Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean

Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean

Graham MacRobie, President and CEO, Alias Encore, Inc.

Understanding the Conflict

Asymmetric Warfare - a conflict in which combatants attempt to exploit each other's characteristic weaknesses, even though their resources and power differ substantially.

Advertisers’ exploitable weaknesses – size, speed, and time.

Fraudulent affiliates’ exploitable weaknesses – greed, visibility, and to a lesser extent, accountability.

Know Your Partners

Reach out to new affiliates.Stay in touch with top affiliates.Consider occasional phone calls.Google the addresses, looking for other

businesses at the same location.Check the WHOIS contact information for

the affiliate’s domain name(s).http://www.BetterWhois.com.

Countries to Consider Checking Twice

(AI) Anguilla (BS) Bahamas (BB) Barbados (BZ) Belize (BM) Bermuda (IO) British Indian Ocean

Territory (VG) British Virgin Islands (KY) Cayman Islands (CK) Cook Islands (CR) Costa Rica (CY) Cyprus (DM) Dominica

(GI) Gibraltar (GG) Guernsey (IM) Isle of Man (JE) Jersey (LB) Lebanon (MU) Mauritius (MC) Monaco (AN) Netherlands Antilles (KN) Nevis (PA) Panama (SC) Seychelles (WS) Samoa (TC) Turks and Caicos Islands

Know How Your Partners Work

Understand how they plan to (or currently) send you traffic.

Who else do they work with?Is their plan consistent with their

performance?Do they have traffic patterns that are very

different than other affiliates?Engage your network.

Typosquatting

Misspelled versions of your domain name.

Capitalize on typographical and spelling errors.

Currently millions are registered.

Affects mid to large-sized sites (Alexa 50,000 or better) with domain names longer than 5 characters.

Traffic converts very well. All the “best” names are

already taken. Compete.com, Alexa, etc. are

frequently inaccurate on volume.

yootube.com 86,042

yooutube.com 68,486

youbube.com 36,286

youtabe.com 31,481

youtrube.com 34,831

youtuve.com 334,113

ypoutube.com 14,929

Proxies

A proxy is computer software and/or hardware which services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers.

Useful for investigating traffic fraud.

Web serverresponds with

web page,images, etc.

Web browsersends requestto web server

Proxy sends requestto web server

Proxy respondsto web

browser

Browser sends request

to proxy

Web serverresponds to

proxy

Tor - The Onion Router

Allows you to view a website as if you were located somewhere else in the world.

Similar to the “routing phone calls through multiple satellites” cliché from spy movies.

Both the software and the service are free.

Sometimes slow or even very slow.http://www.torproject.org.

Recording Proxies

Allow you to examine traffic in detail.Opposite of referrer logs (outside in).Pay particular attention to redirects.Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer (free) -

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html.Charles Web Debugging Proxy ($50) -

http://www.xk72.com/charles.

Charles Screenshot

Tiered Commission Structure

Particularly useful for making fraud more visible.

Exploits a characteristic weakness – greed.

Relatively easy to apply.May make your program

unnecessarily complex for some legitimate affiliates.

For example:

$0 to $4,999 pays 5%

$5,000 to $9,999 pays 6%

$10,000+ pays 7%

Program Policies

Don’t assume a problem will go unnoticed.Well thought out rules indicate vigilance.Help protect legitimate affiliates from

unfair competition.Much easier to sort out in advance of

finding fraud.Consider gray hats as well as black hats.

Contact Information

Graham MacRobiePresident and CEO

Alias Encore, Inc.

[email protected]

http://www.aliasencore.com

(866) 608-8202

(949) 870-0633 direct

Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean

David Naffziger, CEO, BrandVerity

Operating a Clean Affiliate Program

Abuse is Inevitable

Forms of Abuse to Watch Out For• PPC• Malware / Toolbars• Cookie-Stuffing• Transaction / Lead Fraud• Domain squatting

Techniques for Combating and Cleaning a Program

Discussion

PPC Policy Violations (Trademark Poaching)

PPC policy violators have become very sophisticated

Techniques Utilized to hide from Merchants• Copy search ads• Use special characters in trademarked terms to evade Google’s

filters (ex: lowercase “L” instead of capital “I”)• Reverse geotargeting: all regions but your office• Reverse ip-targeting (comes with any email you send): all IP

addresses but yours• Narrow geotargeting: specific regions• Dayparting• Referrer Laundering• Entry Pop Ups, Exit Pop Ups• Affiliate ID protection

Malware / Toolbars

• Pop Up Advertisements that drop affiliate cookies• Often triggered by:

• Google searches• Visits to your website• Visits to your competitor’s website

• Legitimate Link Replacement: They rewrite existing links (affiliate or otherwise) with their own affiliate link

Malware affiliates utilizes two primary techniques

Cookie-Stuffing

• Close to sale• Found off of organic search

results• Especially Forums

• Triggered by:• 1x1 iframes• Invalid images• Other Javascript

Drop affiliate cookies without user consent

Transaction/Lead Fraud

Do you pay commissions on invalid sales?

Some of the techniques used• Co-registration: Sign up for service 1,

user registered for service 2• Incentivised registration: Fill out this

insurance application, get more points/guns/life in Facebook game X

• Lead padding: Fake leads (often taken from yellow pages)

• Stolen credit cards: Stolen credit cards are used to make fraudulent purchases so affiliate can get CPS or CPA• More common on digital goods

Brand Squatting

Own your brands. Everywhere.

• Domains• Typos (nikee.com)• Brand Extensions ( nikeshoes.com )

• Twitter• Facebook• AnySocialNetwork that overlaps your customer base

Techniques to Clean a Program

Discussion

Contact

David NaffzigerCEO, BrandVeritySearch Ad [email protected]@brandveritywww.naffziger.net/blogwww.brandverity.com