Bold New Affiliate Fraud Fighting Efforts Launched

[Linda Buquet]

I wanted to report today on several new initiatives that are being undertaken in an attempt to fight affiliate fraud.

Yesterday a Performance Marketing Leadership Summit, was held and the focus was on Fraud Prevention and Affiliate Screening. The event, hosted by OfferVault, was open to affiliate and CPA networks who are concerned about the growing problem of affiliate fraud and how to detect and eliminate it. In a series of keynote presentations and panel discussions, participants received information which they will be able to implement to correct this problem.

Jivan Manhas of MediaTrust told the crowd “We are seen as the ugly stepchild of online marketing. We call it performance marketing because the term affiliate marketing is tainted.” according to Adotas who reported on the event. Ad networks must unite to fight fraud! Volunteers? Read that story to discover some of the fraud prevention solutions that were discussed at the event.

In response to the affiliate network application fraud problem, Mark Roth, the owner of Offervault a CPA network aggregation site and offer search engine, is creating an Affiliate Certification process called AffiliCert.

What is AffiliCert?

Affilicert is dedicated to combating fraud committed by affiliates in the CPA/Performance Marketing industry, and to facilitating the approval process for legitimate affiliates.

We do this by providing the community of networks with a stream of pre-screened affiliates who have been through our rigorous screening process.

Murray Newlands attended the event and has more about AffiliCert here:
AffiliCert Affiliate Certification what the hell

Additionally MediaTrust today just announced an online compliance center and proprietary anti-fraud detection tools to help lead the performance marketing industry toward higher accountability and compliancy.

MediaTrust Launches Enhanced Fraud Detection Tools along with New Industry Compliance Center and other Leadership Initiatives

The performance marketing channel is rapidly growing in popularity with online advertisers due to its compelling pay-for-results pricing model. This rapid growth makes self-regulation and open knowledge sharing among all members of the performance marketing ecosystem (advertisers, networks, publishers, and consumers) critical to its continued success.

To execute successful campaigns in compliance with industry and FTC standards, advertisers and publishers need information, tools and ongoing research pertaining to new compliance standards, fraud mitigation and campaign management best practices. MediaTrust is working to ensure that all industry stakeholders have the information and tools needed to effectively and responsibly leverage the channel.

[lexdino]

Good to hear about it.
The only thing that remains constant is change and since one is also coming into the affiliate business arena, it isn't new!

[jd_clickint]

yeah thats going to be huge, I work for a network and its has been such a big problem a lot of fraud, its a shame its getting bigger in the industry, I even have seen cases where affiliates just learn how to fire the pixel over and over,

two thumbs up for this initiative!!! for sure

and thanks for the usefull post

[edosauyi]

We are talking and hearing about this iniative, but the question i want to ask is that, will it work ? can it be implemented ? even with Affilicert certificate will those companies not continue doing what they have been doing ?
Well i fully support this, but i dont think this iniative will work, even if it works at the beginning, it wont last for long.

[Peter Bordes]

it is a very important initiative, and certainly one that is not easy to tackle as fast as we would like... it complex and going to take time as it takes our industry to come together and work in a way that has never happened before. its all about opening up and collaborating.

i think the certification is one piece and certainly a good place to start. but we ALL ( networks, affiliate and advertisers) need to trust each other and work closely together to weed out the fraud networks and develop systems and technology to help prevent it from spreading. this issue can severely damage our young segment of the industry. particularly when we are having big brands looking to enter affiliate marketing for the first time.

we have started a fraud technology initiative and an open compliance center to help get information out to our industry and community. please let us know what else MediaTrust can do to help!