Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Tracking Services Monitor Cookie Stuffing

 Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool for driving organic traffic and revenues for modern-day companies. But unscrupulous affiliates may leverage affiliate marketing to create frauds. Affiliate marketing fraud can come in various forms.

As a performance-based approach, affiliate marketing is gaining steady prominence among significant companies. It assists marketing teams in boosting growth by using the affiliate’s website to display advertisement links for commission payments.

Considering the rising instances of affiliate fraud, companies are deploying eCommerce fraud prevention tools to minimize risks.

A majority of affiliate marketing tracking platforms monitor cookies to avoid affiliate fraud. Here are some essential aspects of cookies and how malicious affiliates use them to create hoaxes. 

Cookies are an Integral Component of Affiliate Marketing

Marketing teams need to attribute sales to an individual clicking on affiliate ads. One of the simplest ways to do so is by using cookies. Cookies refer to information about users when they visit a specific website.

The user’s device stores cookies and even advertisers displaying affiliate ads can place cookies on their users’ devices. Cookies can track users as they browse online, and that’s why they are an integral part of affiliate marketing.

Overview of Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Fraud

Cookie stuffing is a type of affiliate fraud. In this type of fraud, malicious affiliates drop one or more third-party cookies onto the users’ web browsers. And as these cookies are malicious, merchants misattribute affiliate marketing traffic to the fraudster.

When the time comes to pay legitimate affiliates, the nefarious affiliates steal credit for traffic they didn’t generate. Stuffing cookies is a serious concern for your company’s marketing efforts, and this is because it takes money away from legitimate affiliates who bring leads to your website. Cookie stuffing severely harms your company’s affiliate marketing programs, and it also demotivates legitimate affiliates who work hard to fetch you organic traffic.

The Most Common Methods of Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Marketing

Malicious affiliates leverage several methods to stuff cookies in your users' devices. Here is a list of some of the most common ways.

Pop-Up Ads

A pop-up is a dialog box that notifies users about offers. But malicious pop-up ads can send malware to your users’ browsers. Users should be careful when installing third-party software or browser extensions.

JavaScript

The primary objective of JavaScript is to make web pages more attractive and interactive, and it is also helpful in redirecting users to other websites. Unscrupulous affiliates can install malicious code between these redirects in your users’ browsers.

Some other methods of stuffing cookies by malicious affiliates are as follows.

✔     WordPress plugins

✔     Browser Extensions

✔     Stylesheets

✔     PHP scripts

Reasons why Cookie Stuffing Monitoring is Essential

Reliable affiliate marketing tracking platforms continuously monitor the stuffing of cookies to maintain your affiliate marketing’s overall integrity. Cookie stuffing can harm your reputation.

Your advertising team will find it challenging to recruit reputed and experienced affiliates in the presence of cookie stuffing.

Sometimes, the website owner installing the cookies might not know they are engaging in fraud. Here are some reasons why monitoring of stuffing of cookies is necessary.

Violates the Privacy of Users

At times, the users don’t get the chance to customize their choice of cookies. Nefarious affiliates may drop malicious cookies onto your user’s browsers.

This can be a violation of the users’ privacy, and cookie stuffing without users' knowledge can also violate data regulations.

Tracks the uers Browser history

Cookies track and monitor the users’ browser history to offer a highly customized experience. But nefarious affiliates may use these cookies to execute it with malicious intentions.

Such acts result in losing the trust of your valuable customers, and you also tend to lose your brand’s reputation among your users.

Brands lose their Revenue

Your company’s advertising team pays commission to legitimate affiliates who drive conversions. But in the case of cookie stuffing, you end up paying commissions to nefarious affiliates.

The Risk of deriving False Insights

During cookie stuffing, there are chances of deriving false insights. Malicious affiliates fed false information to your marketing team about what works and what doesn’t. Your overall affiliate marketing endeavors will fail during cookie stuffing.

Cookie stuffing remains one of the most widespread types of affiliate fraud. The best way to stop cookie stuffing is to track your affiliate network for violations.

How do Virus Positive Technologies help you monitor Affiliate Fraud?

Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) is pioneering the detection of ad fraud. VPT will help you monitor your affiliate network, which assists in protecting your brand’s reputation. VPT’s advanced methodology recognizes non-compliant behaviors and offers numerous brand compliance monitoring tools.