Exploring The Ever-evolving Landscape Of Cookie Stuffing In Affiliate Fraud

Fraud in affiliate marketing can destabilize your brand’s reputation and image in the target market. Besides financial loss and reputation damage, your marketing team must also bear the burden of wasted resources.

Affiliate fraud, in the form of cookie stuffing, can result in a negative user experience. Cookie stuffing can erode the trust of users. By eroding the trust of users, you will experience decreased conversions.

Cookie stuffing is a type of affiliate fraud as it violates the principles of transparency. It also deceives your marketing team by falsely claiming credit for referrals. Cookies form an inseparable part of your affiliate campaigns. They refer to pieces of information that store a user’s data when they visit specific websites.

Nefarious affiliates use these third-party cookies to break into the browser of your user. The main objective of these malicious affiliates is to monetize and incentivize the purchases happening through that browser.

In cookie stuffing, malicious affiliates can overwrite the existing cookies by using digital tools. Cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing has undesirable repercussions. Your marketing team ends up paying threat actors for misattributed services.

Affiliate marketing losses are already soaring, with cookie stuffing playing a major part. This fraudulent practice in affiliate marketing can derail your campaigns and deplete your marketing team’s budget.

What Should You Know About Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Marketing? 

So, what is cookie stuffing? It is an illicit technique used by nefarious affiliates to manipulate your marketing team’s tracking systems. The main aim of these unscrupulous affiliates is to exploit cookies for monetary purposes.

Cookies are small text files stored on the devices of users when they visit your website. Cookies are responsible for web visitors to experience a smooth browsing experience when they’re navigating your website. Cookies also track the activity of visitors visiting your website.

In legitimate affiliate marketing, the cookies attribute the referral when your users click on affiliate links. It ensures that the affiliates receive their commission. Threat actors take advantage of this process and place cookies on the devices of the users without any consent.

The nefarious affiliates place multiple cookies, even if they haven’t interacted with your website or affiliate links. The primary objective behind cookie stuffing is to get commissions through unfair practices.

Ways in Which Nefarious Affiliates Drop Cookies

Affiliate cookie stuffing can be dangerous if left unchecked. The unscrupulous affiliates drop cookies on the devices of your users without their consent. The main aim of these techniques is to exploit the vulnerabilities in the tracking systems used by your marketing team. Here are some common ways in which the threat actors drop cookies to deceive the attribution process.

Adware – The Most Preferred Method to Stuff Cookies

Adware is a type of malicious software used by threat actors to stuff cookies onto the users’ browsers. The main objective behind installing adware is to display advertisements. It also tracks the online purchase history of users and displays personalized ads.

By showing irrelevant ads, the nefarious affiliates tempt users to click on them so that they can earn commissions. Without driving any relevant traffic to your website, these malicious affiliates earn commissions through adware.  

Zero-Pixel Images

This is another common method with which threat actors can deplete your digital marketing budget. Zero-pixel images are transparent or invisible that appear as a black space to your users.

Nefarious affiliates insert zero-pixel images into the website of your legitimate affiliate. When users click on this hidden image, they get redirected to your company’s product page with an affiliate cookie in their browser. In this manner, the threat actors earn commissions for all the sales from your user’s browser. 

iFrames – A Cookie Stuffing Method for Insecure Websites

If your company’s website is insecure, threat actors may use it to stuff cookies and earn commissions illegitimately. Inline frames (iFrames) let you embed content from the affiliate website onto your website.

Note that iFrames are also popular among nefarious affiliates as it allows them to inject malicious cookies. With iFrames, the threat actors can make the users leave an affiliate link when they purchase anything. They use this affiliate link to earn a commission.

What are the Major Repercussions of Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Marketing?

With cookie stuffing, it will be challenging for you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns accurately. Listed are some of the major repercussions associated with cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing.

• Cookie stuffing results in unfair competition. The ethical affiliates who abide by the rules encounter unfair competition from nefarious affiliates.
• Cookie stuffing gives rise to distorted analytics. It generates false referral data, which makes it challenging for your marketing team to measure the campaign’s effectiveness.
• This type of affiliate fraud erodes trust between your legitimate affiliates, consumers, and merchants.

What is the Role of Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) in Safeguarding You from Cookie Stuffing?

With the affiliate management services of VPT, you can continuously monitor your affiliate blogs and websites. The services provided by VPT are regulated by the FTC. So, VPT can help you with compliance monitoring. The advanced solutions of VPT also help conduct background checks on your affiliate publishers.