Digital marketing is no rocket science, but a unique way to shift offline marketing to online. Certainly, affiliate marketing has a big role in expanding its promotion. Now, eCommerce is multiply. It’s everywhere. The role of affiliates or referral links is indeed crucial in it.
On one hand, these are vital conduits to bring in leads. The leads come to many e-merchants through this effective way. On the other hand, the advertising e-store pays out to the publishers a part of small revenue. It’s a kind of selling & buying through referrals, driving sales to heights.
Know About Earning via Affiliate Links
Certainly, this revenue generating mechanism via affiliates has become a big attraction for scammers. Before looking into scams, let’s catch up with how this marketing actually works.
If you are able to track the clicks on specially crafted links that have a unique identifier called affiliate IDs, you can easily figure out its insight. Actually, there is a cookie inside that tells the eCommerce marketing experts or e-merchant who to pay the revenue share to as the sale gets completed.
Trending Affiliate Frauds
This cookie is in the grass root level of affiliate frauds, which makes you to be alarmed of such defaults. Let get through some modern affiliate frauds, which teach us the lesson to stay always on with monitoring
- Fake App Installs
Many startups gear up branding with app installation campaigns. They drive more installs by paying upon successful installations. Uber, PayTM, Zomato and many are in the list to take as an example. The malicious scammers have found faking app installs the easiest way to fool people. The defaulters falsify reports by making it appear that the “Install app” campaign is running on legitimate sites, although it doesn’t. Besides, there are such scammers who leave no stone unturned to show up fake ad impressions, clicks and installs that actually did not happen. Uber, for example, has detected these affiliate fraud trends, suing 100 mobile exchanges for these frauds.
- Click Injection
It’s an automated trick, whereby browsers and mobile apps are made to automatically click on affiliate links to claim all credit for the sale or whatever the Call To Action (CTA) is.
- Click Flooding
This is another play with clicks by scammers whereby they increase the probability of getting credits via the affiliate ID in the last click. It all happens before the success of the affiliate campaign. The good thing happens with it is that it attracts credit from organic installs, which happen naturally just like SEO. People start installing app or clicking ad to buy because they are actually interested in it.
The merchants have researched for several interesting ways to get off this problem. Blocking fake sites, bad faith publishers, random android ads and out of geo website seem challenging for fraudsters to continue with click flooding.
- Faking Sales
Some cheater merchants are not willing to actually pay for the leads through referrals. So, they fake the sales. For this, they target attribution platforms in reporting to mark that a sale happened, which actually does not. They do this by carefully integrating constructed URL consisting of a specific parameters or validations. This is to trigger automated clicking, which is for faking the sales.
When the eCommerce merchants get deep with the fraud at the month end, the sale appears not happened indeed. In the meantime, the fraudsters get enough time to get away with the revenue part. So, the eCommerce marketing can make you ripped off if you stay blindfolded to affiliate frauds. Remember, awareness and alertness are the only alternatives to fight it off.