58% of affiliate sales were the brand’s own customers
An apparel brand asked me to look at an affiliate program that seemed to be growing. Most of the growth turned out to be its own customers, bought back through Google.
Vertical
Apparel
Focus
Fraud audit
The problem
Fraud audit
An apparel brand saw affiliate sales jump, with most of the growth coming from a handful of publishers it barely knew. Nothing else had changed: no new campaigns, no new budget, no new partners of any size.
The team did the sensible thing. They asked those publishers what they were doing and got answers and screenshots back. It still did not add up. Sales from the same few publishers kept climbing, and nobody in the business could say where the customers were actually coming from. They asked me to find out.
What I did
What an affiliate fraud audit is
A fraud audit is not a performance review. It asks whether the sales a program is paying commission on were really created by its publishers, or claimed by them. Over three weeks I went through every publisher, every sale and every click across two years, and followed the traffic back to the websites behind it. Three things decide whether a publisher stays.
Where the traffic really comes from. Search the brand’s own terms, follow the redirects, see who is on the other end.
Whether it is incremental. A publisher that only appears at checkout is claiming a sale, not creating one.
Who is behind the intermediaries. Sub-networks join a program on behalf of hundreds of websites and pass commission down to whichever made the sale. The network only shows the sub-network’s name, so you have to ask.
Every publisher gets a rating, with the evidence for it kept alongside, so the brand can see what rests on proof and what rests on a pattern in the data.
Of the year’s affiliate sales came from four brand bidders
Commission over two years and one peak season
Ad hijacks detected in the first days of monitoring
The results
What the audit found
Four publishers were bidding on the brand’s own name. The largest showed the brand’s domain and “Official Site” in its Google ads. Shoppers already searching for the brand clicked, landed on the brand’s website carrying affiliate tracking, and commission was paid on the sale. Those four accounted for 58% of the year’s affiliate sales.
The evidence they had supplied was manufactured. The influencer link page one publisher sent was hosted on the publisher’s own domain, used the brand’s campaign photography, and linked with the same affiliate ID as the hijacked ads. Three of the four also advertised discount codes the brand had never issued.
19 sub-networks would not say who was promoting the brand: £48,000 of sales from websites nobody could name.
What it had cost
Over two years, £30,832 of commission went to publishers that should not have been on the program. The same publishers would have taken a further £18,000 through the coming peak season: £48,865 in total.
That is commission only. Every hijacked ad is another bidder in the auction for the brand’s own name, so paid search costs more and clicks move from free organic listings to paid ones. Organic traffic falls while affiliate appears to grow.
What changed
267 publishers recommended for removal: fraud, low quality and two years of inactivity. The four brand bidders went first, with outstanding transactions rejected and a trademark complaint filed with Google.
19 sub-networks put on notice: disclose who is promoting the brand or come off the program.
Continuous brand-term monitoring in place. In its first days it detected 5,800 ad hijacks and a 28% share of voice on the brand’s own search terms.
Commission groups, program terms, creative and the application queue all reset, and fifteen good publishers that had gone quiet identified for reactivation.
Common questions
01
What is affiliate brand bidding?
02
What is ad hijacking?
03
How much does affiliate fraud cost a brand?
04
What is a sub-network in affiliate marketing?
05
Can a brand stop others bidding on its brand name?
06
