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Trick-Or-Treat! – Protect Yourself From Pranksters!
We’re back at it again on Devil’s Day to discuss pranksters. For those of you who didn’t know, Devil’s Day is what the day before Halloween is called, and the day for ghoulish Halloween pranks! So Affiliates and Merchants alike need to be on the lookout!
Affiliates
Beware of any too good to be true affiliate programs. Choosing the wrong program can have some ghoulish side effects, including:
- A bad reputation. You could risk scaring away your hard earned traffic and you may compromise your own reputation as a quality affiliate.
- Lost commissions. After sending sales to a merchant you may find that your commissions are scarcer than candy after midnight on Halloween. This is perhaps the biggest risk for an affiliate. You’ll have wasted your precious resources for a payout that will never come.
To protect yourself, work with reputable networks and do your research. Before promoting any merchants check that their checkout process and shopping cart are secure. Affiliating with solid merchants means that you won’t have to deal with angry customer fallout making you look like the boogeyman.
Merchants
It’s not only on the thirty-first of October that you have to worry about little masquerading devils… all year round you need to be on watch for potential partners marketing themselves as affiliate genies when in reality they’re affiliate fraudsters. As a merchant, you need to be on the lookout for:
- Cookie stuffing - Affiliates taking credit for others affiliate’s referrals
- Inflating - Affiliates who artificially inflate the number of clicks in a CPC program
- Spamming – Affiliates who send out misleading emails
- Squatting – Affiliates who take advantage of typos
- Cloning – Affiliates who clone legitimate sites
Don’t be a Zombie! Protect yourself!
Monitor and engage with your affiliates closely, enforce your terms and conditions and work with affiliate software that has in-built affiliate fraud detection features. When starting an affiliate program, choose your partners wisely. You can read more on recruiting new affiliate partners here. Keeping up to date with the pulse of your program is the surest way to keep the Grim Reaper out.
If you have any questions about the hair-raising details above, contact us at info@shareresults.com. Here’s to hoping your Halloween is a real scream!
