mFilterIt
Contact Us
mfilterit

Affiliate

Brand Bidding for Better Search Performance

Brand Bidding: Dos & Don’ts for Better Search Performance

Blog, Affiliate /

What happens when someone searches for your brand and still doesn’t land on your webpage?  Brand keywords sit at the most fragile point of your funnel: the moment earned intent turns into revenue. When users search with your brand keyword, they are not browsing, they are deciding. For marketers, this is the highest-intent traffic you will ever get, and how you handle it can make or break conversions, attribution, and overall search ROI.  That’s where the dos and don’ts of brand bidding come in.  Do it right, and brand keywords become a powerful lever. Do it wrong, and the damage is subtle but expensive.  What you are going to see isn’t just a tactical checklist. It’s about discipline at the bottom of the funnel. Because when it comes to brand keywords, what you allow and what you don’t, decides whether intent turns into growth or quietly leaks away.  That’s exactly what this blog is going to cover, highlighting:  Who are responsible for brand keyword auction?   What brands should do to improve brand keyword performance?  What brands should not do to while navigating brand bidding checks?  How to identify if your affiliate partners are bidding on brand keywords?  How can you ensure long-term control over your brand keywords?   Key Players in Brand Keyword Auctions Brand keywords are prime targets for anyone trying to steal your organic traffic. To protect your brand, focus on the three main players:  Brand itself – To ensure they are seen when someone searches with their brand name.  Competitors – It is a common norm of competitors bidding on brand keywords to be seen for the similar audience pool.  Partners & affiliates – If affiliate partners bid on brand keywords, it is not ethical as they are paid commissions to bring unique visitors. Knowing these players helps brands take the next step, focusing on the essential actions and best practices (the do’s) needed to optimize and protect brand keyword performance.  Do’s: How to Analyse Brand Keyword Performance Here’s what brands should keep in mind when reviewing brand keyword performance.  Always Own Your Brand Keywords Owning your brand keywords is non-negotiable, even if you rank #1 organically. Brand campaigns give you full control over how your brand appears at the most critical moment of intent, your messaging, sitelinks, extensions, and landing pages. Without this control, competitors or resellers can define the narrative, intercept high-intent traffic, and dilute trust before users ever reach you.  Monitor Who Else Is Bidding on Your Brand Brand keyword auctions are rarely exclusive. Competitors, affiliates, resellers, and even unknown third parties may bid on your brand terms, often appearing alongside or above your ads. Regular monitoring helps you understand who is present in the auction, how aggressive they are, and where brand leakage or policy violations may be occurring.  Align Search and Affiliate Teams Brand keywords sit at the intersection of paid search and affiliate marketing, making alignment critical. Clear rules, shared performance metrics, and consistent communication between teams help prevent internal competition, inflated costs, and attribution conflicts. When teams operate in silos, brand efficiency suffers even when results appear strong on paper.  Measure Incrementality, Not Just Conversions High conversion volumes on brand keywords don’t automatically mean high value. True performance comes from understanding incrementality, how much of that demand is genuinely driven by paid efforts. Evaluating new versus returning users, overlap with organic traffic, and assisted versus last-click conversions reveals whether brand spend is creating growth or simply capturing existing intent.  Don’ts: What Weakens Brand Keyword Performance Here’s what many brands overlook and how it quietly weakens their brand keyword performance.  Don’t Assume Brand Traffic Is Free Brand traffic may look inexpensive, but it’s never free. Every brand click carries a cost, and without active management, CPCs can quietly rise due to competition, inefficiencies, or poor structure. Treating brand campaigns as an afterthought often leads to inflated spend and missed opportunities to protect and optimize high-intent demand.  Don’t Ignore Partner Brand Bidding Brand bidding in affiliate marketing isn’t always wrong if brand has stated the clear guidelines on which keywords are allowed for bidding. However, affiliate partners who bid intentionally or unintentionally on brand terms, and without clear rules or monitoring, this activity can inflate cost per click, distort attribution, and weaken true search efficiency. Controlled participation enables scale; unchecked bidding creates leakage.  Don’t Rely Only on Last-Click Attribution With last-click attribution, credit often goes to partners who didn’t generate demand organically but simply intercepted it by diverting users through their own links. This masks the efforts that actually brought the user in and makes brand keyword performance look stronger than it truly is, while inflating the value of traffic that was never incremental.  What to Do When Your Affiliate Partners Bid on Your Brand Keywords  If partners are bidding on your brand keywords, you need to know and identify it. Here’s a stepwise guide for brands to detect brand bidding violations by dishonest affiliates:  Step 1: Identify Which Affiliates Are Bidding Start by gaining visibility into which partners are bidding on your brand keywords. This includes understanding who they are, how often they appear, and where they show up in the auction. Without clarity on participation, brand control becomes guesswork.  Step 2: Review Their Keywords, Ads, and Landing Pages Look closely at the exact keywords, partners are bidding on, the ad copy they are using, and where that traffic is being sent. Misaligned messaging, misleading offers, or unnecessary redirects can confuse users and weaken trust at the moment of search.  Step3: Ask One Critical Question Evaluate whether the bidding activity is genuinely improving brand keyword performance or simply intercepting demand that would have reached you anyway. This distinction helps separate incremental value from inflated conversions.  Step 4: Act Based on Impact Once performance is clear, decide the right approach and allow affiliate bidding with clear guardrails, restrict specific brand terms, or adjust commissions to reflect true contribution.  How to Maintain Long-term Control Over Brand Keywords Long-term brand protection comes from governance not one-time fixes. Clear rules, visibility, and accountability keep brand keywords efficient and protected. Following guidelines enable brands to own the long-term control over their keywords –  Set Clear Brand Keyword Guidelines Define who can bid on brand terms, which keywords are allowed, and how brand messaging should appear. Clear rules reduce confusion and prevent misuse across teams and partners.  Monitor Brand Activity Regularly Brand auctions change fast, especially during sales and peak periods. Regular monitoring helps catch CPC spikes, new bidders, and compliance issues early.  Share Ownership Across Teams Brand keyword performance spans search, affiliate, and partner teams. Shared accountability keeps costs controlled and goals aligned.  Review

Brand Bidding: Dos & Don’ts for Better Search Performance Read More »

influencer monitoring

Why Is Influencer Monitoring Critical for Brand Trust?

