How Does Cookie Stuffing Contribute To Affiliate Fraud?

Posted by Selins Jesse on December 16th, 2022

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based approach to online marketing and gaining organic traffic. Cookie stuffing may sound like it describes marshmallows or chocolate chips. But affiliate marketing is a devious way for threat actors to siphon away unearned money from legitimate affiliates.

Affiliate marketing is a marketing channel where your company’s marketing team earns commission with legitimate affiliates. Affiliate marketing fraud is a process where malicious affiliates circumvent the system to claim sales commissions in an illegitimate manner.

When executed in a controlled manner, affiliate marketing can be a robust tool for boosting your website’s organic traffic.

But stuffing cookies means you could be paying commissions on bogus sales. Cookie stuffing, also known as cookie dropping, is when nefarious affiliates drop multiple cookies. Here are crucial aspects to know about the working mechanism of cookie stuffing in affiliate fraud.

Overview of Affiliate Marketing and Cookie Stuffing

Affiliate marketing is a method for your company’s marketing team to make money with organic traffic. In affiliate marketing, a third-party website promotes your products. The third-party website earns a commission if users end up buying products from your actual website.

Affiliate marketing is beneficial for the affiliates and your company’s marketing team. You have to pay only when buyers purchase through the affiliate links. Legitimate affiliates can earn passive income through their online presence. In affiliate marketing, cookie stuffing is the biggest threat.

Affiliate cookie stuffing takes away the credit the legitimate affiliates deserve for their hard work. Cookies are a piece of code that stores information on the web. A cookie can remember when was the last time you visited a specific website.

The primary objective of cookies is to develop a user mapping and remember their previous actions. During cookie stuffing, when a user clicks on an affiliate link, the credit for the click goes to the fraudster. Malicious affiliates stuff or drop cookies on your users’ web browsers to execute this attack on a large scale.

Cookies are an Inseparable Part of Affiliate Marketing

Marketing teams need to attribute sales to an individual clicking on the affiliate ads. The best way to attribute sales is by using cookies. Cookies can store essential information about the visitors browsing through your affiliate’s website.

Marketing teams and affiliates also place third-party cookies to understand the behavior of their users. Your company’s legitimate affiliates and the marketing team rely on cookies to make the campaign successful.

Common Methods of Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Marketing

The unscrupulous affiliates leverage several types of methods to stuff cookies in the devices of your users. Here are some common methods with which threat actors execute cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing.

Pop-Ups

A pop-up is a harmless dialog box. Its primary aim is to notify users about promotions and offers. But malicious pop-ups are the main source of cookie stuffing. These pop-ups can send malware to your users’ browsers.

JavaScript

The primary objective of JavaScript is to make websites more attractive, responsive and user-friendly. JavaScript can also redirect users to a different webpage. Threat actors take advantage of the time gap between redirecting to drop cookies.

Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) make it simpler to code pages. CSS ensures the consistent display of the webpages of your website. Malicious affiliates can place the direct affiliate URL into the style sheet as an image.

Some of the other methods of dropping cookies by nefarious affiliates are as follows:

  • Browser Extensions
  • WordPress plugins
  • Stylesheets
  • PHP scripts

Top Reasons to Monitor Cookies in Affiliate Marketing

The reliable and advanced affiliate tracking solutions monitor cookie stuffing in a proper manner. With the best affiliate tracking platform, you can maintain the integrity of your affiliate campaigns.

Cookie stuffing makes it difficult for your marketing team to recruit popular affiliates. Your relationship with customers suffers. Cookie stuffing also affects your brand’s bottom line. You should monitor cookies in affiliate marketing because of the following reasons.

Violates the Privacy of the Users

The users don’t get the opportunity to customize their choice of cookies. Malicious affiliates may drop cookies onto your users’ computers. It can be a violation of their privacy. Cookie stuffing without the knowledge of your website visitors can violate the data regulations.

Deriving False Insights with Cookie Stuffing

During cookie stuffing, your brand can derive false insights. Malicious affiliates feed false information to your marketing team about what functions and what doesn’t. Your endeavors to optimize sales will plummet.

It is essential to deploy the best affiliate tracking platforms to monitor your digital network.

How do Virus Positive Technologies help you Monitor Cookie Stuffing?

VPT is pioneering the monitoring and detection of affiliate fraud. VPT monitors your affiliate network and raises red flags during violations. It also lets you know what is cookie stuffing. The advanced methodology of VPT can identify non-compliant behaviors. It also offers a range of brand compliance and monitoring solutions to modern-day companies.

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Selins Jesse

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Selins Jesse
Joined: August 19th, 2022
Articles Posted: 17

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