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Affiliates Need to be Certified to Thwart Fraud

August 14, 2005 by Shawn Collins

The following is what Bret Grow of the LinkMo Advertising Network had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?

Speaking as an ad network, our bread and butter are the affiliates who run our offers. The trust sustained between a network and affiliate are paramount.

The affiliate trusts that we keep our links alive, pay a competitive price for their sales/traffic and report it honestly. Networks trust affiliates to provide credible data and lawful traffic no matter the level of volume.

One of the biggest problems my associate Frank Ouimette and I face in affiliate marketing is the lack of affiliate identity verification in the industry.

We are inundated daily with fraudulent affiliate signups. Manually sifting through all of them to find those who are legitimate is time consuming.

But, no matter how much work it is, it’s critical to weed out crooks that would sent bad data and spam across the network.

If a fraudulent affiliate does create an account and find a profitable offer to monetize, they simply create additional bad accounts by stealing the names of legitimate companies and affiliates to cloak their bad traffic (often in low volume) across those accounts and then direct payments to untraceable addresses.

Recognizing and stopping fraudulent affiliates is costly and generally happens too late.

I believe the solution is an industry wide 3rd party affiliate verification service. We’re developing a new service called CertifiedAffiliates to determine which affiliates are legit and which are fraudulent before they gain access to any network.

To date, we have received positive responses from merchants, networks and affiliates because having crook affiliates hurts everyone in the affiliate marketing industry because it creates less trust between the parties who must trust each other the most.

In addition, it also causes CPL Merchants to payout less because they must cover the costs of bad data. Personally, I plan on rewarding affiliates who get certified through CertifiedAffiliates for the time and expense the service will save us each day.


How would you answer the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved? There are no right or wrong answers – just opinions that can help improve the industry.

The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive a limited edition “It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.” t-shirt.

Share your thoughts now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=56601070891

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