The holiday season is the biggest time for the year when campaigns scale fast, budgets expand, and every click counts. Brands prepare months in advance to capture the surge in consumer intent, aiming to convert festive enthusiasm into measurable ROI.
Affiliate marketing campaigns play a key role in this strategy, with brands amplifying their reach, boosting app installs, and attracting high-intent shoppers through affiliate partnerships.
In fact, the US affiliate market is valued at 11.53 billion in 2025 and is anticipated to grow at CAGR of 11.08%. This explosive growth shows how integral affiliate partnerships have become for digital marketing success, connecting brands with millions of potential customers.
But with scale comes risk. As affiliate traffic surges, so does the volume of invalid or fraudulent activity that hides within it. Many brands see higher traffic but unchanged conversions, a clear signal that all that “activity” isn’t coming from real users. That’s where ad traffic validation at all levels becomes essential.
In this guide, we will cover –
- What is affiliate fraud?
- Impact of affiliate fraud during the holiday season
- How can full-funnel ad traffic validation safeguard brand this holiday season?
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Conclusion
What is Affiliate Fraud?
Affiliate fraud is when some affiliates perform any illegitimate activity to drive up numbers and generate commission from the inflated metrics. It spoils the campaign metrics and ROAS, especially during the holiday season, when it matters the most. This can occur due to any method of fraud, including fake leads, repeated leads, etc.
How Holiday Affiliate Fraud Impacts Performance
Affiliate fraud spikes during the holiday season as both customer activity and affiliate partnerships surge, with brands competing to capture maximum attention. Let’s look at how this impacts affiliate marketing campaigns and the common types of fraud that tend to peak during this time.
1. Surge in Budgets and Campaign Volume
a. Why fraud rises: During the holidays, brands spend more and launch bigger campaigns. With so much traffic and so many clicks coming in, it becomes easier for fraudsters to hide fake activity.
b. Common fraud types: Fake clicks (known as click spamming or click injection), and brand keyword hijacking.
c. How it happens: Fraudsters use bots or click farms to generate thousands of fake clicks or inject clicks just before a real app install, stealing credit from genuine affiliates. Some even bid on your brand name in search ads to capture users looking for you.
d. Impact: Brands end up paying for fake traffic, face inflated costs per click (CPC), and see misleading data on engagement and conversions, paying more but getting less real performance.
2. Rush to Onboard New Affiliates
a. Why fraud rises: As brands try to scale fast, they onboard new affiliates quickly, sometimes without proper checks. Fraudsters use this rush to sneak in as “legit” partners.
b. Common fraud types: Coupon misuse, referral fraud, fake conversions, and brand keyword hijacking.
c. How it happens: New or unverified affiliates may create multiple fake accounts, share discount codes widely, or run unauthorized ads using your brand name.
d. Impact: You end up paying fraudulent commissions, your CPC spikes unexpectedly, and your brand message appears in places you never approved.
Read in detail about referral and coupon fraud
3. Incentive-Driven Campaigns Become Fraud Magnets
a. Why fraud rises: High cashback offers, discounts, or referral bonuses attract not just customers but also opportunists.
b. Common fraud types: Coupon fraud, referral fraud, and fake conversions.
c. How it happens: Fraudsters or bots create fake accounts to repeatedly use referral links or coupon codes. Some even set up “install farms” to fake app installs just to earn rewards.
d. Impact: You attract a flood of low-quality users who rarely return, damaging long-term retention and skewing your success metrics.
4. Attribution Manipulation Peaks
a. Why fraud rises: Holiday campaigns offer higher payouts, so fraudsters compete to take credit for the “last click” that leads to a conversion.
b. Common fraud types: Click injection, and click spamming, also organic hijacking
c. How it happens: Fraudsters trigger fake clicks right before a user installs your app, making it look like they caused the conversion.
d. Impact: Real affiliates lose credit, your optimization decisions become inaccurate, and marketing spend shifts toward bad traffic sources.
5. More Sophisticated Automation Attacks
a. Why fraud rises: Fraudsters use advanced bots that can imitate real users during high-traffic seasons.
b. Common fraud types: Fake clicks, fake signups, and automated referral abuse.
c. How it happens: They use tools like “headless browsers” (bots that act like real browsers without showing a screen) or emulators to mimic user actions like clicking ads or filling forms.
d. Impact: Your analytics fill with fake data, increasing payouts to dishonest affiliates and making performance reports unreliable.
