Affiliate Marketing Click Fraud

I run a monetised blog as you can no doubt see, and another form of click fraud that occurs is the failure to record clicks emanating from publisher sites back to an advertisers site.

I am NOT suggesting any of the advertisers I publish on my blog are anything but 100% honest, they have been specifically chosen to match the niche I write about, but in the wild west that is the Internet there are operators whom are less that scrupulous about recording clicks.

Why I classify this as click fraud is that the failure to register a click which results in a sale is denying publishers their legitimate commission for generating traffic and sending to the advertiser.

The solution to this problem is to use some sort of system which records the click before redirecting the link to it's correct location. This can be written in-house or a 3rd party product can be bought. This is the method used by the big third part affiliate programs such as TradeDoubler.  I have the benefit of a personal click fraud system (see my consultancy service) which also acts as a affiliate tracking service, but this not fool proof, it only captures the data from the point of click and does not verify the conversion unless the advertiser is kind enough to implement some conversion java script code on the conversion page.

This is exactly the same problem that the search engines have, there is no complete set of data from the click on the ad to the conversion thank you page.

This  lack of transparency is an issue across many areas of internet commerce.

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Below is an example of an affiliate link which redirect through my ad monitoring software and records the click.

(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard