Promoting your products and services costs money. It’s natural to expect that such investment will somehow pay off. Affiliate marketing is the go-to option for companies and their marketing teams to gain traction. It is a type of performance-based marketing.
Affiliate marketing lives up to the expectations of marketers. Affiliate marketing involves money and is always susceptible to fraud. It’s a tough world out there, and not all affiliates are fair. Allowing them to represent your brand can sometimes backfire.
Do you know that affiliate fraud can contribute to brand infringement? Affiliate fraud plays with the interests and livelihoods and interests of your customers. Recovering diminished brand reputation and stolen affiliate marketing budgets may be tough for your marketing team.
In affiliate fraud, your marketing team may be working with misguided strategies due to poor metrics and skewed data. Brand infringement due to affiliate fraud can also affect the legitimate affiliates of your company. Fraud can skew cost per conversion on affiliate campaigns.
Overview of Brand Infringement
A brand is an intangible asset of a particular organization or product. A brand refers to a notion that helps people recognize different entities. A brand can be a name, a logo, a slogan, etc. The name of a brand helps create a perception of the organization.
The brand plays an essential role in differentiating your company from competitors. In brand infringement, threat actors may use your company’s copyrighted material to grab the attention of customers. Leveraging the intellectual property of a brand lowers its reputation and misleads the users.
Ways Nefarious Affiliates are Exploiting your Brand’s Intellectual Property
Brand infringement tarnishes the positive reputation of your company. Your promotional activities and affiliate campaigns will take a backseat due to brand infringement. During affiliate fraud, websites and publishers attribute affiliate sales to the threat actors.
All legitimate websites in your company’s affiliate campaign can suffer due to affiliate fraud. Here are some ways in which affiliate fraud infringes the intellectual property of your brand.
Paid Ads Violation
Nefarious affiliates can hijack paid advertising campaigns on search engines to redirect your users from affiliate links. In paid ads violation, your marketing team loses convertible traffic and revenue. You cannot compete against the keywords.
Typosquatting
Most brands are implementing brand protection solutions to thwart issues associated with brand infringement. Typosquatting is another way in which threat actors are infringing on the rights of your brand.
In typosquatting, nefarious affiliates intentionally register domain names to mimic legitimate sources. These affiliates with ill intentions can steal the credential of your users. They can also drop malware onto the system of your users.
Typosquatting may damage the reputation of your company severely in the target market. It also steals the personal data of your users.
Cookie Hijacking
Cookie hijacking refers to the placement of affiliate cookies by distributing adware through web browser extensions. Threat actors hijack the clickable elements on the websites of the advertisers to execute cookie hijacking.
Adware Round Tripping
Adware round-tripping is a strategy for deceiving your marketing team by stealing their leads and buyers. The threat actors leverage adware to confuse your users. In adware round tripping, the malicious affiliates also inject affiliate cookies and earn false commissions. Adware round-tripping can have devastating effects on your company’s legitimate affiliates.
Phishing Attacks
In phishing attacks, nefarious affiliates rely a great deal on emails. They send emails containing the name and logo of your brand to specific users. The main objective of a phishing attack is to drop malware onto the systems of your clients. The recipient, upon opening the email, ends up being a victim of fraud.
The Repercussions of Infringement on your Company’s Reputation
Affiliates of your company work much like a community. In most cases, they communicate with each other and collaborate on various tasks. The industry is tight-knit. The world of affiliate marketing is a tight-knit ecosystem.
The word travels fast when threat actors infringe on the intellectual property of your company. Here are the negative impacts of ad fraud and brand infringement on your company’s reputation.
Erodes the Trust of the Legitimate Affiliates of your Company
In affiliate fraud, your marketing team tends to pay the threat actors instead of paying the legitimate affiliates. The relationship between your company and the affiliates should always be robust and interdependent. But affiliate fraud can create distrust in the legitimate affiliates of your organization.
Loss of Funds
During brand infringement and affiliate fraud, your company loses funds. The malicious affiliates use the intellectual property of your company to get legitimate commissions. The fraudulent activities result in the loss of funds. You may also have to deal with chargebacks.
The Role of Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) in Preventing Brand Infringement
VPT offers you insights into the activities of affiliates. The ad fraud detection platform of VPT has customized dashboards. They also monitor your affiliate network 24/7 and raise red flags during violations.