I suspect this is happening with another company again. one week ago I placed an order and it has not registered. I am 100% sure I used the appropriate URL link. This company has always had a great CTR of at least 4%.
How does a person protect themselves from this and make sure you get what you deserve? I am referring to Commission Junction afilliate companies and Adwords?
Of course, that probably wouldn't explain your own orders being shorted, unless they were for different merchants, some victimized by stealware, others not. Other variables too like stealware could have come onto your system after your first order, etc.
Hopefully you know that a few of the affiliate networks are very pro-active when it comes to remaining spyware free while other networks consider stealware generated sales vital to their profitability.
Remember, the stealware not only overwrites affiliate codes and steals your commission, it will also create a spurious affiliate sale when the surfer got to the merchant on their own without the benefit of an affiliate link. Hence, creating a commission when none would have been due. This is a freebie benefit to the network and the merchant still gets a sale. The merchant would have gotten the sale anyway but probably doesn't understand what happened behind the scenes. The merchant may at best understand that they stealware does "perform" for them.
At this point, there is not a lot you can do except keep speaking up. There are people fighting for us in our corner. Ben Edelman keeps track of spyware affected merchants. Don't promote them!
I do best with "indy" programs composed of small groups that I can trust. They're less targeted too since it's not efficient to write code to attack a small independent merchant when the same stealware code can be "resuseable" for hundreds of merchants in a network.
I don't think the problem is unique to or abetted by AdWords. This stuff resides on the surfer's PC and cares not where the browser request originates from. If anything, AdWords stats can help since there should be some correlation between clicks registered on AdWords and click-throughs recorded by the merchant. This detection is especially helpful if you use tracking ids for your different campaigns.
It's going to be a long fight since it has a global reach and it's going to take several culprits getting used to toilets without seats for 5 year stretches before crooks get the message that crime doesn't pay. However, first stealware has to be universally recognized as a crime.
patient2all
