Performance marketing is one of the most preferred tools brands use to drive the growth of their e-commerce businesses. In this form of marketing, brands collaborate with affiliates or publishers, who promote the company’s products on their website. A publisher earns a commission whenever a sale is made through referrals or if the campaign’s objectives are achieved. E-commerce companies partner with various publishers to increase the sales on their platforms and improve the reach of their products and services. But as the medium is gaining in popularity, so is the fraud. As affiliate marketing spending is likely to reach more than USD 8 billion by the end of 2022, according to Statista, fraudsters will also try to cash in on the frenzy and dupe the vulnerable. This blog will talk about how brands can avoid fraudsters while operating their performance marketing campaigns.

Carefully select your affiliate partner

Marketers should be extra careful whenever they are looking to add a new affiliate to their performance marketing fold, as getting the wrong or unreliable partner onboard would make your campaign susceptible to fraud. To begin with, brands should analyze the performance of the affiliates with their past campaigns, the brands they have worked with, and the average engagement rate on their social media posts. All this goes a long way in determining the partner’s reliability, who would be working alongside you to promote your products and services to a broader audience base.

Some of the red flags that brands should look out for is whether the affiliate has a vast audience base despite being a very new entrant in the space? Or do their posts see unusually high engagement, which bots or fake followers could have generated? If the answers to the above questions are yes, brands should exercise caution while onboarding such partners because there is no doubt they will do your image more harm than good.

Buying fake followers and increasing engagement through bots are some of the most common frauds seen in performance marketing, and marketers should be ready to not fall into the traps of these fraudsters and jeopardize the success of their campaigns.

Right revenue model

There are various revenue models for performance marketing like Cost Per Impression, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Click, Cost per Sales, and Cost Per Acquisition. In addition, brands use different revenue models based on the goals and objectives they want to achieve from a specific affiliate marketing campaign. Unfortunately, some revenue models are relatively easy for the fraudsters to game than others.

For example, if you are working on a Cost Per Click revenue model, where generally your partners are paid to generate clicks on an advertisement or a marketing campaign, affiliates can drive in low-quality traffic or use bots to inflate the number of clicks relatively quickly and defraud you of massive commission. It is not that the other revenue models are foolproof and cannot be misused, but models like Cost Per Sales and Acquisition cannot be easily defrauded.

Hence, choosing a suitable revenue model becomes crucial for brands to limit the risk of getting their marketing campaign compromised.

Monitor traffic closely

Actively monitoring your affiliate marketing campaign can significantly reduce the risk of you getting defrauded, and it will also ensure that you detect any illegal or suspicious activity in your marketing campaign before it can do much damage. While monitoring your campaign, if you notice a sudden surge in traffic without any plausible reason or an inexplicable number of transactions from a single IP address, you should immediately start looking for potential fraud in your campaign and take corrective measures.

However, not every time something like this happens can be a fraud, but as a brand that is banking highly on its affiliate marketing campaigns, you cannot be more careful.

Get the right platform

Boostiny’s coupon-based marketing platform eliminates fraud and drives actual sales for its partners. Boostiny by ArabyAds has demonstrated that its superior AI-based technology efficiently helps top brands protect their advertising dollars from the leading cause of mobile ad fraud: click spamming, click farming, click injection, and ad stacking. The leading technology platform in the MENA region supports the performance marketing initiatives of the region’s top regional and global brands.