$14.8B at Stake: Will You Let Cookie Hijacking Slip Through?
The U.S. affiliate marketing industry is entering a new phase of scale. It is crossing the $10 billion mark for the first time, up from $9.1 billion in 2023, and projected to reach $14.8 billion by 2028. With giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Target running large, complex affiliate programs, the stakes have never been higher. But as the channel grows, so does the race to claim commissions (sometimes wrongfully) which can also look like this-imagine a shopper comes directly to your website, ready to buy but yet somehow, a third-party partner ends up taking creadit for that sale. Many brands are already trying to tackle it, but the growing sophistication of the tactic makes it increasingly difficult to control. In this blog, we dive into a sophisticated tactic known as cookie hijacking where affiliate cookies are secretly inserted into a user’s browser to claim credit for organic traffic, ultimately stealing conversions that rightfully belong to the brand. Behind the Scenes of Cookie Hijacking: 3 Tactics You Might Be Missing Here are three common ways affiliates cause cookie stealing to hijack organic traffic: Extensions Injecting Cookie Affiliates driving sales by influencing real customers is ideal but them stealing is not. One common way an affiliate program experiences this issue is through cookie hijacking. While analyzing a leading global e-commerce platform, we found that many users were directly visiting the site to make purchases. However, some had browser extensions installed (like coupon or deal tools) that silently triggered affiliate links in the background, without any click or user consent. As a result, when the purchase was completed, the system attributed it to an affiliate. Since most tracking follows a “last click wins” model, the affiliate whose cookie was dropped last received the credit, despite having no real influence on the sale. Auto-redirect with Affiliate Tag Another way of cookie hijacking that we noticed in the same brand’s use case was, the page as when users were redirected to brand’s website. If a user is browsing normally and visits a random page (this could be a shady site, popup, or even hidden script). The page quickly redirected them to brand’s site and in a split-second redirect, an affiliate cookie is dropped silently. When that user makes purchase, the credit is given to the affiliate as system sees the cookie. Forced cookie from an external site A user visits a completely unrelated website, not your brand’s. In the background, that site quietly drops an affiliate cookie without the user clicking anything or showing any intent. Sometimes, the user is even redirected to your website, making it look like a normal visit. Later, when they make a purchase, the affiliate gets credit, simply because their cookie was already placed earlier. How Can You Safeguard Your Brand From Cookie Hijacking Cookie manipulation is a growing risk for U.S. brands, especially those running large-scale affiliate programs. As partner ecosystems expand, having clearer visibility becomes essential to avoid affiliate fraud and protect genuine performance. Legacy, surface-level tools can highlight obvious issues, but the real question is whether they can keep up with increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics. In most cases, they fall short. And for U.S. brands running high-stakes affiliate programs , uncertainty isn’t something they can afford. With a more advanced, third-party approach like mFilterIt’s, renowned brand are already bringing more transparency to their affiliate marketing programs. Here’s how it empowers brands- Launch instantly, stay in control – No integrations needed, just immediate visibility into your affiliate ecosystem Gain complete transparency – Always-on scanning ensures you see every leakage, not just the obvious ones Expand your risk coverage – Protect your brand from both known partners and unknown bad actors Make decisions with confidence – Accurate, low-noise insights you can actually act on Hold the right partners accountable – Clear attribution helps you take precise, effective action Understand your true customer journey – See exactly how users reach and convert on your platform Protect revenue in real time – Identify and stop fraud before it impacts your bottom line Conclusion The key to a smooth affiliate program is visibility to understand real user journeys and know where attribution is coming from. Brands that focus on transparency and proactive monitoring through holistic ad fraud solution can prevent revenue leakage and build stronger, more reliable affiliate programs. FAQs What is cookie theft? Cookie theft is when someone steals a user’s cookie or places their own cookie in the user’s browser to wrongly take credit for a purchase they didn’t influence at the first place. How to prevent cookie hijacking? Monitor affiliate traffic and user journeys closely Block suspicious extensions, redirects, and unknown sources Validate partners and enforce strict program rules Use advanced tracking/monitoring tools for better visibility Why is cookie hijacking difficult to identify? Cookie hijacking is difficult to identify because it often happens silently in the background. Since the user still completes a genuine purchase, the fraud appears legitimate in standard attribution systems, making it harder for legacy tools to flag. What are the common signs of cookie hijacking in affiliate programs? Common signs include sudden spikes in conversions, abnormal click patterns, high traffic from unknown sources, and mismatched user journeys that indicate unauthorized tracking activity What impact does cookie hijacking have on attribution and commissions? Cookie hijacking manipulates attribution by assigning credit to fraudulent affiliates, leading to incorrect commission payouts and reduced returns for genuine marketing efforts. What compliance measures help prevent affiliate fraud in the US? US advertisers can enforce strict affiliate policies, conduct regular audits, use fraud detection tools, and follow FTC guidelines to ensure transparency and prevent fraudulent activities.