Blog, Affiliate /

People don’t buy from brands; people buy from people. And this shift in consumer mindset has led to the increase of brands inclining towards influencer marketing. Brands work with influencers to reach their audiences who already trust them and their content. But as influencer marketing grows, so do the challenges. Not every influencer uses that trust responsibly. Some take advantage of brand campaigns through misleading or fraudulent practices, which can impact performance and damage brand identity. For example, imagine a skincare brand launching a new serum through a group of influencers. Within days of the campaign going live, a few creators began promoting a “40% off” offer instead of the approved 20%, others used outdated product images they found online, and a couple even made claims the brand never endorsed. Soon, customers were confused, comments turned negative, and the brand’s messaging looked inconsistent across platforms. Situations like these are more common than brands expect—and they reinforce why active, real-time influencer monitoring is no longer optional. In this blog you will discover –  Why influencer marketing is important for brands today When influencer marketing turns into exploitation Why influencer fraud is difficult to detect How mFilterIt helps brands monitor influencers effectively Why Influencer Marketing Holds So Much Power Today  The rise of influencer marketing has made it a highly effective strategy for brands. Here’s why: Influencers have built strong trust with their audiences Influencers grow their communities through credibility and consistent engagement. This trust makes influencer marketing an effective way for brands to reach large, highly engaged audiences through a single, trusted voice. Creator recommendations feel more authentic than ads People follow creators because they value their opinions and recommendations. When influencers promote a product or service, it feels more like a personal suggestion than an advertisement, making brand messaging more believable and impactful. Influencer content blends naturally into social feeds Unlike traditional ads, influencer content fits seamlessly into everyday social media feeds. It also extends beyond an influencer’s followers, helping brands reach new audiences who may discover the content organically. Platforms algorithmically boost creator-led content Social platforms prioritize content that drives engagement and delivers value. Influencer-led content often benefits from this algorithmic boost, helping brands reach the right audience more effectively. When Influence Becomes Exploitation Influencer marketing is beneficial but only when influencers bring value in action. However, many influencers exploit the brand awareness campaigns in the following ways – IP violations Influencers may use brand assets such as logos, creatives, or messaging on unauthorized platforms or formats. These unauthorized uses can lead to intellectual property violations and raise questions around brand credibility and control. Typo-squatting Instead of driving new organic demand, some influencers create lookalike URLs that closely resemble official brand domains. This redirects traffic that would have reached the brand organically, misrepresenting true performance and inflating attribution. Brand bidding Influencers may bid on branded keywords and run paid ads to capture organic brand demand, causing brand bidding violations. As traffic flows through influencer tracking links, acquisition costs rise and bid prices increase, despite no incremental value being created.  Brand misrepresentation Unapproved or inaccurate brand messaging such as false discount claims or misleading product information, can surface across influencer content. This leads to compliance risks and erodes consumer trust. Coupon code misuse Some influencers misuse promo codes through invalid offers, self-use, or counterfeit coupons. While these actions trigger commissions or discounts, they fail to attract new audiences or deliver genuine campaign value. Why Influencer Fraud Is Hard to Detect  Influencer fraud is not an easy catch. With the evolving tactics, it becomes more critical to catch because basic monitoring cannot address the following questions – Are influencers reaching the intended audience? Reach is frequently inflated through fake followers or audience manipulation. While surface-level metrics may look strong, they fail to show whether the audience is real, relevant, or capable of driving genuine value. Is content aligned with brand guidelines? Influencer content exists outside controlled ad environments. Non-compliant or misleading posts can blend seamlessly into organic feeds, allowing brand guideline violations to go unnoticed at scale. Are commissions tied to genuine performance? Performance-based payouts are a prime target for abuse. Promo code exploitation and self-referrals can trigger commissions without real customer intent activities that traditional monitoring often misses. Know more about referral and coupon fraud How mFilterIt Enables Smarter Influencer Monitoring Influencer monitoring must be done on various parameters that holistically analyse the authenticity of influencers. A renowned electronics company implemented mFilterIt’s influencer monitoring solution, Effcent to evaluate if their influencer partnerships are driving true engagement to their campaigns or not. Here’s what our influencer monitoring includes Influencer Profile Analysis – Evaluates an influencer’s credibility using key indicators such as engagement rate, follower quality, and audience authenticity to determine whether a campaign will truly reach the intended audience. Influencer Posts Analysis – Assesses the quality and impact of influencer-created content by analysing likes, sentiment, and content relevance to gauge overall effectiveness. Influencer Followers Analysis – Uses a comprehensive 13-point checklist to assess audience quality, filter out fake or low-value followers, and deliver a composite score out of 30 that helps brands decide whether the influencer is worth investing in. Conclusion: Turning Influencer Marketing into a Controlled Growth Channel Influencer marketing continues to be one of the most powerful ways for brands to connect with audiences but only when it is built on transparency, accountability, and trust. This is where structured influencer monitoring becomes critical. By combining performance analysis, audience intelligence, compliance checks, and commission validation, brands can move from reactive detection to proactive control. For right influencer monitoring solution like mFilterIt’s Effcent becomes essential to monitor marketing more intelligently. Want to know how? Contact us now. FAQs What is influencer marketing? Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where brands partner with social media creators or influencers to promote products or services to their audience. What is influencer fraud? Influencer fraud refers to deceptive practices such as fake followers, inflated engagement, brand bidding, coupon misuse, or misrepresentation that distort campaign performance. How can influencer fraud

Why Is Influencer Monitoring Critical for Brand Trust? Read More »

Brand Bidding Violations in USA

Brand Bidding Violations in PPC Campaigns: What It Is, How It Hurts, and How to Stop It

