$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
Jewellery
Focus
Fraud audit
The problem
Fraud audit
The brand came to me with the question that quietly haunts a lot of affiliate programmes: “we have all these publishers driving sales, but we don’t really know how.” Plenty of partners on the report, plenty of revenue attributed to the channel — and no way to tell whether it was creating value or quietly cannibalising it. The brief was simple: find out what’s actually going on, and stop paying for activity that isn’t real.
What I did
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.
Commission savings, annualised
Cost per acquisition
Commission cost of sale
The results
The fraudulent publishers were removed from the programme. Attributed revenue barely moved — which is the point. The removed partners weren’t creating sales; they were claiming them. And the savings aren’t just a cost cut: commission that was leaking to hijackers is now budget that can be reinvested in higher-value placements — content partnerships, tenancy slots, exclusive offers with the partners who genuinely bring customers in.
