Affiliate fraud, caught per affiliate and sub-ID

Affiliate fraud is any way an affiliate earns a commission without sending a real customer. The common forms:

• Bot and click-spam traffic. Automated visits that inflate clicks on per-click deals, or pad volume to hide what else is going on.
• Fake leads and incentivized sign-ups. Form fills by bots, or by people paid to sign up with no intent, on per-lead and per-signup offers.
• Resold traffic. Cheap pop and push traffic passed off as the affiliate’s own audience.
• Cookie stuffing. Dropping an affiliate cookie on visitors who never chose to click, so the affiliate takes credit for sales it didn’t cause.
• Brand bidding. Bidding on your brand in search against your terms, then claiming customers who were already looking for you.
• Fake orders. Purchases with stolen cards, or orders refunded after the commission is paid, on per-sale offers.

High payouts in igaming, finance and lead gen raise the incentive for all of these.

ValidVisit judges the visit each affiliate sends to your landing page.

• It catches bot and other automated visits, traffic from data centers, VPNs and proxies, and clicks that never ran your page. Through a server-side postback it also ties each lead or sale to the visit behind it, so a conversion from an Invalid visit stands out.
• It doesn’t catch fraud that happens away from your page. Cookie stuffing, brand bidding and stolen-card orders need your affiliate platform’s referrer and conversion reports, your search-term reports and your payment provider’s checks.

Each kind of evidence lives somewhere specific; a visit verdict is the right tool for the fraud a visit can show.

Pass each affiliate’s ID and sub-ID in the landing-page URL and ValidVisit attributes every visit to them. The report then ranks affiliates and sub-IDs by their share of Invalid visits, worst-first.

Read it the way you’d read any source. A whole affiliate with a high invalid share is a conversation about their traffic; one bad sub-ID inside an otherwise clean affiliate is usually one source they bought. How to calculate an IVT rate per segment walks through the arithmetic, and fake leads covers lead offers.

An affiliate margin lives in the gap between what a visit costs and what the offer pays. On pop, push and native traffic that gap is decided zone by zone and sub-ID by sub-ID. A source that converted last week can drift as its own supply changes, and the first sign is usually a conversion rate that sags while clicks hold steady.

Bot traffic costs you twice. There’s the spend on visits that could never convert, and there’s what happens downstream: an advertiser who sees poor lead or sale quality from your traffic can scrub conversions, cut your payout or pause you on the offer. You’re judged on quality you couldn’t see upstream.

Keep your tracker. ValidVisit reads the tokens you already pass, zone, site, sub-ID, campaign and creative, in each network’s own macro format (tracking-token directory). Pass them through to your lander and put the script on the page you control, usually the lander or prelander. There’s no extra hop, so the path from click to lander stays exactly as it was.

Each visit gets a Valid or Invalid verdict, with its evidence, attributed to the sub-ID that sent it. Reports roll up by zone, sub-ID and source, worst-first, so the rows at the top are the ones costing you.

The setup guides for Voluum, RedTrack, Binom, BeMob and Keitaro cover each one.

1. Launch a new source on a small budget: enough visits per zone to read a pattern, not enough to hurt.
2. Read quality per zone and sub-ID before reading ROI. A zone with no conversions yet but clean visits needs time; a zone full of Invalid visits doesn’t.
3. Cut the worst zones by pasting the Cut list into the network’s blacklist. Where each network lets you block.
4. Whitelist what holds up and move it into its own campaign before you raise bids.
5. Keep reading after you scale. Sources decay; a weekly look at the worst-first report catches drift before it shows up in your payout.

Send conversions to ValidVisit by server-side postback and the conversions report shows which ones came from Invalid visits. That’s the number to look at before the advertiser does: a sub-ID converting on bot traffic is a conversion that may be rejected later, and on networks that optimize toward your conversion events it gets scaled, not cut.

Push deserves a special look, because a real subscription doesn’t mean a real person is behind each click. How invalid visits enter a push campaign.