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Audit Ad Fraud & Media Wastage Before Your Financial Year Budget Reset
For years, viewability has been treated as the gold standard—but what if it’s just a myth? This infographic challenges the assumption that “viewable” ads are actually seen by real people. It invites marketers to rethink performance metrics, question what truly drives attention, and uncover the hidden gap between visibility and impact. Discover how Valid8 helps bust the viewability myth, enabling brands to move beyond surface-level metrics and focus on genuine human attention, cleaner data, and smarter media decisions that truly drive results. Download Submit
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FY Closing Checklist: Are You Auditing Ad Fraud Media Waste Before Budget Reset?
It’s that time of year again. Finance wants numbers. Leadership wants plans. And marketing teams across the country are doing what they do every time during financial year close: reviewing channel spends, comparing ROAS across platforms, and deciding where next year’s budget should go. But here’s what most of those budget conversations skip. Channel-level reporting tells you what you spent. It doesn’t tell you whether any of it actually worked the way you think it did. The uncomfortable reality is that media waste doesn’t happen only in bad channel choices or poorly targeted campaigns. It happens at every stage of the funnel: Impressions served but never seen Clicks generated by bots or non-intent traffic Visits that never engage Conversions that were misattributed or would have happened organically (Source: Statista) This means a vast majority of media advertising budget wastage, and ad fraud is invisible without deliberate, layer-by-layer auditing. As you close the financial year and plan for FY 2026, the most important question is not just where to spend more, but where your budget may already be leaking. The Full-Funnel Media Waste Audit Checklist To ensure your next year’s budget is based on reliable performance data, marketers should audit campaigns across four key stages: Impressions (Reach & visibility) Clicks (Traffic quality) Visits/Installs (Real engagement) Events/Conversions (True business outcomes) Below is a structured financial-year closing audit checklist for each stage. Impressions & Reach Stage You Paid for Reach. But Did Real People See It? Impressions are hardest to tie to outcomes and often get ignored while auditing ad traffic. It is because an ad delivered is often considered to have been viewed. As per IAB viewability standards, if a static ad is visible on the screen for a continuous one second, the impression is counted as served. However, delivered is not the same as seen. And seen is not the same as seen by the right person, in the right place, at the right moment. If you’re not actively auditing where your impressions are going, which placements, which audiences, which environments, you’re not running a branding campaign. You are just running a reach report. What Advertising Budget Waste Looks Like At The Impression Stage Invalid Traffic (IVT): Bot-generated impressions consuming budget and reporting as delivered. Viewability failures: Ads technically served but never actually in-view by humans. Brand safety violations: Impressions delivered in unsafe or irrelevant content environments. Pixel stuffing: Multiple ads hidden within a single placement or tiny pixel, generating impressions that users never actually see. Ad stacking: Multiple ads layered on top of each other in a single placement, with only the top ad visible while all register impressions. Audience mismatch: Impressions served outside your target demographic, geography, or intent band. Frequency breaches: Ads repeatedly served to the same users beyond frequency caps; inflating impression counts without increasing incremental reach. Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites: Low-quality publisher sites designed primarily togenerate ad impressions rather than genuine user engagement. Know why brands need to go beyond viewability in details here. Here’s what we saw in one of the campaign audits for a FMCG brand A full-funnel audit conducted on an FMCG brand campaign running across placements over a four-week period, revealed something that the campaign dashboard simply wasn’t showing. At first, the numbers looked fine. Impressions in the millions, a 1.43% CTR, and IVT at 3.4%. But the real signal was buried in the visit-to-click ratio: of every 100 clicks recorded, fewer than 48 resulted in an actual website visit. More than half the clicks were going nowhere. Digging deeper into placement-level data made the picture significantly worse. Out of 4,859 total placements generating impressions, 92.98% of placements generated zero clicks further. Placement-Wise Breakdown Total Placements Active 4,859 across the campaign Placements with ZERO clicks 4,518 placements — 92.98% of all placements Impressions on zero-click placements 2,55,808 impressions completely wasted Good placements (11 only) Delivered 1,25,15,646 impressions (1.69% CTR) Placements with low VTC ratio 169 placements with only 17.88% visit conversion Moreover, some of these were structurally incapable of generating visits, screensaver apps and set-top-box interfaces where a user has no ability to click through to a website. What a programmatic campaign audit revealed for an energy sector brand A near-identical pattern emerged in a programmatic campaign run by a global energy sector brand across two major programmatic