A jewellery brand with a busy affiliate programme and a familiar question: all these publishers are driving sales — but are they actually bringing us customers, or just collecting commission on sales we'd have made anyway?
Vertical
Jewellery
Focus
Fraud & compliance audit
-34%
Commission spend
+41%
ROAS — 25.9x to 36.5x
-21%
Cost per acquisition
The approach
I went through every publisher with traffic in the prior 12 months. For each one, the same questions:
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 of the audit, close to a dozen publishers were exhibiting fraudulent or fraud-adjacent behaviour, most of them flavours of ad-hijacking.
The findings
Two patterns come up again and again. Coupon and extension hijacking: the customer is already at your 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 is a conversion rate no real publisher achieves — 20 to 30 percent, against a genuine content publisher's 2 to 5. And fake influencer subnetworks: 'thousands of creators' that are really paid ads bought against the brand's own name, arbitraging the commission. The signature there 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.
