Affiliate fraude..

[tasari]

The big problem for PPC is some affiliates, those who try to cheat and earn a lot !

Solutions ????
* Search for affiliates yourself, bigger sites with good traffic
* Let them put a search box(es) on their sites ?? So when they click they come to your webpage, so less cheating ?? Is it ?

Need help tx...Any suggestions/ideas ??

Tx a lot

[Alan Perkins]

Don't use affiliates. Form partnerships with people and companies you trust.

If you must use affiliates, don't pay them per click. Use a metric that is not so easy to defraud.

If you must pay per click, implement extensive fraud checking and err on the side of the advertiser, not the affiliate.

Track and audit everything. Weed out the bad affiliates. Reward the good ones. Build trust over time, don't assume it straight away.

[tasari]

Humm.. like I read a couple of times.. It is better to search for Partners or allow partners to join but be selective...

I see a lot of PPC try to attract affiliates.. first I thought that is a very good idea to get more traffic to you.. but you there are some couple of cheaters out there..

I also see PPC give free signup possibilities with a deposit of $5 to $50.. I don't think this is effective.. because they will use the money and go to an other PPC or recreate an account..
So I thought to give a small amount like $5 but they have to put a searchbox or search boxes on their site...that without getting paid..

More ideas ????????????

[1Lit.com]

Nope, the biggest problem is MERCHANT FRAUD. I have been in affiliate marketing for five years and you wouldn't believe the number of times companies have ripped me off, tried to wriggle out of earning me my hard earning commission. I've even take some to court, such as Dealtime, and had to force them to pay my commission.

Spent the last few weeks trying to get my money back from our friend Tom at Prebot.com - paid him nearly a thousand dollars and our sites haven't been listed. Over thirty emails, ten phone calls, but he won't get back to us - used to respond within hours when he was taking our money.

[ihelpyou]

Hey 1lit, that is true for regular merchants/affiliates, but I believe they are talking about a PPC search engine who sets up affiliates. In that case, there is fraud by the affiliates and big time always!

[1Lit.com]

I agree with you 100% that there are a lot of fraudulent affiliates in this scenario.

But how many minor PPC search engines do you know who boast about receiving hundreds of thousands of hits a day?

I know they are not because (a) their website look like my five year old sister created them (don't have a five year old sis, but you know what I mean), (b) they have about two links to them from other sites in Google, and (c) when I sign-up for free $10 listing credit, $9.98 is still remaining two years later even though my site is listed top for prominent keywords.

A lot people who run the smaller PPCSEs are fraudsters as well, boasting about traffic that they don't have and trying to lure advertisers through deception.

[ihelpyou]

Agreed!

Those small PPC's have no clue is most cases. It's a vicious cycle of no traffic so they go after affiliates which leads to fraud which they think makes them look bigger with all the affiliates. :)

[Boonton]

We have had a lot of problems with PPC affiliate fraud. The problem seems to strike on engines below the Overture/Google. Even Findwhat doesn't seem immune. We have watched small $25-$50 deposits disappear in a matter of days while it sits for weeks on Overture even though the bids for the terms are higher and Overture's PPC traffic is supposedly second only to Google.

Look closely at your logs to see where the hits came from and you see a host of low end search engines who are using the PPC engines results (presumably earning a portion of the click through revenue). I'm convinced that these smaller engines are faking traffic or somehow forcing click throughs (perhaps by purchasing exit traffic that goes to a prepopulated page of results?).

Sadly I'm at a loss for good ways to prove it. An affiliate with a search engine could have fake clicks spread accross a host of terms each day so no particular advertiser takes too much of a hit. But multiply that by many bad affiliates and your account can be drained quickly with no conversions at all. I've seen Findwhat, Kanoodle and others generate literally several thousand hits with no sales while Overture scores a sale with a hundred or so hits.

Long and short, watch out for any PPC engine that makes it easy to sign up affiliates that get paid by producing traffic.

[tasari]

That are the reasons why I don't give credits for free with my PPC !
My 3 possibilies are
* Sign up and fund your account
* Please a searchbox (or couple) and they get some credits (by placing the search box I get a link back to my PPC!)
* Partner (not yet started, but I will try to find my good affiliates !!)
I hope that these 3 options will help me get GOOD affiliates ;-)

Any other suggestions ?

[sri_gan]

To avoid affiliate fraud, I would believe below things might help a little, My assumption for affiliate is partner and we did enforce below with our working model and it produces a good results.

1. We can enforce checks on the frequency of clicks from a client ip or remote ip. When we find a patterns like time bounded or, rank click bounded then we can identify the source.

2. We can enforce some thing like a threshold for the level of clicks till it doesn't hurt us.

3. We can have a mechanism between the clients who likes a certain affliates traffic, this is bounded to a conversion ratio of the click (100% effective) and you definetely not loose your clients.

There are lot more like these, these 3 will definetely improve any pay per click mechanism.

[Boonton]

The problem with affiliate fraud is that it is in the PPC engine's financial interest in letting their affiliates get away with it. Say a PPC engine has a 50-50 split with an affiliate. The affiliate generates 100 fake clicks a day on a keyword whose top bid is $1. Both the affiliate and PPC engine benefit by $50 a day. The client scratches his head and wonders why his sites conversion ratio has fallen.

The best PPC engines realized in the past that such 'get rich quick' schemes only work in the short run so they policed their affiliates well. But now we are starting to see dubious clicks from Findwhat and (get the kids out of the computer room) Overture. I did some Google searches on one affiliate 'search engine' and I found a forum where a person mentioned he was getting $0.50-$0.75 by promoting this affiliate with GPTRE (get paid to read email).

This brings me to the border of bad click land vs. legit affiliates. In the above example, a good way for the affiliate to get traffic to his site is to share the money. In other words, offer people who sign up 50% of his take. So now the PPC engine pays the affiliate $0.50 for the click and the affiliate 'pays' its members $0.25 for the click. The PPC engine will get plenty of legit looking traffic, but in reality it will be people searching for the highest priced terms in order to build up their payoffs.

I'm starting to worry because I like PPC and had good results with it but the quality of the clicks seem to be falling and I suspect that the system is getting scammed to a greater degree than before. My perception is limited though so it may not be the PPC engines themselves. I would be interested in hearing if anyone else has noticed improved or degraded performance by Overture, Findwhat, Kanoodle etc.

[sri_gan]

Email campaigns may work for bit, but definetely it can produce negative effects also very easily.

I personally know people does the email things as a full time project like a chain mechanism which pays them out for making people to send out emails.

I'm not sure how far this reaches the business needs out in the market, but when a system is capable of identifying a right affliates, then we don't need to worry about the conversion ratio also.

Any PPC which has this mechanism will survive.

[MJR]

Originally posted by Alan Perkins
Don't use affiliates. Form partnerships with people and companies you trust.

If you must use affiliates, don't pay them per click. Use a metric that is not so easy to defraud.

If you must pay per click, implement extensive fraud checking and err on the side of the advertiser, not the affiliate.

Track and audit everything. Weed out the bad affiliates. Reward the good ones. Build trust over time, don't assume it straight away.

Alan, you gave great advice here, in particularly your fist suggestion. Read and learn folks :)