advertising platforms. The brand was running audio and display campaigns to boost visibility and audience reach. Reach and engagement metrics were low, but nothing on either platform dashboard was flagging why. After ad traffic analysis at the placement level across both platforms, here’s what the gap between the two platforms revealed. On Platform A, 11% of all traffic was invalid, with invalid geo as the dominant ad fraud type at 8.06%, meaning a significant portion of clicks was being attributed to the wrong geographies entirely. On Platform B, 38% overall IVT, led by IP Bot Repeat at 22.90%. More than a third of all programmatic budget on that platform was generating zero genuine human engagement. Furthermore, impression fraud didn’t stop at traffic quality. Brand safety violations compounded the financial waste with reputational risk. Ads were actively serving beside arms & ammunition content, generating 16% of impressions, and in a four-ad-stacked placement, absorbing 38% of impressions in a single cluttered slot where no user could meaningfully engage with any of the four ads. Neither violation was visible on the platform’s own reporting. The audit trigger questions advertisers must ask before the financial year closes ✓ Do you have a third-party verified viewability rate and attention metrics of each campaign, not just what the platform reports? ✓ What was your IVT % on programmatic inventory, and was it measured post-bid? ✓ Have you pulled a placement-level report showing click and visit performance by placement? ✓ Do you know which placements are structurally incapable of delivering website traffic? ✓ Were brand safety inclusion/exclusion lists active from campaign launch — not added mid-flight? Click Stage Your CTR Looks Fine. But Who’s Actually Clicking? Advertising budget wastage and ad
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Are You Competing Against the Market or Against Your Own Affiliates?
Affiliate programs are a powerful revenue driver and bring undeniable scale and performance to the table. It’s no surprise that brands continue to increase their investment in the channel. Global affiliate marketing spend is expected to reach $17B in 2025 (up from $15.7B in 2024) and is projected to surge to $38.35B by 2030. (Source) But as investments rise, one question remains: how deeply is this performance really being evaluated? Nearly 22–30% of digital ad spend (Source) is lost to invalid traffic or fraudulent activity and affiliate campaigns are one of the easiest places for it to hide. The affiliate ecosystem is revenue-driven but complex with multiple partners involved and that makes it more vulnerable to performance leakages. When some partners take credit for users you already acquired organically, you unknowingly start competing with your own growth. You know your external competitors. What you don’t see is the partner within your own ecosystem quietly draining your ad budget. These bad partners not only impact you but also steal the credit of genuine partners, impeding their growth. Sounds like a big claim? Let’s uncover it. Steady Growth or Midnight Spikes? What Affiliate Data Is Telling You Your genuine affiliate partners will show a steady and explainable growth pattern. The installs and traffic driven by them will not be restricted to a specific time window or sudden spikes. Instead, you will see natural variations; some days higher, some lower based on seasonality, campaign activity, and normal user behaviour, making the performance look realistic and trustworthy. Whereas, in case of fraudulent affiliates, you will notice a sudden spike in the number of installs. The user journey will not be mapped, and apps can get installed on always-on basis especially during the times when no normal person will install your app (3-4 am). From a marketer’s perspective, sudden out performance without clear explanation often signals inflated or manipulated metrics, not real user acquisition. The graph below shows the exact odd-hours spike happening at peak night where y-axis highlights the install rate and x-axis, the time in hours. How is Wrong Affiliate Intervention Rewriting your Growth Story? You built a strong affiliate network but what if it is rewriting your growth story? Affiliates that do not bring valid traffic and yet win the attribution race are actually not contributing to your ROI. Here’s what the wrong affiliate intervention looks like – This data of 7 days indicates campaign performance of various affiliates. In just seven days of campaign data, the gap between clicks and installs shows major discrepancies. One partner alone generated 29.03 million clicks but delivered only 45,501 installs, an extremely low 0.16% click-to-install rate while others also failed to cross even the 1% install rate mark. On the surface, the program appears to be scaling through massive traffic, but in reality, the growth narrative is being shaped by inflated clicks rather than real users, distorting performance, budgets, and optimization decisions. From Attributed Performance to Real Incrementality: The Shift You Need This time, you are not required to increase the budget of affiliate programs, instead what you require is a comprehensive approach that provides right attribution to deserving partners, cutting noise of fraudulent affiliates. Here’s how mFilterit’s holistic ad fraud solution Valid8, empowers your brands with an added layer of attribution integrity – Eliminate odd-hour install spikes by closely monitoring the full user journey and identifying suspicious patterns