USA, Affiliate, Blog /

Your brand name is the busiest doorway in town, so who’s greeting your customers before you even get there?  Every day, thousands of shoppers search for brands directly on Google and more than half of them are discovering or choosing a brand at that very moment. This makes your brand keywords the heart of your PPC strategy, driving the most ready-to-convert users straight to you.  Brand bidding in USA is a common practice, but brand bidding violation is a hoax caused by foul market players who target your brand keywords by quietly bidding on them, hijacking your organic conversions, and damaging your brand reputation.  While teams try to manually monitor these violations, their checks often remain limited to what can be seen on the surface. With so many variables and constant shifts in search environments, even strong teams may miss deeper violations.  In this blog, you will discover –  How brand bidding violations ruin your PPC campaigns  Who is responsible for brand bidding violations  What makes brand bidding violation tough to tackle  Signs to identify brand bidding violations  Why manual monitoring isn’t enough to catch PPC fraud  How mFilterIt puts a defined halt to brand bidding violations  How Brand Bidding Violation Impacts Your PPC Campaigns  PPC is all about showing your brand to the most relevant audience at the right time. You bid on keywords your audience is searching for, your ad appears instantly, and you capture demand from users already interested in what you offer.  But foul market players redirect your traffic to their landing pages or make your organic traffic reach your website through their tracking link. This advertising abuse damages your PPC campaigns and cause –  Higher CPC With No Real Gain When dishonest players bid on your brand terms without permission, they drive up the auction price, making you pay higher for your own organic traffic.  Stolen High-Intent Traffic Brand bidding violations hijack the most expected conversions to someone else’s landing page.  Skewed Campaign Performance & Reporting Lower CTR, inflated spend, and misleading attribution make it harder to evaluate your campaign metrics.  Reduced ROAS & Wasted Budget You lose budget fighting against unnecessary competition, reducing ROAS and hurting efficiency across the entire funnel.  Brand Dilution and Confusion Unapproved ads can create misleading ad copies, and wrong offers on brand’s name, diluting brand credibility.  Leakage in the Conversion Funnel Traffic that should have organically reached your website gets rerouted to fake coupon sites, unapproved resellers, creating huge drops in conversion rate.  Who Are Bidding on Your Brand Keywords?   Multiple fraudulent players are responsible for advertising abuse like brand bidding violations as they gain traction for the traffic that was already yours. They include –  Affiliates Some affiliates bid on your branded keywords, causing affiliate marketing fraud to hijack your organic traffic and then sell it back to you for a commission. They run ads above your website on search engines like Google and capture audience’s attention.  For instance – A user aimed at purchasing cosmetics from your brand and while he was willingly going on the website, an eye-catchy phrase like “Grab Best Offers – Avail Now,” caught his attention and he clicked on it. That is, your organic traffic getting redirected through an affiliate’s link, making affiliate earning commission on it.  Competitors/Rivals Many competitors directly bid on your branded keywords, openly stealing the attention followed by stolen conversions.  For instance – A user searches for “YourBrand shoes” on Google, intending to buy directly from you. But instead of your ad appearing first, a competitor like “StrideMax Shoes – Better Than YourBrand” shows up at the top with a paid ad. This way user gets redirected to the competitor’s product page, and your high-intent customer is captured by a rival brand.  Resellers/Distributors Resellers use your brand keywords to push their own listings, often outranking your official ads.  For instance – A user searches for “YourBrand smartwatch” on Google. Instead of your official product page showing at the top, a reseller runs an ad like “Buy YourBrand Smartwatch – In Stock at Reseller’s Name.” Their paid listing appears above your own ad, so the shopper clicks the reseller’s result and buys from them instead of your official store.  Coupon/Deal Sites Coupon sites run Google Ads on searches like “YourBrand discount,” “YourBrand offers,” “YourBrand coupon,” or even just your brand name.  For Instance – A user searches for “YourBrand promo code” or even just “YourBrand” on Google. At the top, they see a paid ad from a coupon site like “SaveBigDeals – YourBrand 50% OFF Today!” The user clicks the ad expecting a real discount, lands on a coupon page with generic or expired codes and then gets redirected to your website.  Why it is difficult to detect Brand Bidding Violation?   There are many sophisticated techniques used by fraudsters to perform the violations of brand bidding practices. These tactics often remain undetected due to limited capabilities of manual monitoring. Here’s what they include –  Geo-targeting tricks – They show violating ads only in countries you don’t check.  Dayparting – Ads run late at night or early morning when no one on your team is watching.  Cloaking – They hide their violating ads from your team by blocking your IPs, devices, or browsers, so the ads appear only to real customers and stay invisible during your checks.  Dynamic ad copy switching – Some affiliates change their ad text automatically depending on who is searching. To real customers, the ad shows trademarked terms like “YourBrand Deals”, but when your team or monitoring tools check, the ad instantly switches to safe, generic text, making the violation hard to detect.  Know why brand bidding in affiliate marketing is riskier in 2025 Top 5 Red Flags to Identify Common Brand Bidding Violations  Brand bidding violations are critical to identify. Watch out for these red flags to spot them before the damage is done.   Top Signs to Identify Brand Bidding Violations Branded CPC Spike – Your cost per click suddenly rises on your own brand name.  Organic Traffic Drop – Fewer users reach you through branded organic searches.  Paid Clicks Surge – You start paying for traffic you normally get for free.  Misleading Ad Copy – Ads use phrases like “YourBrand deals” or “official offers.”  Odd Conversion Patterns – Conversions spike at unusual hours or unfamiliar locations.  How Your Team Misses Brand Bidding Violations  Brand bidding looks easy to monitor until you realize how many combinations you actually need to check. Affiliates don’t violate rules everywhere, they do it selectively, in places your team isn’t watching.  The Real Monitoring Load (Simplified Example) Say you have:  40 branded keyword variations  8 regions to monitor  3 browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox)  2 device types (mobile + desktop)  That’s:   40 × 8 × 3 × 2 = 1,920 checks per audit  Now add time:  1 search ≈

Brand Bidding Violations in PPC Campaigns: What It Is, How It Hurts, and How to Stop It Read More »

How Do You Stop Brand Bidding by Affiliates

How to Stop Brand Bidding by Affiliates? Can Standard Marketing Tools Track This?

Blog, Affiliate /

“I have a bunch of shady affiliates bidding on our brand search keywords. Every time I ban them, they come back with a new account. I spend hours searching manually on incognito windows, geo-switching, digging URLs, and still miss half of them. Meanwhile, the CAC for our brand keywords keeps rising for no real reason, draining budget and even hijacking our organic traffic.” Many marketers find themselves stuck in this exhausting loop: ban one affiliate for bidding on your brand terms… only to see them resurface under a new account the next day. Despite hours spent checking different SERPs, tracing URLs, or monitoring CPC fluctuations, a significant portion of this brand bidding still goes undetected.  What makes this even more frustrating is the common belief that traditional marketing, analytics, or visibility tools can solve the problem. They can’t — at least not at the level required to stop affiliates who rotate accounts, cloak redirects, or trigger ads only in specific regions. These tools were never built to detect this kind of behaviour, which is why the issue keeps reappearing, no matter how deep you dig.  This blog breaks down why SEO tools fall short, how dedicated affiliate monitoring bridges that gap with real-time, source-level visibility, and includes a real case example to illustrate what truly effective detection looks like in practice. Whether you’re dealing with rising branded CPCs, unexplained CAC spikes, or recurring brand keyword hijacking, this detailed blog will help you understand what’s happening and what actually works to stop it.   Understanding The Problem: Why Affiliates Bid on Your Brand Search Keywords? Affiliates bid on brand keywords for one simple reason – to divert organic users from their links, stealing the attribution of a traffic source that was directly coming to your brand’s website.  Your brand terms cost less, are high-intent, and convert far better than generic keywords. This makes an easy shortcut technique for affiliates to boost their numbers without putting in real effort. Instead of driving genuine incremental traffic, they piggyback on the demand you’ve already created through your own marketing.   Here’s why it gets even more difficult to detect affiliate brand bidding:  Affiliates rarely use one stable link. They create multiple domains, subdomains, sub-IDs, and tracking variations to stay undetected.  They rotate multiple accounts quickly. Even if you ban one, another pops up immediately exhausting marketers trying to track these fake accounts.  They trigger most ads only when you are not looking, like during night hours, in specific cities, and on certain devices, timing chosen to avoid manual detection.  Affiliates scale brand bidding activities aggressively during high-demand periods (sales, launches, festive shopping windows) when the value of each conversion is higher to earn more payouts.  The result? Rising CPCs and higher CAC. And unless you have visibility into every link and every identity behind the ads, the cycle continues.  Get a deeper understanding of affiliate fraud. Explore our complete guide for marketers.  Can Standard Marketing & Analytics Tools Track Affiliate Brand Bidding Violations? The standard marketing tools cannot detect brand bidding violations. They can provide signals based on data, but miss the kind of visibility required to ensure enforcement and affiliate compliance in search campaigns.  What traditional marketing and analytics tools can detect? Shows which domains or advertisers appear in your auction over time.  Provide historical ad copies and landing-page snapshots when captured during routine crawls.  Reveal keyword-level insights such as search share, impression trends, and estimated spend.  Help you understand broad auction dynamics and track competitors running stable, long-term campaigns.  These insights are useful for market visibility and strategy, but they only reflect a portion of what’s happening.  What traditional marketing and analytics tools cannot detect?  Affiliates don’t follow a stable pattern for brand bidding abuse. It is fast, fragmented, and intentionally designed to stay hidden. Here’s what they miss:  Cannot monitor brand bidding violations in real time.  Fail to capture ads targeted to specific geos, devices, or audiences that only some users see.  Don’t identify affiliate sub-IDs, masked redirects, or rotating accounts behind the ads.  Don’t capture thousands of tiny link variations or provide the forensic evidence (screenshots, redirect chains, timestamps) needed to enforce affiliate rules or deny payouts.   Cannot detect cloaking in brand bidding, where a clean page is shown to you, but a redirect is shown to the user.  They don’t track short-lived “burst campaigns” during nights, weekends, or peak sale hours.  Fail to map patterns of affiliate brand bidding abuse, such as repeated offenders switching identities or redirect networks working in clusters.  Why Marketers Need an Advanced Affiliate Monitoring Tool to Detect Brand Bidding?  An advanced AI/ML-based affiliate monitoring tool is specifically built to offer visibility and transparency across all affiliate activities. Here’s what all provides:  Continuously monitors brand keywords across multiple geo locations and devices. 24/7 coverage, not periodic scans.  Detects hidden or time-specific ad triggers. It can catch short bursts and late-night campaigns.  Captures every link and ad variation, even thousands of them. Including tracking parameters, sub-IDs, and UTM permutations.  Identifies the source of each violation by mapping the publisher, sub-publisher, affiliate ID, or the redirect owner behind the ad.  Generates enforceable evidence. Full screenshots, timestamps, and the redirect/log trails that serve as proof.  Alerts you immediately when an unauthorized ad appears. Proactive notifications that allow fast action.  Provide daily/weekly reports for pattern detection. Aggregate findings into actionable intelligence for program decisions and payout validation.  Check out the affiliate monitoring audit checklist every brand needs for fraud-free growth.  Foxtale’s 21% CPC Dropped: How mFilterIt Helped Them Combat Brand Bidding Foxtale, the fast-growing skincare brand, invested heavily in TOF and video campaigns to boost search volumes and drive high-intent users to their website. However, they noticed CPCs were rising on brand search terms by 25–30%, even though demand was strong. Search scalability was getting harder, and ROAS was dropping.  The Challenge Ad networks and affiliates were secretly bidding on Foxtale’s brand terms.  Manual checks barely caught a fraction of what was happening.  High-intent traffic was being hijacked, increasing Foxtale’s acquisition costs. 

