Working with affiliate networks allows those webmasters who have a sufficient amount of ingenuity and imagination to rise well. However, the ingenuity of some webmasters goes so far as to come up with sophisticated ways to generate low-quality traffic in large volumes. Such sites, at best, will be disabled without trial; at worst, they will receive a significant fine and will be held accountable in court if their actions cause significant harm to the advertiser’s brand.

It also happens that quite “innocent” webmasters who have overlooked the site requirements in the offer or unknowingly used a “super profitable traffic generation scheme” from a dubious article on the Internet are targeted. Ignorance does not excuse you from responsibility, and so that you do not end up being extreme, we have prepared an article about what traffic is prohibited or undesirable in the affiliate network.

Strictly no

In this section we consider those types of traffic that are considered “black” and strictly prohibited. In the affiliate network, this traffic is called “fraud.” Fraud - fraud), since using various technical tricks the webmaster tries to imitate user activity.

Books and Active Advertising Systems. These are online exchanges where webmasters post tasks for which they promise users a reward. Actions can be the most different types: “Download the application”, “Register in the game”, “Find all X banners on the site and click on them”, “Follow the link, spend 2 minutes on the site, find the banner in the lower right corner, click on it and scroll the page to end”, “Follow the link to the game and deposit one ruble into your game account.” An advertiser who has posted a task in an affiliate network waits for action on CPI or CPL (application installations or leads), sees in the statistics that traffic from the publisher is active, and pays him a reward. Of this amount, the webmaster gives a portion to users who “helped” him generate traffic. At the same time, users are not directly interested in the advertiser’s product; they are motivated by a reward from the webmaster - that’s why such traffic is called motivated. Incentivized traffic can be welcomed by an advertiser only in extremely rare cases, for example, when he is willing to pay for downloading an application in order for it to be promoted in application stores. But this moment specifically stipulated by the advertiser in the offer and is very rare.

Mimicry of an advertiser. If you think that copying a website in order to drive traffic through it to a real advertiser is not prohibited, you are mistaken. The same goes for groups in in social networks- you can’t just call yourself an official representative of the VKontakte or Instagram brand. Almost any brand mention It is advisable to coordinate with the advertiser - after all, these are his reputational risks.

Cookistaffing. This term refers to the substitution of cookies when the cookies of a respectable webmaster are overwritten, and the attacker’s cookies are substituted in their place. The scammer seems to convince the advertiser that it was he who brought the buyer, although none of his sites participated in the conversion funnel. Cookiestuffing works through:

This is far from full list tricks, which unscrupulous webmasters resort to to destroy other people's cookies. There are many other ways in which cookies can be stored automatically, without the knowledge of the user of the Internet device.

It's possible, but be careful

Advertisers treat some types of traffic with caution and even fear. The main fear is that webmasters will either take customers away from the channels through which advertisers promote themselves, or create reputational risks by using channels with an image that does not correspond to the brand’s values, or unobtrusively and forcibly kill other people’s cookies, thereby ruining the relationship between advertisers and other honest webmasters. We're not saying these channels are bad. We say that they should only be used if if the advertiser allows it, and quite neatly, without losing traffic quality and without competing with advertisers.

And still not fraud

Let's imagine a scenario: the user saw a banner advertising a new smartphone, which was posted by webmaster X. He clicked on the banner, looked at the smartphone, compared it with other options, made a purchase decision and even added it to the cart. But then I remembered about the coupon/cashback service site, went to it, and following a link from this site (which is owned by webmaster Y) returned back to the desired smartphone. Webmaster X's cookies were overwhelmed by webmaster Y's cookies.

Is this considered fraud? No, because the user himself made the decision about which link to follow. These cookies were not secretly placed on him, they were not processed through clever systems, but he was offered a bonus as a motivation (and then only in case of a completed purchase, so the traffic cannot be considered motivated). Accordingly, here no evidence of intentional fraud, because webmaster X works through banners, and Y through coupon services - that’s their business model.

It is worth mentioning here that we are talking about sites with real promotional codes, discounts and cashback, and not those who are promoted in search engines using the request “discount code for store N”, although there are no discounts in it, and collect other people’s cookies.

FraudBusters: Admitad case

In the current realities of the CPA world, violation detection systems need to be improved and improved at least to semi-automatic modes.

Thus, we at Admitad came up with a violation detection system for contextual advertising. In the process of developing our affiliate network, we have developed mechanisms that allow us to automatically detect the most intricate traffic fraud schemes. Based on the monitoring results, the system sends reports in several directions at once: for webmaster, who (by mistake, ignorance or intentionally) carried out an advertisement with a violation, as well as information on violations for advertiser managers according to the programs assigned to them.

The mechanism of operation is quite simple. Let’s assume that a hypothetical offender decides to run an advertisement on the website aliexpress.com in the Google search engine. In your account Google AdWords he started a few words that prohibited for Aliexpress offer(For example " aliexpress" And " aliexpress"), and launched this advertisement in the Russia region.

Our system detects similar violation:

This is how violators are reflected in the system

Registers webmasters with internal system registration of violators.

It is worth emphasizing once again that all these processes should occur automatically or at least semi-automatically. The reason for this is the exclusion of the human factor, forgery or other issues that can worsen the rating of an affiliate network in the competitive CPA marketing market and undermine customer trust.