at the source level before they drain your budget. Demand true source-level transparency to shift budgets toward partners delivering genuine installs and cut spend on hidden, low-quality traffic sources. Detect traffic quality issues and behavioural anomalies early to optimise campaigns toward high-intent users instead of inflated performance numbers. Automate blocking, protect payouts, and optimise partner performance to reduce wasted spend, safeguard ROI, and scale confidently with partners that truly drive results. How We Tracked Down IVT: Saved $1.3 Million in Just 3 Months ? For a major travel portal running performance campaigns to acquire new customers, the problem wasn’t the budget, it was the lack of visibility into where the traffic was actually coming from. Despite healthy spending, the brand could not clearly distinguish between genuine and low-quality affiliate sources. We stepped in and closely monitored affiliate performance across the program. By identifying the partners driving fraudulent and non-incremental activity and stopping payouts to them, the brand ensured that only genuine contributions were rewarded. As a result, it was able to save up to $1.3 million in just three months while bringing back control over its performance spend. Conclusion The last thing you must worry about while running an affiliate program is to fight against your own affiliates. Affiliate marketing program are not the problem; the real opportunity lies in making them work the way they are meant to. To unlock their true incremental value and eliminate dishonest contributions, brands need to evaluate the entire affiliate journey, not just the final attribution. Only then they can fight affiliate marketing fraud and reward genuine partners, stop performance leakages, and turn the channel into a reliable, growth-driving engine. Want to know how? Schedule a call! FAQs How Can You Tell If An Affiliate Is Driving Real Growth? Real affiliates show consistent, natural performance trends. Sudden install spikes, odd-hour conversions, or a big gap between clicks and installs are signs of non-incremental or low-quality traffic. Why Do Affiliate Programs Sometimes Waste Ad Budget? Because last-click attribution can reward partners who didn’t create real user intent, brands end up paying for users they would have acquired organically, leading to inflated metrics and lower ROI. How Can Brands Stop Affiliate Fraud And Protect Roi? By analysing the full user journey, identifying traffic sources, and rewarding only genuine incremental conversions while blocking invalid partners and payouts. What are the signs of affiliate fraud in campaign data? Common signs include sudden traffic spikes, odd-hour conversions, unusually high clicks with very low installs, poor click-to-install rates, and conversions from suspicious referral sources. These patterns often indicate invalid traffic or attribution of manipulation. How can brands audit their affiliate partners effectively? Brands can evaluate affiliate partners by reviewing traffic quality, conversion behaviour, referral sources, and adherence to program guidelines. Ongoing
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What is a Unified Ad Manager & Why Should Agencies Care?
Agencies lose approximately 10-12 hours per week on manual campaign adjustments and another 8-15 hours on consolidating cross-platform data alone. (Source: AdsMCP) Now multiply that across multiple clients running campaigns on marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Blinkit, and Zepto. That’s a lot of time being wasted that could have been utilized on strategic plannings. You might be thinking ‘What other option do we have?’ Well, what if I told you otherwise? That all your dashboards can be controlled using a unified marketing platform. A platform where campaign creation, bid adjustments, budget changes, performance tracking, and reporting can all be done in one place. Instead of navigating multiple marketplace interfaces at once, you operate from a single, structured system built to simplify execution. That’s what we are going to cover in this blog. What is a unified ad manager? Why do agencies need a unified ad manager? How does it help streamline the process for ecommerce brands and agencies? Let’s dig in. What is a Unified Ad Management? A Unified Ad manager is a central platform that helps agencies manage and optimize advertising campaigns across multiple e-commerce marketplaces from one place. This way, instead of switching tabs and logging into separate ad managers every time, the unified marketing platform brings all campaign controls together in a single dashboard. From launching campaigns to adjusting bids, monitoring performance, applying rules, and reviewing results, all actions can be taken without switching between systems. It also helps analyze digital shelf insights like tracking keyword share of search, monitoring category visibility, and measuring competitor rankings, providing a consolidated view of ad campaign performances. Why do Agencies Need a Unified Ad Manager? Agencies have several ecommerce clients, and each client runs ecommerce ads on multiple platforms. Which in turn, also comes with various operational challenges that make a unified ad manager a practical necessity. Here’s why: Too many dashboards to manage Each platform has its own interface, layout, and workflow. Logging in and out of multiple platforms throughout the day slows teams down and makes it harder to maintain a clear overview of performance. Everyday updates take too much