After all your efforts around affiliate recruiting you should have listings on directories, in social networks, forums and through your network of friends and industry experts. You will also (or should have) affiliates clamoring at your door to get into your program. Now comes the make or break opportunity, who to let in and who to keep away from your affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing is prone to fraud due to the lack of quality management, unsophisticated tracking systems, invisible affiliates and the basic principals around your links and pixels. It is the affiliate managers job to follow through with due diligence and screen out the bad from the big fish.
Not every affiliate network or platform allows a completely transparent affiliate application but those that do; you can really get crazy with your investigations. The bottom line here is that you identify the quality of the site, legitimacy of the affiliate and gauge the performance of every affiliate as you bring them on. There are several things you can do to stop the phony affiliates from entering your business, choose one or all, but instinct has become my #1 adversary.
IP Addresses – Platforms like DirectTrack and other inhouse affiliate applications allow you to capture the IP address in which they signed up. Use a tool like http://www.ip2location.com/ to get an idea of where the application is being filled out, is it nearby where the affiliate says they live?
Social security number validation – Another tool for inhouse solutions is to bounce the Affiliate’s social security number off of a validation service like: http://www.quentinsagerconsulting.com/utilities/ssn_online.php. This allows you to see if it’s gibberish, well tricked or valid SS#.
Google Maps your address – Where do they live? Take their address and Google Map it, is it a business? Postal forwarding service? Hotel? Also take and enter the address into Google and see if it comes up. I found a phony affiliate by entering their street address into Google, it returned being a doctors office!
Domain history – Plug their domain name into the Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php, this allows you to see how far back he/she is going with this domain, is the Google PR and Alexa Rank consistent with the History of the domain or are they throwing some fluff in there to give themselves a better reputation?
DirectTrack’s Login Manager – For DT clients Only. Look for the Login Manager under Affiliate Management. This will give you a snapshot of how many times a specific affiliate has logged into their account and from what IP Addresses. Are they consistent? I found an affiliate had logged into his account from 3 different cities in China, Texas, Colorado, 3 cities in California and Australia all in 10 days. He travels more than I do!
Whois.sc – A very cool set of tools every affiliate manager should already know about, but cannot leave it out. You can check domain name registrar information, how many domains are hosted on IP and Server as well as see how may other domains an owner owns.
Phone Calls – Very few networks or programs are picking up the phone. This is probably the easiest and most effective way to control fraud. CALL THEM! Your reaction, instinct and conversation will take over the decision making.
How quickly they start earning money – Once they are in, are they driving sales immediately? Dig a bit deeper. Most legitimate affiliates need a week or so to get started. Instant sales could mean they are grabbing tracking pixel code.
Payment methods – Have an affiliate insisting on PayPal or other strange and not so business friendly payment method? Be careful, stick to your policy and keep your payment methods in the box.
International – I do NOT forbid affiliates from other countries but their tax system and US laws don’t necessarily protect you against damages done by affiliates in foreign countries and I would consult an attorney before making a decision on how to interact with international affiliates. Know them well, require additional information and communicate often. They can be your largest affiliates as well as most damaging.
Make the affiliate run a test order. If you are still having doubts, ask the affiliate to run a test order through their affiliate link. Credit the order or pay more commissions to balance out their cost but doing this opens up an entirely new set of data to help you stay protected.
Look for sites linking to the affiliate site: Another helpful tool is seeing how many other sites are linking to the affiliates website. Who is linking to it? Are the links full of article databases or social networks? Those are pretty easy to get, decide based off quality of links, not necessarily quantity. We ALL like new affiliates! Here is a great tool to help find links: http://www.linkpopularity.com/.
Much of the information you need to run these checks are just not available to all managers nor do we have the time to run thorough investigations around every application. Use your instincts and clever ideas & tools to get the scoop on your affiliates.
What are you doing to prevent Affiliate Fraud for your affiliate program?
Tags: affiliate fraud, phony affiliates
04.May.08 
Merchant Blog 
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