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Article

Arming merchants and decent affiliates against rogue marketers




© AffiliateSeeking - This article is not allowed to be re-published but can be linked to.

The rapid growth of affiliate marketing is not a surprise anymore. Any web user can sign up to promote any interested merchant through a special affiliate tracking link. The referring website, called an affiliate, gets paid when a user clicks the link and makes a purchase on the merchant's website. Since merchants only pay when results are realized, they feel free to welcome any small affiliates - websites that are too small to catch an advertiser's attention for thorough monitoring.

The boom of affiliate networks on the Web as an excellent source of income had tempted some competing affiliate marketers to exploit technological vulnerabilities in an effort to gain greater revenues. These unconventional business practices entail serious risks to merchants and decent affiliates. Experienced merchants, however, investigate and monitor affiliate websites before they are accepted to ensure that these dubious acts are prevented.

Some unlawful affiliates collect e-mails to send tons of unsolicited messages (or spamming) to promote their websites. Others use more sophisticated methods like creating multiple websites with the purpose of generating artificial traffic from search engines (spamdexing), and unwanted advertising software (such as spyware and adware). All of the mentioned advertising methods pose serious threats to merchants and to honest marketers as this may lead to losses and damage to products reputation.

Spyware works in a way that they cover the affiliate's competitors' sites. It potentially intrudes privacy since it can be used to reveal a user's identity on computers where it is run or installed. Spyware can also present a merchant's advertisement on the unsolicited software without their consent risking their products' names and resulting company defamation from oblivious users. These programs are distributed worldwide from unreliable download sites which bundle this type of software with their regular download services.

Rogue affiliates purposively take advantage of spyware not only to increase traffic to their merchant sites on their account but also to steal commissions of other marketers. Spyware modifies the affiliate identifier stored on cookies to redirect the referrals to them even though the actual user did not click the links. This forces the merchant to pay a higher amount as evidenced by their tracking software - though they do not deserve it.

Hunting down for these affiliates can be tedious for merchants. Some sophisticated, dedicated merchants develop systems that detect these fraudulent claims. They refuse to give compensation to affiliates who exercise these activities.

In an effort to combat these activities, merchants can discourage its new applicants and old affiliates by explicitly prohibiting this exercise through new provisions in their affiliate terms and conditions.

Another way for merchants to search rogue affiliates is by examining transactions with missing HTTP Referrer headers. These pieces of data are present when a visitor makes a genuine click to the merchant links and are missing when the traffic comes from pop-ups. Other merchants are armed with more advanced systems and devices like packet sniffer which logs network transactions and distinguishes traffic generated from a legitimate click and a spyware.

For law-abiding affiliates, they can help counter illegal marketing methods by reporting rogue affiliates to legal authorities and merchants. Affiliates must also be skeptic to any unexpected change, whether loss or gain, of their site's revenue. This prompts the merchant to reevaluate referral tracking records that will verify the fairness of the commissions and do further appropriate actions.



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