How to Stop Brand Bidding by Affiliates? Can Standard Marketing Tools Track This? Read More »

Why Affiliate Compliance Monitoring is Important

Affiliate Compliance Monitoring: Why It’s Crucial for Every Brand

Blog, Affiliate /

When Affiliate Compliance Slips, Your Brand Pays the Price  Imagine a fast-growing e-commerce brand launching a seasonal campaign and partnering with multiple affiliates to boost sales and drive conversions. Within days, traffic spiked, a good sign, they thought. But behind the surge, unapproved coupon sites and cashback platforms had picked up leaked affiliate links and were redirecting genuine shoppers through their own tracking URLs.  The outcome? Brand lost tens of thousands in false payouts, its conversion data became unreliable, and customers began distrusting its discounts.  What looked like campaign success was actually affiliate fraud draining ROI and damaging brand credibility, a reminder that without strict affiliate compliance monitoring, even genuine performance marketing can backfire.  In this blog, we will discover –  The growing need for affiliate marketing compliance  Common affiliate compliance violations  Why are affiliate policy violations difficult to detect?   How mFilterIt’s compliance monitoring model protects brand integrity  Role of technology in strengthening compliance  Benefits of holistic compliance monitoring  Conclusion  The Growing Need for Affiliate Compliance The affiliate ecosystem is vast and goes far beyond direct affiliate partnerships. It includes sub-affiliates, affiliate networks, influencers, review platforms, coupon sites, and other partners that help drive traffic and sales. With so many layers involved, every interaction plays a role in shaping how a brand is represented. This makes it essential for brands to ensure that each affiliate partner follows their ethical standards, maintains consistent messaging, and complies with brand and industry specific advertising regulations to protect both performance and brand reputation.  When affiliates don’t follow a brand’s guidelines, it opens the door to miscommunication for the users, leading from misleading claims, wrong messaging, and suspicious links. This can lead to penalties from regulatory bodies, damaging the brand’s reputation, and wasting valuable ad spend. Common Affiliate Compliance Violations Undermining Brand Integrity The common violations of affiliate compliance sneak in, giving you the illusion of inflated metrics. Let’s know what these violations look like –  Fake Performance and Attribution Manipulation  Some dishonest affiliates use deceptive tactics to make their campaigns appear successful. Techniques like cookie stuffing and click spamming target your organic users, stealing credit for installs or purchases that were already going to happen. On top of this, advanced methods like click injection trigger fake clicks just moments before a real user completes an install, tricking the system into awarding last-click attribution to the fraudster. This causes genuine affiliates to lose credit leading to wasted ad spend and inflated metrics Unauthorized Social Media Promotions Sometimes affiliates use brand creatives on their own social media handles with same or exaggerated offers and false discounts that are not approved by brands, to clickbait users. This might trigger the number of clicks or install rate too but questions the brand’s credibility and trust within customers. When customers feel misled, they often blame the brand, not the affiliate. Brand Bidding Violations Some affiliates bid on your branded keywords to appear above your official website, thereby diverting the organic traffic as paid traffic. Unapproved Regional Promotions Some affiliates run campaigns in restricted regions, ignoring ad disclosure rules or violating data privacy regulations, causing legal troubles. These violations can cause serious legal troubles for brands. Coupon frauds Affiliates use expired or fake discount codes to attract users and claim commissions on genuine sales, leading to revenue loss and customer mistrust. Typo squatting Fraudsters create look-alike domains with slight spelling errors to redirect users and steal affiliate credit meant for legitimate partners. For example, using ‘gooogle.com’ instead of ‘google.com.’ Referral fraud It happens when dishonest affiliates manipulate a referral program through fake referrals using bots or duplicate accounts to earn rewards without bringing real users or sales. Why are Affiliate Policy Violations Difficult to Detect? Complex Affiliate Hierarchies Affiliate network is based on a complex ecosystem that makes it hard for brands to trace where traffic truly originates from. Fraudulent activities often hide behind legitimate affiliates, masking non-compliant behavior. Lack of Source-level visibility Without automated monitoring across networks, brands often detect violations only after damage has occurred. This delay allows bad actors to profit before being caught. Manual Audits can’t match scale With thousands of clicks, installs, and conversions happening, especially during the peak seasons, manual checks become too slow to identify these compliance violations as they possess limited ability to catch every policy breach in time. Tangible Business Benefits of Compliance Monitoring Implementing strong affiliate compliance monitoring delivers measurable business value beyond fraud prevention.  Improved ROI By filtering out fraudulent or low-quality traffic through affiliate monitoring tools, brands can direct budgets toward genuine affiliates and high-performing channels, ensuring every dollar spent drives real results. This enables them to stay compliant to brand guidelines and secure their digital assets as well. Brand Protection Compliance monitoring safeguards your brand’s reputation by preventing misuse of logos, creatives, and messaging. It ensures your brand is represented accurately and ethically across all touchpoints. Market Competitiveness With advanced compliance tools, brands can act with vigilance, stay compliant with its guidelines and regional policies, and maintain a trustworthy online presence, gaining a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace. mFilterIt’s Affiliate Compliance Violation Monitoring: How does it work? When brands struggle to maintain affiliate compliance, the risk goes beyond simple brand guideline violations; it can deeply harm brand assets, reputation, and customer trust. mFilterIt’s robust affiliate monitoring tool not only tracks and analyses affiliate performance but also safeguards brand integrity. Let’s know how –  Prevent Brand Bidding Stop affiliates from bidding on your brand keywords in paid search, protecting both your organic traffic and ad spend. Detect IP Violations & Typo-squatting Identify unauthorized domains or lookalike websites using your brand name to mislead customers. Track In-Store Product Mentions Use advanced extensions to monitor how your in-store or offline products are promoted online by affiliates. Counterfeit Products Find and remove duplicate product pages that confuse customers and dilute genuine sales. Avoid Brand Misrepresentation Detect false claims, misleading content, or inaccurate product details that can harm brand credibility. Stop Coupon Code Misuse Identify unapproved coupon sharing and

