How To Prevent Click Fraud in Affiliate Marketing?

Preventing click fraud in your affiliate traffic can be tricky. Yet, it can be done. In this article, we will discuss “click fraud,” how much it can cost you if you don’t pay attention, and most importantly – how to prevent it.

What is click fraud?

Click fraud is when a visitor or a bot pretends to be a legitimate visitor on a webpage. He then clicks on an ad, a button, or some other type of hyperlink. Click fraud aims to trick a platform or service into thinking that real users interact with a website, ad, or app. 

Click fraud is basically when bots, competitors, or even fraudulent affiliates click on your ads, links, or banners without any real interest in your product.

It’s fake traffic, folks.

And it’s costing businesses billions every year.

Not exactly pocket change, right?

This can lead to wasted ad spend, inaccurate campaign data, and, worst of all, you’re paying for traffic that will never convert.

If you’ve promoted an affiliate campaign with paid traffic, there is a big chance you’ve encountered a problem with your traffic quality. 

Have you ever heard about click fraud before? 

Ad fraud to cost advertisers $19B in 2018, representing 9% of total digital advertising spend. A new report from Juniper Research has found that advertisers will lose an estimated $19 billion to fraudulent activities next year, equivalent to $51 million per day. This figure, representing advertising on online and mobile devices, will continue to rise, reaching $44 billion by 2022.

Sam Smith, juniperresearch.com

Typically, bot traffic affects desktops more often than on mobile devices. However, now it’s clear that around 40% of the top paid traffic sources are implementing fraudulent practices and traffic generated by bots.

Types of Click Fraud

Click fraud isn’t one-size-fits-all. Let’s break down the main culprits:

Type	🚨 Description
Bot Traffic 🤖	Automated software clicking your ads without any real interest, just chewing up your budget.
Competitor Fraud 🥷	Rivals click on your ads to deplete your budget or mess with your metrics. Petty, right?
Publisher Fraud 💸	Dishonest affiliates or publishers generate fake clicks to boost their commission earnings.
Click Farms 🏭	Groups of people hired to manually click on ads repeatedly. The dark side of gig work.

How Click Fraud Affects Your Business

Let’s be real—click fraud isn’t just about lost ad dollars. The ripple effects are brutal:

• Skewed Analytics 📉: Your data’s tainted. Now, you’re basing business decisions on junk.
• Lower ROI 🚫: You’re throwing good money after bad clicks.
• Damaged Reputation 🔥: Poor performance can lead to unhappy clients and stakeholders.

Spotting the Signs of Click Fraud

How do you know you’re a victim? Look for these red flags:

Signs	🚩 What It Means
Unusual Traffic Spikes 📈	Sudden surges in clicks without a matching increase in conversions.
High Bounce Rates 🏃‍♂️	Users hit the site and then bolt. Fast. Not a good look.
Geolocation Anomalies 🌎	Clicks coming from places where you don’t target your ads. Suspicious much?
Click Patterns ⏰	Repeated clicks from the same IP addresses or devices. Bots don’t take breaks.

So what’s the root of this madness? 

Cybercriminals carelessly abuse a combination of circumstances while the “getting is good.” A few large fraud rings have already been busted. However, most new anti-fraud measures have proven ineffective at preventing the worst offenders.

Many affiliate marketers are aware of the possibility of click fraud. However, most traffic providers haven’t been able to provide a decent long-term solution for optimizing click quality.

Marketers, merchants, and advertisers must realize that deliberate click fraud is now part of all the e-commerce sales channels and a massive threat to merchants’ profits.

Who would want to produce fraud clicks, and why?

Before we are going to discuss, how to prevent click fraud in your affiliate marketing campaign, it’s important to understand who (and why) would want to engage in this type of scam.

• Affiliates. Affiliate marketers promote ads or goods for merchants and get paid every time the advertisement is clicked (or the customer signs up). Affiliate fraud occurs when these affiliates beat the system by employing people or automatic click bots to regularly click these advertisements or send signup forms through malware on users’ devices.

• Competitors. As childish as it may sound, the competitors pay people to click on a rival merchant’s advertisements. The affected merchant ends up paying a great deal of money for clicks with zero ROI since they are all fake. These fraudulent clicks quickly drain the advertising budget and prevent the ads from showing to real people.

• Paid agents. Agents, generally in 3rd world countries, are hired by unscrupulous merchants, marketers, or advertisers. They are paid to click on competitors’ ads. These people use various computers, tablets, smartphones, and connections, spending their working hours just clicking. This drains the merchant’s ad budget fast; however, it is harder to detect and prevent.

How Are These Fraudulent Clicks Generated?

Malware & Botnets Generated Click Fraud

The growth of malware has allowed more desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones to become infected, usually without the user ever recognizing it. These malware or viruses run applications in the background, click on ads, and send conversion forms (pulled from the user’s phone information). It can even insert fraudulent credit card data. 

Compromised mobile devices are also capable of downloading and installing new apps without the user’s awareness. This leads to a highly profitable industry for cybercriminals. They become capable of producing totally fake traffic that can seem to be real traffic performing thanks to human-like actions.

Botnets can also be paid (or “rented”) by the hour, making them more accessible without the time-consuming and challenging process of developing and spreading the malware and obtaining compromised devices.

Bots & Proxies Generated Click Fraud

Proxies can seem to be an entirely mainstream connection solution. However, another person on the other side of the earth can access websites through the very same connection. 

This poses a severe challenge for advertisers who wish to target specific countries, as their ads could be a waste of money on users outside of their location-targeted audience.

Automatic scripts or bots can also use proxies to complete fraudulent actions. Then they repeat the process from a new IP address. Modern fraud rings (which have been busted) showed that millions of IPs were exploited by the fraud ring to produce fraudulent clicks and conversions, all through shared connections and proxies.

Can Click Fraud Be Stopped?

Yes. There are several solutions for preventing and stopping click fraud in your affiliate marketing campaign.

• Completely block traffic from unidentified connections such as proxies or other tunneled sources.
• Look for web browsers that resemble programs, such as “Python” or “PHP.” These categories of browsers show that the connection was bot-generated.
• Get a list of domains of referrers which were known to send lousy traffic earlier or produced fraudulent conversions. Blocking known “bad” traffic sources and bot IP’s is a practical approach for managing and preventing click fraud.
• Examine your stats and look for a spike in conversion or click, particularly at unusual times of the day, such as the early morning or late at night.

All these techniques are a good starting point for fighting click fraud. 

Unfortunately, as technology advances, it becomes more challenging to recognize click fraud in real time. Cybercriminals are using so many advanced methods to blend in with real human traffic that detecting fraud often becomes a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.

A real-time solution to clean fake traffic is the most potent way to eliminate click fraud.

Check out Scaleo’s FREE Anti-Fraud Logic™ feature, automatically identifying, filtering, and blocking low-quality traffic. This way, you can regulate traffic quality in real-time.

This allows publishers and advertisers to automate quality checks for both mobile and desktop sources. 

Conclusion

While fraud clicks are a huge problem that costs merchants around 50 million dollars every day, you can prevent it. The first step towards eliminating fraud clicks is to stop low-quality traffic.

Blocking known bad traffic sources or suspicious and unidentified traffic channels can help tremendously. You can also use tools such as Anti-Fraud Logic™ by Scaleo to monitor and root out the weeds in real-time.

Ready to level up your fraud prevention game?

Try Scaleo for advanced fraud detection, detailed traffic analysis, and real-time protection. Keep your affiliate marketing clean, and your profits high.

Last Updated on September 9, 2024