Guarding Your Profits: Navigating Affiliate Fraud & Cookies

Affiliate fraud refers to any false or dishonest activity intended to generate commissions from an affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate fraud also encompasses any additional activity that is expressly prohibited under the terms and conditions of an affiliate marketing program.  

As we discussed in previous chapters, in affiliate marketing, publishers and website owners can insert tracking links into their content that lead to a company's online store, product pages, registration pages, etc. When a specific action takes place, such as the registration or sale of a product, the affiliate receives a commission.  

However, the temptation to make more profit makes fraudsters affiliates find ways to game the system with bogus activities in order to increase payouts.

What is affiliate fraud?

Affiliate fraud has been around as long as affiliate marketing has existed, but it has become more sophisticated in the world of digital marketing. With the early affiliate programs that paid for traffic or clicks, fraudulent methods could be as easy as auto-refreshing a page, using click-away software, or spamming emails containing the link. reference. Pop-ups, especially those that open behind browsers, have also become very popular. This forced companies running affiliate marketing programs to put more work into their terms and conditions to eliminate these potentially brand-damaging techniques.

Types of affiliate fraud

The technology has evolved to track and expose most of these techniques, and the market itself has begun to devalue traffic in favor of quantifiable sales or action. Affiliates were only paid when an item was added to the shopping cart or a registration form was filled out. But scammers always find a way.

Here are some new types of affiliate fraud:

• They use stolen data for new lead registrations or stolen credit cards to generate sales.
• They get people to download adware or spyware that inserts affiliate code automatically and redirect them to the advertiser's site.

• Typosquatting on domains that are similar to those of the company name or products to collect a referral from the redirect.

• Clone the content of another affiliate site and try to steal traffic.

They buy Google Ads on the search engine results page where a company or its products are already ranked. Customers typically have no idea they have clicked on an affiliate ad when they click on the 2nd ad, and the affiliate is paid a commission for conversions that the brand would have captured directly.

Cookie stuffing all visitors to a website to profit if a visitor buys something later for unrelated reasons. In fact, the fraudster uses web cookies to collect affiliate commissions on goods they did not sell.  

Both advertisers and affiliates must learn about how cookie stuffing happens in order to prevent it.

Phishing traffic and auto-fill forms with software still work as well, depending on how compensation is set for a particular affiliate marketing program. The key to preventing affiliate fraud is having clear terms and conditions that prohibit the most common methods of fraud. It then comes down to monitoring transactions and enforcing terms and conditions when suspicious patterns emerge.

Cookies have a great presence in affiliate marketing, with which you can do a lot; they directly influence your work as an affiliate. And making money online is directly related to how cookies work; both advertisers and publishers need to understand how it is applied, from affiliate links to remarketing campaigns. By understanding this, you will understand how often the commission is generated for you.

What are cookies?

Cookies are simple text files that are generated and stored in your browser as soon as you access a website, this text file can contain various information ranging from cookie validity, language, font size, date, or anything that the owner of the website wants to make available on it.

Cookies are extremely important in affiliate marketing because every affiliate platform ends up using them in some way.

When you indicate an affiliate link (see how to disclose your affiliate link here), when you access this link, a cookie will be generated, and it will have various information, such as the cookie's expiration date,  your affiliate code, and other information used to track. Through this, it will be possible to track the sale in case he comes to click later (usually when the visitor accesses but does not buy at the time and returns later to finish) on the sale page directly. This is because he was marked with the cookie.

Sometimes, it is common to receive online sales that we do not know where they came from; many of them are associated with cookies; they probably accessed your link and purchased many days later.

A practical example of cookies

Imagine a very simple situation; you have a blog with an affiliate link. Mary is an affiliate of the XYZ product and released her link www.affiliatexyz.com, and Sam is a visitor who clicked on the affiliate link and was directed to the online product page. Sam stayed on the site and visited but didn't buy anything. After five days, Sam returns directly to the product's website and purchases the course, but Mary will receive the commission for the sale.

The cookie worked for her in this process, as it marked Sam's browser.

This is how the Cookie works on the sales pages of affiliate products; this model is widely used on the main platforms (but it is not the only way). That's why it's very important to generate affiliate links correctly so that you can make and track sales correctly.

An important detail is that cookies can be replaced (overwritten) by others.

If today someone clicks on your affiliate link, it will be marked with a cookie, but if they don't buy it, and tomorrow they click on the affiliate link of another blog of the same product. In this situation, the commission will be generated for another affiliate because theirs has updated yours. But there are many ways to work to reduce this.

Cookies as remarketing tools

As you have already seen above how the cookie works, it is now easier to relate Cookies and Remarketing and how they help to guarantee more commissions.  Remarketing helps reduce affiliate link losses. For this, it is necessary to use strategies to attract visitors to the site again, and without a doubt, remarketing does that.

Remarketing works with cookies; once the visitors access your website, they will be marked with the remarketing cookie, too, so you can, for example, use Facebook Ads, and your Facebook ads will be displayed to them every time he opens Facebook. The same is true for those who use Google Ads (if they access your site and are tagged when searching Google, your advertising may appear for them).

The purpose of remarketing is to bring back the person who has already visited your site but not purchased at the first moment, they will be able to see the advertising and come back to buy and finish.

For more in-depth explanations on affiliate marketing and utilizing cookies, take a look at our immersive Affiliate Marketing Online Training.