Affiliate Compliance Monitoring: Why It’s Crucial for Every Brand Read More »

Brand Bidding in Affiliate Marketing

Brand Bidding in Affiliate Marketing: What It Is and Why It’s Riskier in 2025

USA, Affiliate, Blog /

Your brand keywords are your identity. But what if you’re paying higher cost for your brand keywords, or in worst case scenario – paying for your organic traffic.  Brand bidding is a technique used by affiliates and competitors where they bid on your branded keywords to divert your traffic to their landing pages. The impact of brand bidding in affiliate marketing is not just limited to ad budget wastage.   The brands have to pay more for their own branded keywords, they lose search traffic, and revenue drops.   In 2025, it is expected that the expenditure on search advertising will hit $351.5 billion worldwide, indicating a strong growth in the paid search sector. And with the demand for search surges, it is critical for brands to have the right protection against brand bidding violations.    According to our analysis done, we have found that 43% of affiliate traffic is invalid.   This blog is going to unpack:  Why brand bidding protection is critical in 2025?   What Leading Brands Are Doing to Prevent It?    How mFilterIt Protects Your Affiliate Program from Brand Bidding?    Why Brand Bidding Is Riskier in 2025 In 2025, brand bidding has become more than just a compliance problem; it has emerged as a strategic threat. It directly attacks the authenticity of your website, leaving users in a dilemma and baiting them to make the purchase from an affiliate’s website or tracking link. Let’s understand how brand bidding is riskier in 2025:  1. Increased PPC Brand Bidding = Higher CPCs on Brand Terms Affiliates bidding on brand keywords are directly proportional to the cost-per-click. The higher the bidding, the higher the cost-per-click, leading to an increased cost of paid search campaigns, making the visibility achievement on search engines greater challenge.   2. Detection Becoming Harder Due to AI-powered Tool Monitoring the actions of affiliates and enforcing policy violations rules have become tougher for brands as affiliates consistently use cloaking, dynamic redirects, and global targeting by AI to evade detection.  3. Exploitation of Performance Metrics In 2025, brands are relying heavily on performance metrics, prioritizing channels that generate maximum clicks, conversions, and ROAS. Hence, affiliates aim to exploit these metrics by click baiting users and taking credit of the purchases, they made without creating any new demand. This boosts the performance statistics of affiliates through mispresented numbers.  4. Brand Goodwill at Stake Misleading affiliate advertisements, fake discounts, and unreliable affiliate tracking links can severely hamper the goodwill of the brand by eroding customer trust.  Real Impact: How Brand Bidding Eats into Your ROI Your market funnel is at risk; brand bidding is draining your profits. Let’s know how profit leaks are undermining your return on investment (ROI):  1. One Customer, Double Payment If users who are your organic customers, are specifically searching for you, visit an affiliate’s tracking link and make purchases, you lose one organic user and instead pay the affiliate commission on a sale you would have gotten anyway.  2. CPCs Rise Manifold Your PPC campaigns land in a competitive landscape when affiliates bid on your keywords, increasing the cost-per-click and affecting the overall paid search efficiency.  3. False Attribution Affiliates gain commission from selling your products, but no new demand is created. The customers are the same buyers who would have visited your website, anyway, hence creating false attribution.   4. Poor UX = Lost Conversions Misleading or outdated ad copy from affiliates can create confusion, frustration, or distrust — increasing bounce rates and reducing conversion quality.  How to Prevent Brand Bidding: What Leading Brands Are Doing As major talks are going around how to prevent brand bidding in affiliate marketing, brands are also recognizing its importance. The following are the strategies opted by them to tackle the same:  1.Transparent Brand Policies and Contracts Brands create their affiliate program agreements, forbidding affiliates to steal their trademarked terms. The agreement includes what keywords the brand can use; the penalties imposed on the agreement and more.  2. Real-time Monitoring through Automation Brands are keeping a hawk’s eye on violations of their trademarks by affiliates. They monitor the landing pages, ads that appear above their official website and take action accordingly.  3. Negative Keyword Implementation The tactic of negative brand keyword implementation is followed by several brands across the affiliate campaigns to prevent affiliate ads from triggering on brand terms.  4. Timely Audits & Reporting Brands evaluate affiliate traffic through patterns, source, and conversion behaviour to detect and prevent suspicious behavioural patterns. This also includes reviewing landing pages and promo codes to identify any misleading information.  5. Cross-Functional Team Alignment (Legal, PPC, Affiliate Management) Leading brands are bringing legal, PPC, and affiliate teams together to tackle brand bidding in affiliate marketing. Legal handles takedowns, PPC monitors brand keyword activity, and affiliate managers enforce the rules. When these teams work in sync, violations get caught faster and the brand stays protected.  6. Third-party Solution for Detecting Brand Bidding Violation Third-party solution provides unbiased monitoring and detection of brand bidding violations. By offering an external perspective, it ensures transparency, credibility, and consistent protection of a brand’s search presence.  How mFilterIt Protects Your Affiliate Program from Brand Bidding Every click, every booking, every creative asset your brand deserves to own them. Yet brand bidding and unauthorized promotions quietly cause loss of direct traffic, inflate acquisition costs, and dilute trust.  That’s where EffCent steps in, mFilterIt’s affiliate monitoring solution built to protect your performance marketing ROI. But how do we do it? Let’s know now –  Real-time Monitoring –Track brand keyword bidding across ad networks and regions to spot misuse instantly.  Actionable Reporting –Deliver daily reports that highlight brand bidding violations for quick corrective action.  Proprietary Detection –Use Effcent’s technology to precisely identify unauthorized bids on branded keywords.  Restrict Violations –Enable immediate blocking of ad networks bidding on brand terms.   Know how a leading brand utilized mFilterIt’s affiliate monitoring solution to combat brand bidding.  Conclusion Brand bidding is a real threat to your performance, budget, and brand trust. As we

Brand Bidding in Affiliate Marketing: What It Is and Why It’s Riskier in 2025 Read More »

