How Affiliate Fraud Affects You
How Fraud Affects YOU
Do you think that everything will be just peachy because you’re 100% legit? Well, it would be great if things were that simple but they just aren’t. If you have a direct relationship with the merchant then yes, only your actions and the quality of your traffic count.
On the other hand though, if you’re working with a network, things stand quite a bit differently. For every person who is 100% legit, there are lots of others who send awful traffic and guess what: you get paid less “thanks to them”!
Why?
Well, think about it for a moment. Your relationship with the network is important, right? Networks judge you and increase payouts based on how well your traffic converts, right? OK, then why would things be different when it comes to the relationship between networks and merchants?
Networks (just like you) are judged based on the quality traffic they send. Merchants are not exactly thrilled about losing money and as a result, they carefully monitor the quality of their traffic. And what do you think they’ll do if/when they figure out that a certain network is sending awful traffic their way? You’ve guessed it:
1) They’ll stop working with the network in question
2) They’ll start “overlooking” leads
3) They’ll lower the payout
What Should Networks Do?
Simple: networks should be paranoid! They should do their best in order to identify scammers before they manage to do some real damage. A lot of times, it’s extremely easy to identify a scammer: something as simple as a phone call can be enough. So before you start complaining about how strict one network or another is, think things through from their perspective and from the perspective of the publishers who are currently working with them.
If anything, networks need to become even more selective. It’s not all that hard to identify people who would not add value to a company. Seriously, it’s not. If you want to be a part of one of the top networks, you need to prove that you’ll be able to help them make money but NOT by sending fraudulent traffic their way. They can easily determine if working with you is smart or not by taking a look at one of the sites you own. Ok, maybe you don’t want that. No problem but in that case, you had better have someone who can vouch for you, preferably someone who does a lot of volume with the network in question. Remember: fraud affects YOU and sometimes, even being paranoid helps.
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