time Campaigns need regular optimization. Bid adjustments, budget changes, keyword refinements, product pauses, and more. When these actions are repeated separately on each platform, advertisers end up spending much valuable time on execution instead of strategy. Reports are scattered across platforms Consolidating performance insights from all platforms manually is time-consuming and makes cross-platform comparison more difficult. Scaling becomes operationally heavy As agencies onboard more brands or expand into new marketplaces, manual processes multiply. What works for a few campaigns becomes harder to manage at scale. Growth opportunities can be missed When teams are focused on managing routine tasks across platforms, less time remains to identify new keyword opportunities, optimize high-performing products, or experiment with strategic expansions. Operational load can limit strategic focus. Higher risk of errors Frequent manual updates across multiple dashboards increase the chances of inconsistencies such as incorrect or guesswork bids, missed budget changes, or delayed campaign pauses. Therefore, a unified ad manager helps bridge the gap between multiple platforms and campaign management, making the process more organized, scalable, and consistent. How does mFilterIt’s Unified Ad Manager Help Streamline the Process for Agencies? A unified ad management brings structure to the workflows of advertisers in agencies and ecommerce brands. Here’s how that translates into real operational gains and benefits of using a unified ad manager: Centralized Campaign Creation and Monitoring When agencies build any campaign for ecommerce brands, it needs to go live across platforms at the same time. Using a unified ad manager, instead of building campaigns separately for each marketplace, agencies can create and manage them from a single interface. Multi-platform integration allows campaigns to be structured using product, keyword, and budget inputs in one place. Outcome: Campaign setup becomes faster and more organized, reducing duplication of effort. Seamless Campaign Modifications Ecommerce campaigns often require frequent updates like adjusting bids, refining keywords, reallocating budgets, or updating product codes. Instead of repeating this across platforms, agency campaign managers can apply all changes in one place. Bulk actions further simplify tasks like adjusting multiple campaign budgets or adding/removing keywords. Outcome: Campaign managers spend less time repeating the same task across platforms, lowering operational load and improving consistency. Rule-Based Optimization and Objective Alignment A unified ad manager introduces a structured rule engine that allows agencies to define optimization logic once and apply it across campaigns. For instance, if a product is close to ranking higher on the digital shelf, the system automatically uses the defined logic to increase the bid by ₹10 every hour until the product reaches the #1 position. Once the target rank is achieved, the rule can stop the increase. This removes the need for manual guesswork and constant monitoring. Instead of repeatedly checking rankings and adjusting bids themselves, campaign managers can rely on predefined rules to handle these changes. Outcome: Performance standards are applied consistently, helping campaigns stay aligned with brand goals without constant manual supervision, saving both time and budget. Smarter Budget Management with Campaign Pacing Budget allocation is not only about how much to spend but also when to spend it. Campaign pacing tools help distribute budgets throughout the day and adjust bids based on traffic patterns strategically so that ads continue running during important traffic windows instead of stopping midway through the day. Outcome: Campaign budgets remain balanced across peak traffic periods. This improves campaign stability and reduces the need for manual efforts, saving time. Unified Reporting and Activity Tracking With consolidated dashboards and drill-through capabilities, agencies can move from a high-level view to detailed performance insights within a few clicks. Activity logs track all changes made to campaigns. Outcome: Improved transparency supports clearer reporting, stronger accountability, and more informed decision-making. Conclusion Success for agencies increasingly depends on how efficiently they can execute, optimize, and report on campaigns at scale. The unified ad management provides agencies with the structure needed to manage that complexity. It helps make the shift from traditional advertising methods to structured and automated campaign creation. With insights collated into one system, it allows teams to operate with greater precision and improve ROAS for clients in a more consistent and scalable way. If you want to simplify execution while driving stronger performance outcomes, now is the time you change how your ecommerce campaigns are managed. Connect with our experts to learn how we can help. FAQs Why do agencies need unified ad management? Agencies need unified ad management to centralize campaigns, data, and reporting across platforms. It improves efficiency, reduces manual work, and enables better decision-making through a single, integrated view. What challenges do agencies face without a unified ad manager? Without a unified ad manager, agencies struggle with fragmented data, limited cross-channel visibility, and inconsistent reporting. This leads to delayed fraud detection, inefficient budget
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