Every Brand Needs an Affiliate Monitoring Audit Checklist for Fraud-Free Growth

Affiliate Monitoring Audit Checklist: Every Brand Needs for Fraud-Free Growth

Blog, Affiliate /

If you’re running an affiliate program, chances are you have seen both sides of the story. On good days, affiliates bring in new customers, drive sign-ups, and help you scale faster than you imagined. But on bad days, you notice ad spends rising, driving minimal value, organic traffic dipping, or complaints from customers who clicked on an “official offer” that never came from you.   This is the reality for many performance marketers and affiliate program managers today. Affiliate marketing may be one of the most powerful growth channels for industries like ecommerce, fintech, and travel, etc. But it is also one of the most unpredictable if left unmonitored.   A single fraud affiliate can misuse your brand name, bid on your own keywords, or send traffic from unsafe domains, leaving you with inflated costs, lost revenue, and damaged brand credibility.  That is why the industry focus has now shifted to not just running affiliate campaigns but also monitoring affiliate performance closely.  Regulatory bodies like the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) have been tightening disclosure norms and ad monitoring guidelines, signaling that brands are supposed to take complete accountability for how affiliates promote them.   Therefore, monitoring your affiliate ecosystem isn’t just a best practice anymore, it’s becoming the standard for sustainable growth.  So, here’s the big question: How do you keep affiliates in check without slowing down the performance they bring?  In this blog, we’ll walk through what a structured affiliate monitoring audit framework looks like and how brands can implement it to protect their budgets, brand reputation, and long-term growth.  Here’s What an Affiliate Monitoring Audit Checklist Looks Like  Affiliates often exploit loopholes to earn quick payouts using various affiliate fraud techniques like brand bidding, misuse of promo codes, duplicate listings, etc. To avoid this, we have curated an extensive affiliate monitoring audit checklist to help you evaluate your affiliate partner’s performance and take proactive decisions. Check out here:   1. Are affiliates using your brand assets and claiming to be your “official partner” without approval? Your brand name is your most valuable asset. Yet, some fraudulent affiliates often misuse it in ad copies, metadata, or promotional creatives to attract users without being directly associated with the brand. These unauthorized claims like “official partner” or misuse of logos not only confuse customers but also trigger legal complications.  How to audit and identify trademark violations:  Regularly scan ad copies, metadata, and landing pages for your brand name, variations, or misspellings.  Check that logos, product images, and creatives are only used with explicit brand approval.  Verify that affiliates don’t claim false associations like “official partner” unless authorized.  2. Do you often see other landing pages ranking on your brand keywords? Affiliates often bid on your brand keywords, driving up cost-per-click (CPC), hijacking search intent that anyway belongs to the brand organically. They also use techniques like typosquatting, like “Amazn deals” or “Flipkrt offers”, to divert users and earn commissions that eventually inflate your spend.  How to monitor affiliates for brand bidding:  Monitor search engines for affiliates brand bidding on your brand keywords.   Look for typosquatting errors and usage of competitor or brand keyword combinations.  Restrict affiliates from inflating CPCs by competing with your own campaigns.  Read this blog to know the signs you’re losing budget for unauthorized brand keyword bidding.  3. Are affiliates running campaigns using fake websites you don’t know about?  Fraudulent affiliates create lookalike websites resembling official sites (e.g., myntra-deals.in). Customers often mistake these for genuine pages, only to be scammed, amplifying further risks.  How to audit links for domain spoofing or IP squatting:  Identify lookalike or spoofed domains mimicking your brand (e.g., myntra-offers.in).  Audit affiliates to ensure all operating domains and subdomains are disclosed.  Prohibit the use of brand trademarks in domain names unless approved.  4. Do you find your brand ads placed on unsafe content websites? Affiliate ads sometimes end up on sites promoting adult content, gambling, drugs, or politically sensitive material. This misplacement not only harms the brand reputation but also leads to regulatory backlash.  How to audit unsafe affiliate ad placements:  Block affiliate traffic from adult, gambling, drug, piracy, or politically sensitive sites.  Use automated filters to prevent placements near hate speech, fake news, or unsafe content.  Continuously audit ad networks for brand-safe inventory.  5. Is your brand voice being manipulated with low-quality or AI-generated content?  Affiliates often generate content, blogs, reviews, or social media posts, to promote offers. But some use AI-generated text or plagiarized material, diluting brand voice and sometimes sharing misleading claims, creating confusion among customers.  How to monitor affiliate programs for content integrity:  Require affiliates to disclose AI-generated content.  Audit affiliate blogs, reviews, and posts for originality and compliance.  Prohibit plagiarism and ensure all content aligns with your brand voice and regulatory standards.  Learn how affiliates use AI-generated sites to game attribution models.  6. Are affiliate links exposing your users to malware sites or phishing attempts? Fraudsters exploit affiliate links through cloaking, forced redirects, or even malware injection. Customers may land on unsafe pages, creating cybersecurity threats and broken user journeys.  How to audit affiliate campaigns for unsafe linking practices:  Audit affiliate links for transparency and clarity (no cloaking, forced redirects, or hidden tracking).  Ensure links route only through secure, brand-approved channels.  Validate that links don’t lead to malware, phishing attempts, or unsafe redirects.  How do you enforce affiliate compliance and blacklist bad actors proactively? Affiliate fraud techniques are moving fast and adapting faster than most compliance teams. A one-time audit cannot prevent ongoing abuse. Without advanced enforcement and proof, even detected violations may continue.  How to enforce affiliate compliance:  Set up continuous monitoring for violations across ads, domains, and links.  Maintain an active blacklist of non-compliant affiliates, domains, and IPs.  Withhold payouts from affiliates breaching compliance rules.  Conduct quarterly audits to proactively identify risks.  How mFilterIt Helps Strengthen Your Affiliate Monitoring & Compliance Strategy  Running affiliate campaigns without continuous monitoring is like leaving your brand vulnerable to affiliate fraud activities. You may not notice the risk immediately, but affiliate campaigns,

Affiliate Monitoring Audit Checklist: Every Brand Needs for Fraud-Free Growth Read More »

