📈 Q3 UK Affiliate Fraud Report! The key focus for AdPolice in 2023 is helping programs confront "advanced" affiliate ad-hijacking. 🔓 "Traditional" Ad-Hijacking: Where affiliates mimic your ads, redirecting high-intent traffic to claim fraudulent commissions. Detectable and easily managed with the right tools - yet persistent. 🔐 "Advanced" Ad-Hijacking: Where affiliates employ sophisticated redirects, such as go2cloud.org that effectively cloak the aff ID. This catch me if you can tactic is costing programs tens of thousands in undue commissions monthly when left unchecked. During Q3 we monitored 185 advertisers, each with 100,000+ monthly UK visitors. Here's some insights: ⚠ Brand Bidding (92%): 171/185 advertisers have multiple affiliates brand bidding. 🚫 Ad-Hijacking (59%): 110/185 have cases of “traditional” ad-hijacking. ☢ "Advanced" Ad-Hijacking (54%): 99/185 have cases of “advanced” affiliate ad-hijacking. Noteworthy: 22 brands have cases of "advanced" ad-hijacking yet have successfully managed all cases of "traditional" ad-hijacking when detected over a certain timeframe. Could this indicate vigilant monitoring but limited resolution capabilities for advanced affiliate fraud? Final note is to suit up and anticipate affiliate fraud to surge in Q4. Affiliates tend to up the ante during peak sales season. Make sure you vet your affiliates, keep tabs on any suspicious spikes in commissions and form a strong process to enforce compliance when something doesn’t quite add up! Feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts and strategy for managing affiliate ad-fraud!
Staggering stats! It's key to not only spot the issues but also consistently follow up on them. Ryan it's like that one case we looked at where they fixed 1 of the 10+ issues, but it took a long time to tackle that very first one. More emphasis needs to be put on the follow-up part as that one fix already saved them thousands of fraudulent commissions.
This whole thing sounds like BS with claims and no details! I've asked a question relevant to what you've posted, no response yet!
Thanks for sharing this Ryan. I guess hard evidence is more difficult to find in cases of advanced hijacking, so even if the signs are there, action isn't taken.
Interesting, you mean go2cloud.org is hijacking traffic? this domain is used for several affiliate programs, are you sure go2cloud.org is a fraud? we've recently observed a weird behavior with one of of our programs who's end point was go2cloud.org. Please respond because this is very critical ! appreciate your insights!
Sam Knott “advanced” was what I was trying to explain earlier!
Operations
8moSo finally someone got to know about this Google ads and brand bidding scam but unfortunately there is no legal action for such scams and people who are doing this are enjoying huge commissions from brands running ads on brand domains I don’t know how google is sleeping over such scams even I know some people who are doing such frauds and scams and the irony is instead of baning there Google ads account, google has given them the badges of premium partners ,poor google 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