$25,000 saved in commissions
A luxury brand whose affiliate programme had been run by an agency for years — leaving the brand itself with little visibility into what its partners were actually doing.
Vertical
Luxury
Focus
Fraud audit
$25,000
Commission savings, annualised
−21%
Cost per acquisition
3.9% → 2.7%
Commission cost of sale
The approach
I went through every publisher with traffic in the prior twelve months, asking the same questions of each:
Where does the traffic actually come from?
What does the click-to-conversion pattern look like?
Is any of it incremental — or does the partner only fire at checkout, on customers who had already decided to buy?
By the end, close to a dozen publishers were showing fraudulent or fraud-adjacent behaviour — most of them flavours of ad hijacking. Two patterns came up again and again.
Coupon and extension hijacking: the customer is already at checkout with a full cart when a browser extension fires an affiliate cookie and takes credit for a sale that was always going to happen. The data signature: a conversion rate no real publisher achieves — 20 to 30 percent, against a genuine content publisher’s 2 to 5.
Fake influencer subnetworks: “thousands of creators” that are really paid ads bought against the brand’s own name, arbitraging the commission. The signature is the opposite — enormous click volumes converting below 1 percent. Real creator traffic doesn’t behave like that.
Both patterns show up clearly in a properly audited programme. They’re invisible if nobody’s looking.