Leverage affiliate monitoring to prevent fraud & boost ROI

Affiliate Marketing Campaigns: Know How Smart Affiliate Monitoring Drives Growth

USA, Affiliate, Blog /

The global affiliate market continues to expand at an annual growth rate of nearly 8%, with brands investing heavily in affiliate programs to drive performance and reach new audiences.  But here’s the catch — rising spend doesn’t always equal rising returns.  As affiliate programs scale, the need for transparency and accountability across every click, install, and conversion has become critical. Consider this scenario: one affiliate is driving a surge in installs, but downstream conversions remain flat. Without evidence of what’s happening behind the scenes, how do you explain this performance gap — let alone fix it?  This is where the disconnect lies. Dashboards may glow with inflated numbers, yet real business impact lags. Budgets leak, brand reputation is put at risk, and marketers are left with more questions than answers.  To truly maximize the value of affiliate partnerships, brands need visibility into traffic quality, confidence in partner compliance, and the ability to direct spend toward affiliates that actually drive growth.  In this blog, we’ll unpack:  The most common affiliate fraud and violation techniques. Why traditional tracking often falls short.  How brands can safeguard ROI with deeper monitoring and smarter optimization.  The Blind Spots You Can’t Ignore: Common Affiliate Fraud and Violation Techniques Without active monitoring come hidden risks. As affiliate programs scale to include multiple partners, from influencers, coupon sites, and ad publishers, brands often lose visibility into where and how their campaigns are being run. And without visibility, small issues can quickly snowball into wasted budgets, poor-quality leads, and even damaged brand reputation.  Here are some common affiliate fraud techniques every marketer should know about, along with some real-world affiliate use cases detected by mFilterIt.  1. Brand Bidding A major blind spot is when affiliates bid on your branded keywords. In such cases, you end up paying for customers who would have anyway reached you organically.  Example: A user searches for a brand name on Google and clicks on a sponsored ad from an affiliate pretending to be the brand’s official site. This results in a commission payout for a user who would have converted anyway.      Watch for: Inflated CPCs on brand-specific keywords and affiliate-attributed conversions that come mainly from branded queries.  Impact: You end up paying twice, once for the ad and again for affiliate commissions, with no added value.  2. Ads Placed on Harmful Sites Sometimes affiliates place ads in environments that are completely misaligned with your brand values, such as adult sites, piracy platforms, MFA sites, or counterfeit marketplaces (in case of ecommerce brands).  Example: A family-oriented or financial service app being promoted via banner ads on explicit content sites, often completely unknown to the advertiser.      Watch for: Customer complaints or unexpected mentions of your brand in unsafe spaces.  Impact: Even one misplaced ad can damage years of earned trust, as audience perception is built basis the kind of content they see you besides.  3. Fraudulent Traffic Fake clicks, bots, or incentivized traffic spikes from unfamiliar geographies or domains inflate numbers while delivering zero business impact and making further optimizations even more difficult.  Example: An affiliate running click farms that generate thousands of automated clicks on ad campaigns, resulting in high engagement but no actual sales or customer value.  Watch for: Sudden spikes in traffic or leads from unusual locations or sources that don’t align with real customer behavior.  Impact: Fraud distorts performance data, wastes ad spend, and even manipulates further optimizations.  4. Trademark Violations Affiliates may misuse brand assets like trademarks, logo, images, tagline, etc, run ads in restricted regions, or push creatives that were never approved by the brand.  Example: An affiliate creates a fake offer banner using the brand’s official logo and runs display ads or push notifications directing users to another landing page.      Watch for: Sudden conversions from unrecognized sources.  Impact: It creates confusion and distrust among customers and weakens your brand message or identity.  5. Counterfeit & Fake Offers Some affiliates drive sales through tactics that attract one-time buyers using deceptive offers or counterfeit promotions with no repeat value.  Example: A cashback banner offering ₹200 cashback for downloading an app that actually provides no such benefit, causing consumer frustration and support complaints.        Watch for: Affiliates with high conversion rates but low repeat purchase or retention.  Impact: Your reports may look positive, but customer lifetime value (CLV) stays weak.  Why Traditional or Manual Checks Aren’t Enough? Affiliate payouts are based on performance. Marketers often rely on contracts, affiliate network agreements, and occasional audits to keep their programs in line. But in today’s real-time, ever-evolving digital ecosystem, and increasing use of AI, these safeguards fall short.  1. Contracts & T&Cs are reactive: They define what affiliates shouldn’t do but rarely prevent violations before damage occurs.  2. Manual audits are too slow: By the time discrepancies are spotted, affiliates may have already pocketed commissions and moved on.  3. Affiliates adapt quickly: What worked yesterday may already be replaced by new tactics designed to bypass outdated checks.  It is impossible to manually keep track of fraudulent tactics that affiliates use to earn commissions. That is why most brands are shifting towards a smarter data-driven affiliate monitoring strategy to safeguard their marketing budget and brand reputation before it hits the bottom line.  The Smarter Approach: Advantages of Using an Affiliate Monitoring Solution While self-audits help you identify surface-level red flags, they often fall short when it comes to detecting sophisticated affiliate fraud and ensuring long-term compliance. By combining automation, data intelligence, and compliance checks, it offers brands a smarter way to manage affiliates and protect investments. Key benefits to the brand are:  Enhanced Transparency – Clear visibility into affiliate activities and contributions.  Improved ROI – Optimize affiliate spending by focusing on genuine, high-performing partners.  Brand Protection – Safeguard brand reputation through compliance monitoring.  Market Competitiveness – Stay ahead of competitors by leveraging advanced fraud detection and compliance tools.  Regulatory Compliance – Ensure adherence to global and local regulations to avoid legal penalties.  How mFilterIt Helps: Affiliate

Affiliate Marketing Campaigns: Know How Smart Affiliate Monitoring Drives Growth Read More »

Affiliate Fraud Is Rising: Here’s How to Secure Your Campaigns

Affiliate Fraud Is Evolving: Is Your Affiliate Monitoring Strategy Keeping Up?

Blog, Affiliate /

Paying affiliates based on performance, right? But are you paying for the performance that drove genuine results? There’s a common misconception that affiliate campaigns are low-risk because they’re performance-based. Well, not quite. Everything has two sides and so do affiliate campaigns. On one side, affiliate campaigns promise scale, reach, and revenue. However, the other one is a darker side of unseen threats due to various types of affiliate fraud techniques, brand abuse, attribution hijacking, misuse of coupon codes, etc. Many campaigns may show rising ROAS, but what’s often missing is how that performance was achieved. Was that traffic truly incremental, or did an affiliate use deceptive techniques just to win last-click attribution? According to an mFilterIt first-party analysis of 343 campaigns run in 2024, 43% of affiliate fraud was detected in India, 35%, 34%, and 33% in MENA, US, and Europe, respectively. In 2025, affiliate marketing success isn’t just about conversions – it’s about validating authenticity, protecting your brand, and rewarding partners who play fair. In this article, we will explore the hidden threats undermining affiliate marketing and understand how affiliate monitoring & brand-safe performance can actually amplify campaign impact when you monitor it right. The Hidden Threats in Affiliate Campaigns While affiliate marketing remains one of the most scalable performance channels, marketers need to recognize the warning signs, to protect both brand equity, budget, and stay ahead. 1. Unauthorized Brand Bidding on Keywords (Search Hijacking) One of the most common forms of affiliate fraud and manipulation is brand bidding. Using this tactic, affiliates bid on your branded search terms, hijacking users who are already looking for your product or website. Instead of converting through organic results or direct visits, users are rerouted through paid ads, earning the affiliate a commission they didn’t truly earn. Impact: This not only inflates your paid search costs but also creates internal competition between your media team and your affiliate partners. And you end up paying twice for traffic that was already yours. 2. Misleading Creatives and Unauthorized Branding Affiliates and influencers often deploy creatives that fall outside your official brand guidelines and misrepresent your brand using outdated logos, fake discount banners, or fabricated promotional messaging. These visuals are designed to grab attention, inflate clicks, creating confusion or mistrust among customers. Impact: Misrepresentation damages brand credibility. These unauthorized creatives often appear on platforms or websites where your team has limited visibility, making enforcement difficult unless you’re actively monitoring across channels. 3. Typo-Squatting and Duplicate Listings Fraudsters often set up websites or marketplace listings using typo-ed brand names or unauthorized duplicates of your product pages. They optimize these pages to rank high in organic results or promote them through ads, redirecting users through affiliate links. Impact: You lose official visibility, and customers may unknowingly buy from unverified resellers or outdated sources, damaging your brand integrity. 4. Promo Code & Cashback Abuse Affiliates and influencers often misuse coupon codes to manipulate attribution. When these codes are placed on public coupon websites, they begin ranking on search engines attracting organic traffic that would’ve come directly to your site. In some cases, influencers even post their codes in comment sections of social media posts, hijacking conversions without truly driving demand. Impact: Skewed performance reporting, reduced margins, reputational damage, and customers conditioned to always expect discounts, even when you don’t offer them 5. Hidden Redirects and Cloaking Techniques Some affiliates use browser extensions, in-app overlays, or cloaked links to secretly redirect users through affiliate URLs, without ever making it visible to your team. What the user experiences and what your tracking tools record may be two very different things. Impact: Lost visibility, deceptive tracking, and lost control over customer journey insights. These invisible tactics not only violate user trust but also pollute your performance data, making optimization difficult. Advanced Affiliate Fraud Tactics in 2025 Every Marketer Should Know About Affiliate fraud today is no longer about random bad actors exploiting obvious loopholes. It has evolved into a coordinated, intelligent system often powered by automation, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated evasion techniques used by affiliates to earn commissions. Affiliate Collusion – Two or more affiliates working together Fraudsters now operate in groups or affiliate rings, where multiple affiliates coordinate their efforts to game attribution models. They rotate tracking links, share device IDs and IP addresses, and even simulate varied browser behaviors to avoid detection. Because each affiliate in the ring appears to act independently, the fraud doesn’t trigger obvious alerts. Without deep behavioral analysis or identity mapping, affiliate collusion generates invalid traffic that siphons off the marketing budget and corrupts data, misleading overall performance. Affiliate Cloaking Fraud Affiliate cloaking involves showing a compliant, brand-approved landing page to your audit tools or standard fraud detection systems while redirecting real users to unauthorized destinations/landing pages. To the brand, everything looks clean: your code sees the right creatives, landing pages, and parameters. But the end user might see fake offers, misleading discounts, or even be redirected to counterfeit products pages. This gives you a false sense of compliance while exposing your customers to experiences you don’t control and can’t see. Why Standard Campaign Metrics Can’t Detect Any of These Most affiliate managers track surface metrics: click-through rates, ROAS, last-click conversions, etc. But what if that conversion came from a hijacked keyword? What if the click came from a cloaked URL? What if the influencer was running fake creatives on irrelevant inventory. Affiliate fraud thrives in the gray zones between attribution layers, browser behaviors, and third-party channels. The truth is you can’t see affiliate fraud in a dashboard; you need affiliate monitoring tools that go deeper. If you’re not validating the “how” behind affiliate conversions, you’re only seeing half the picture. What These Threats Cost You Let’s break down the real impact of affiliate fraud: Paid commissions on traffic that would’ve converted anyway Loss of organic traffic due to brand keyword hijacking Inflated KPIs leading to poor optimization decisions Reputational damage that can erode long-term customer loyalty Missed growth opportunities and lack of strategic