6. Masked Fraud in High Volumes
a. Why fraud rises: When traffic surges during the holidays, small signs of fraud easily get lost in the mix.
b. Common fraud types: All types, especially coupon/referral abuse and click spam.
c. How it happens: Fraudsters mix fake traffic with genuine visitors or spread out fake clicks over time to avoid detection tools.
d. Impact: Fraud becomes harder to spot manually and slowly eats away at your budget and performance metrics.
7. Limited Time to Validate Data
a. Why fraud rises: Fraud is no longer a black-and-white issue, and reviewing every click or conversion isn’t practical. Dishonest affiliates often blend legitimate traffic with incentivized fraud and organic hijacking, which are the real human interactions that show activity but no genuine intent to convert.
b. Common fraud types: Incent fraud and organic hijacking
c. How it happens: Fraudsters push fake activity in short bursts, ensuring they get paid before the fraud is discovered.
d. Impact: You end up getting non-genuine users who lead to wasted ad spend, skewed performance data, and lower overall campaign ROI.
How does mFilterIt’s Ad Fraud Detection Tool help Brands during Holiday Season?
To fight affiliate fraud effectively, brands need to validate ad traffic across the entire funnel, ensuring every click, install, and conversion is genuine. With affiliate fraud on the rise, a full-funnel monitoring approach through an affiliate fraud detection tool is crucial, especially during the high-volume holiday season.
mFilterIt’s Valid8, a full-funnel ad fraud detection tool, provides end-to-end visibility into affiliate activities, tracking traffic sources, conversion quality, and performance trends to detect suspicious patterns early.
How Full-funnel Validation Protects Your Affiliate Performance
1. Source-level Transparency
Provides granular visibility into every traffic source. This transparency helps brands see exactly where their traffic comes from, identify underperforming or fraudulent partners, and optimize media spend with confidence.
2. Capability to Detect Incent Walls
Helps brands uncover traffic coming from incent walls driving installs or events (like sign-up or first payment etc.) These users often take action to claim the reward, without any actual intention to use the app in the future. Valid8 identifies these channels driving incent traffic, helping marketers prevent budget waste and maintain the integrity of their performance data.
3. Identify Attribution Manipulation
Continuously monitors the click-to-install timeline and user behavior patterns to detect abnormal activity, ensuring that only genuine affiliates get attributed for their traffic. It also helps marketer to identify instances of organic hijacking – where they are unknowingly pay for their organic traffic diverted as paid traffic. This protects marketing ROI and keeps performance data accurate.
4. Referral and Coupon Fraud Protection
Tracks referral patterns, redemption rates, and code-sharing behavior to flag suspicious activity instantly, ensuring rewards go only to authentic users and compliant partners.
5. Integrity Service (Pre-Install)
Validates the authenticity of the traffic source and device. By filtering out bots, emulators, and spoofed devices at the pre-install stage, it ensures that only real, high-quality users enter the conversion funnel.
6. Actionable Reporting & Proprietary Control
It helps to gain daily reports on brand bidding violations and utilizes advanced technology to precisely detect unauthorized keyword use. This enables brands to take quick action to block networks misusing your brand terms, protecting both brand reputation and ROI.
FAQs
1. What are the common affiliate fraud types in the holiday season?
The basic fraud techniques include fake leads, fake installs, etc. However, the fraud tactics have evolved, and their human-like behavior makes the detection more challenging. The sophisticated fraud techniques include organic poaching click spamming and click injection, and referral, and coupon fraud.
2. What are the key features to look for in an affiliate fraud detection tool?
Key components of ad traffic validation:
- Source verification
- Attribution integrity checks
- Coupon and referral validation
- Pre and Post install traffic validation
3. What are the tips to protect against affiliate fraud during the Holiday Season?
Quick tips to protect against affiliate fraud this holiday season:
- Monitor traffic and conversions in real time.
- Work only with verified affiliates.
- Track suspicious usage of coupon and referral codes.
- Use AI-based affiliate fraud detection tools.
Conclusion
During the holiday season, when ad spend and competition are high, affiliate fraud often increases quietly in the background. It can make campaign results look good on paper, but in reality, those numbers may vary. To stay protected, marketers need to monitor their campaigns closely. Using full-funnel ad fraud detection software to detect affiliate traffic helps spot fraud at all levels, fake traffic early, track genuine conversions, and understand which partners deliver real value.
This holiday season, focus on authentic growth, real users, verified traffic, and trusted affiliates. Clean data and transparent performance will not only protect your budget but also build long-term success for your brand.
Want to know how? Schedule a demo now
