Advertiser: Dealing With Affiliate Fraud

affiliate network fraud advertiser

[scrony]

As an advertiser we are looking at running our free trial offers on a couple different affiliate networks.

Our concern however is fraud, running free trial offers we pay out much more than we collect in the first 30 days leaving us very susceptible to affiliate fraud or poor quality leads that we loose money on.

The networks are compensated whether the lead is good or bad so they seem indifferent to the issue (if we (the advertiser) catch the fraud the network reverses it, if not it is more money for network - leaving this up to us (the advertiser) to catch).

Speaking with other advertiser in the industry we have been told "watch the networks closely" and this is what we plan to do but how?

Any advice on how to best monitor for fraud or catch poor quality leads early (within 30-days so the network reverses it) would be most helpful.

Thank you!

[LifeinAsia]

You will need to setup a list of rules as to what constitutes a "valid lead." Some examples- must be a valid e-mail address, must have a valid ZIP Code (if limiting it to U.S. addresses), etc. Make sure that you only pay for valid leads.

If you search Google, you can find the terms that other advertisers use for validating leads.

[scrony]

Thanks, but i think i must be misunderstood.

We do free trials, so a valid lead for us is one that we can authorize the credit card.

The problem however are affiliates encouraging their 'visitors' to sign up for a free trial and cancel it. Or affiliates using stolen credit cards to generate 'valid' leads.

We need a way to identify these affiliates quicker and stop this type of fraud. Because we don't know if the lead is bad (meaning the customer is planning to cancel or the credit card company is going to dispute on fraud) for 30+ days and by that time the affiliate has been paid.

[LifeinAsia]

Given your compensation model, I'm not sure there's much you can do proactively, other than extend the amount of time before the affiliate is paid.

If you have affiliates with a track record of excessive cancellations/charge backs, definitely terminate them.

[tomasz]

You can try maxmind.com web service which will give you score based on IP location/radius, email provider, proxy type, etc. Service is quite cheap.