Affiliate Fraud Is Evolving: Is Your Affiliate Monitoring Strategy Keeping Up? Read More »

building-trust-in- affiliate-marketing-emerging-fraud-challenges-& -solutions-for-2025

Building Trust in Affiliate Marketing: Emerging Fraud Challenges & Solutions for 2025

Blog, Affiliate /

Affiliate marketing, as a concept, is revolutionary. It enables businesses to make money by using the influence of popular online publishers. When the right affiliates are involved, affiliate marketing not only drives more sales, but also boosts long-term brand performance metrics like brand recall value and trustworthiness of the brand.   At the same time, by design, affiliate marketing ensures the publishers bring their A-game in getting brands maximum visibility and ensuring their audiences view them in a positive light. After all, more sales also translate to better affiliate payouts for the publishers.   Thanks to this symbiotic nature of affiliate marketing, it is nearly the perfect marketing activity. Nearly.   Instances of affiliate marketing fraud can quickly impact the fantastic results of even the most carefully executed campaigns. Fraud associated with affiliate marketing can drain ad budgets and bring low-intent users to interact with brand’s ad campaigns.   Thankfully, advertisers are not powerless in the face of affiliate marketing fraud. In fact, by employing affiliate monitoring and brand safety best practices, advertisers can completely eliminate the threat of affiliate marketing fraud.   However, before we begin discussing how affiliate fraud prevention works, let’s quickly size up the threat that is affiliate marketing fraud.   The Rising Threat of Affiliate Fraud in 2025  In the next two years, the affiliate marketing market is expected to grow to a whopping $27.78 billion. While this might seem like great news, it also means that fraudsters have that much more incentive to come up with sophisticated ways to commit fraud and dupe advertisers. According to mFilterIt analysis, 43% of the fraudulent traffic is coming from affiliate networks in India.   Where there is money, the instances of fraud also rise. Similarly, in the space of affiliate marketing, Affiliate fraud has existed almost since the inception of this marketing channel . As digital technologies became more accessible, affiliate fraud practices evolved in tandem with the evolution of affiliate marketing itself and alarmingly, the trend continues.   Today, fraudsters have access to sophisticated artificial intelligence models and automation technologies, enabling them to commit fraud in complex and hard to detect ways. At the same time, such technologies also enable bad actors to commit fraud on an expansive scale, targeting both web and app ecosystems. For brands, these activities translate to a damaged brand reputation, inflated customer acquisition costs, and poor user retention.   How are such fraudulent schemes implemented? Which are the most common ones? Knowledge is the first step to prevention. Let’s peek behind the curtains of affiliate marketing fraud:  Common Affiliate Fraud Techniques & Their Impact  Fraudsters have found various methods to corrupt the affiliate schemes to use to their advantage. While there are some common methods, with evolving technology fraudsters have found new and advanced ways to commit fraud. Some of them are here:   – Incent Fraud   Running incent campaigns is perhaps one of the oldest forms of affiliate fraud and yet, it is exceptionally difficult to detect before the fraud has made a significant dent in your marketing budget. Simply put, affiliates incentivize their audience with a reward in exchange for completing a specific action, such as downloading an app and completing an action once the download is complete. Incentives can include small rewards such as loyalty points or even a small share of the affiliate payout.   Since the users complete these actions because of the lure of the reward offered by the affiliate they seldom have any genuine interest in interacting with the advertiser’s app or website. As a result, the advertiser ends up paying for the interactions with these uninterested users while gaining nothing of significance in exchange. This further leads to a high uninstall rate and the advertiser has to pay more to acquire more customers.   – Brand Bidding   This is especially problematic for brand bidding as it drains their marketing budget twice as fast. By bidding for the same keywords as the brand, fraudsters increase the competition around those keywords, leading to an inflated cost-per-click (CPC) paid by the brand. Additionally, the brand still ends up paying much more than the CPC for the traffic it loses in the ads as it is redirected to their website as affiliate traffic by the fraudsters.  – Trademark Misuse  Another common yet clever form of affiliate fraud is impersonation. Fraudulent publishers create fake websites that share striking similarities with an advertiser’s website. Using these, fraudsters may impersonate the brand to attract high-intent traffic and then use affiliate links from the real brand on their fake websites to get affiliate rewards.   – Cookie Stuffing & Attribution Fraud  With cookie stuffing, fraudulent affiliates drop a cookie in the user’s browser when they visit a brand’s website. This way, even if the user visits the brand’s website directly, the attribution of the sale is allocated to the fraudster, enabling them to get affiliate commission for a sale they did not enable.   This not only results in the brand paying affiliate commission on an organic sale, it also manipulates the sales metrics, making data unreliable.  – Fake Lead Generation & Form Spamming  One of the most common tools employed for committing click fraud is a bot. Fraudsters use a network of bots with varying sophistication to complete tasks that get them affiliate revenue. Bots are programmed to act like real human users and generate clicks and fill out lead generation forms with fake information.   If an advertiser pays affiliate commissions for lead generation actions, they may easily fall victim to a fake lead generation and form spamming fraud. This can not only lead to wasted marketing spending and poor conversion rate, but it can also have a long-lasting impact on the advertiser’s overall marketing efforts because it dilutes and skews their marketing performance and CRM data.   – Misuse of Advertiser’s Brand Assets  In some cases, fraudsters may stoop down to directly scam the users. While this usually does not lead to wastage of marketing budgets, it can hurt advertisers and brands in other equally significant ways.  Fraudsters may create fake

Building Trust in Affiliate Marketing: Emerging Fraud Challenges & Solutions for 2025 Read More »

Scroll to Top