher had found typosquatting domain made with affiliate tags. Search for a solution to fix problem with affiliate channels brought the advertiser to Adv.Cake.

As a result:

• 49 publishers from 6 affiliate networks were blocked. The orders received from them were not subject for payment;
• The monitoring was carried out for searching the similar Typosquatting Domains. It was revealed that there were over 20 websites with a spelling domain similar to the advertiser’s website.

Conclusion

Sometimes the fraud rate can reach up to 40% of total traffic (everage 30%). So it’s important to monitor the traffic quality of your affiliate networks. Secure your affiliate channel with solutions that suit you the best and you’ll save budget on fraudulent publisher by not paying for orders you would receive in any other way. Saved budget can then be invested into reliable publishers to generate more sales and gain more profit. Eventually, you could see how useful this channel can be for your business if operated properly.

Written by

Anastasia Zaichko

Head of PR and Marketing Communications

Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.

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