Forget about scammers and ensure success of your affiliate program. Learn how to protect yourself from ad fraud and get rid of it once and for all.
Due to intensive money flow, Performance Marketing has become a breeding ground for ad fraud, where dishonest partners constantly seek new loopholes to attack and cheat the system for easy gain.
And if you’re running a network that claims to be a trusted intermediary, you need to make sure you’re following the best practices for your industry to resist fraud.
So today, we will review what truly makes anti-fraud tools effective and what they must be able to do to never let you fall victim to scams. Let’s go!
What do most current solutions do to combat fraud?
Ad fraud is not an entirely new phenomenon in the digital space. Therefore, the market is already full of various affiliate marketing software solutions promising to stop fraud.
Some of them are pretty effective, but most are disguised as such. Usually, the only thing that most tools can do is actually slightly mitigate the consequences of malicious activity. They can neither detect fraud nor prevent it.
So, this is how they operate.
When the system reports a conversion, it checks it for fraud markers. If such are found, the unscrupulous publisher simply isn’t paid for it, even though the conversion has already occurred.
But if per manual review, it becomes clear that no fraud has taken place, then the publisher gets their payout. Usually, it happens within a two-week period.
The significant advantage of this approach is that even though the advertiser receives fraudulent conversions, dishonest publishers will never be paid for them.
At the same time, this technique appears insufficient and requires reinforcement since such publishers are already registered by advertisers.
And if nothing is done, this may ruin relationships between advertisers and a network or lead to cut-off rates, bans, colossal money loss, and tarnished reputation in the future. It goes without saying that no one wants to let that happen.
So what are those skills the “right” affiliate anti-fraud tool should have to guarantee 100% protection? Let’s review all the essentials you need to pay attention to.
Risk scoring
Normally, the most effective anti-fraud software should resemble a pie consisting of several layers, where the first layer must be a risk review or scoring.
In simple terms, scoring makes risk assessments based on a vast database of various patterns.
Such patterns include checks for IP mismatch with language or time zone, use of emulators, use of corporate networks, and others.
Each pattern has its own score, impacting the final value. The more patterns match, the more likely you deal with fraud.
Conversion delay
Another layer designed to combat fraud implies a semi-automated conversion scoring strategy.
It works pretty much the same as the first layer, with the difference that when patterns get a particular risk score, the system delays a conversion for 24 hours and doesn’t show it to the publisher.
After the hold-up, the manager can enter the folder with delayed conversions to manually check them and decide what to do next – put such conversions on hold forever, decline, or approve.
Fraud prevention (click anti-fraud)
Fraud prevention is the most powerful, intelligent, and fresh mechanism to combat scams. Overall, it’s also based on a technique of scoring incoming conversions following multiple parameters.
So when suspicious clicks (that already scored a certain number of points) come to the Traffic Delivery System, it instantly routes them from the PPL to the PPS offers and doesn’t let them crucially hit the budget.
*PPS offers are not exposed to fraud since the payment to a publisher only takes place when a customer makes a purchase. So if a fake customer comes to the offer and completes no deals, nothing happens.
Conclusion
And actually this is it! We hope this article has dotted all the ‘i’ concerning affiliate marketing anti-fraud tools and things that make them truly effective.
We also believe that by educating yourself and taking the proper knowledge and precautions, from now on, you can avoid falling victim to all kinds of scams.
If you have any questions about fraud prevention or advice on how best to approach your affiliate program, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today!