With exactly the same enthusiasm, work is being carried out on control of other traffic generation channels. The goal of such work is to effectively filter out fraud from useful traffic, and today this is no longer a problem that cannot be localized.

Not just webmasters

It's not just webmasters who can play outside the rules. Advertisers are also periodically caught for not complying with the operating conditions of the affiliate network. This happens in cases where the advertiser deliberately rejects some orders after verification, which were brought by the webmaster from an “honest” site and actually met all the conditions of the offer. The situation when high-quality leads disappear from statistics or do not pass reconciliation is called Shave. Sometimes this happens by accident (for example, due to a technical failure), sometimes on purpose (when representatives of an advertiser or intermediary agency “cut off” part of the traffic in their favor). In dubious one-day affiliate programs, the affiliate itself may be involved in shaving. If you suspect the presence of a shave, check a) whether your site meets the requirements (suddenly you accidentally started sending traffic prohibited by the advertiser, and he turned you off), b) whether other affiliate programs produce similar results for the same offer, c) at what stage can “ “leads fall off”, d) what are the reasons for the advertiser’s rejection of actions. Admitad has a function “Lost orders”, where you can check the status of the order and find out the reason for the rejection.

Conclusion

Fraud enough easy to track, so you shouldn’t think that “I’ll add black traffic, quickly make a lot of money and disappear” - most likely, your traffic will be quickly blocked, and you will be cut off from the affiliate network forever. The same goes for gray traffic - attempts to dilute pure traffic are also easily monitored. Admitad traffic quality checking tools scan it several times a day and catch violators.

It is enough to monitor the behavior of the “user” on the advertiser’s website (the duration of the session before performing the target action, the trajectory of the user’s movement around the site, conversions), and draw conclusions: often people’s behavior is quite predictable and logical, and deviations from this logic are immediately noticeable. The same goes for advertisers and agencies who are trying to “sew” quality traffic - webmasters will quickly notice this and will probably want to know why their statistics do not “fight” with the results of the reconciliation.

Working in an affiliate network is based on philosophy win-win, which only works if each participant thinks not only about his own income, but also about the benefit for the other party. And we encourage both webmasters and advertisers to play honestly - only then will we have effective mutually beneficial cooperation.

An action is usually a purchased order, for finance it is an issued loan. That is, in fact, this is a model with payment for something that, it would seem, definitely guarantees profit.

Today I would like to talk about a topic that worries many major players, such as fraud and deception in CPA networks. Unfortunately, fraud and deception are present in any CPA network, and this is not the fault of the network owners.

The overpayment for an order can be 30-50%, and in critical cases – even more. Many advertisers are afraid to overpay for deception, and therefore do not work with CPA networks at all - which, in principle, is also a way out. For example, shops Child's world» do not use CPA networks at all.

However, along with bad traffic in this case, the advertiser also refuses good traffic. I propose to understand what types of fraud are and how to deal with them.

6. Contextual advertising for the brand

This is not a completely scary or technical method. But if you don’t cut off such webmasters in CPA networks, you will greatly inflate your budget.

The fact is that ordering by brand name, when the user enters the site name into the search, is very cheap. This is usually 50-150 rubles per order. At the same time, in the CPA network you have to pay much more for such an order. Webmasters, using brand context, outbid the advertiser himself and receive orders for which they are paid dearly.

To stop this, for example, we have to constantly monitor all advertising for different cities and different requests. This way you can determine which is visible only at night, at certain hours or from certain cities.

7. Bonus: don’t trust those who protect you from fraud

This case is the funniest of all and was discovered by us quite recently.

In one, they use the services of a fairly large French agency in this area, which helps track – or, in other words, tracad – orders and runs turnkey CPA networks. Among other things, this agency claims that it filters out fraud. The entire budget goes through the agency.

It turned out that at the time of placing the order, this agency did not always call the pixels of the CPA networks. As a result, the order was attributed to the CPA channel and paid for by the advertiser, but did not reach the CPA networks. The differences in budgets turned out to be 20-30%. According to our estimates, more than a million rubles did not reach CPA networks per month.

This is bad because the end webmasters do not receive enough money, which means that it is less profitable for them to work with a specific advertiser. As a result, the advertiser receives less traffic and orders.

How to deal with this:

The CPA should be as transparent as possible.

• If your CPA channel is run by a turnkey agency, then ask for CPA network offices. If they don’t give, then the matter is dirty. In a particular case, they justified themselves by saying that they had an agency office. However, in some networks each advertiser has a separate login, which means it would be possible to give them at least partial access.
• Check with CPA networks. In a specific case, the agency insisted that the agreement was concluded between them and CPA networks, and information about how many orders and money they credit is confidential. This is especially ironic since you should know exactly how much you are paying and for what. Surprisingly, many CPA network managers tried to avoid this action because the agency began threatening them with legal action for disclosing confidential information.
• Demand transparent contracts, as well as payment statements. If the agency does not provide such information and avoids answering, it is worth considering whether you need such an agency at all.

In conclusion I will say: There is no need to be afraid of CPA networks, since they can provide a lot of sales and traffic.

However, you should approach this issue wisely - and either do a good examination on your side, or contact only those agencies whose conditions are acceptable, the work scheme is transparent, and the tools can not only automatically transmit information to CPA networks, but also weed out fraud . Good luck with your work.