Ask most business owners about affiliate marketing and they'll either give you a blank stare as if you're from Mars, or they'll say it's the greatest thing they ever did to get more traffic to their sites.

It's generally accepted that affiliate marketing, for those of us who are enlightened, is truly a low cost and high return on investment - since you're outsourcing part of your marketing and only paying for the performance.

But there is a dark underbelly to affiliate marketing.

It's called "affiliate fraud" and it comes in many disguises.

One of them is called "the fake lead submitter".

It happens when an advertiser pays for leads, and sneaky affiliates either:

1. sign up phony leads via their affiliate link and get paid for the leads before the advertiser realizes that the leads are "not backending" enough to cover the payout per lead, or
2. recruit sub-affiliates (using subid tracking) who then go on to do #1 above, and it's the same outcome

These affiliates are usually caught by mathematics - the advertiser looks at the numbers and catches affiliates who are either converting very poorly or a little too well for the average.

So it turns into a numbers game and a timing game - catching those scammy affiliates before they are to be paid.

The frauding is an ongoing problem and even today in 2009 it's still happening because some affiliates manage to slip under the radar by keeping within the acceptable range.

Until now.

There's a new analytic player in town, and it's not just about the numbers.

You see, with a little bit of code added to your site, you can not only catch the affiliates numerically, you can also catch them red handed with a "movie".

That's right, by recording the actual mouse movements and key clicks, you can watch a movie of each lead as it enters its data into your landing page form.

What you end up with is a little "movie" where you can actually sit back and watch the leads filling out your form.

With this visual aid, you can see patterns of legit and very fake leads as they occur. For example, you can see how one affiliate is sending leads that are generated by a robot because each form entry is perfectly made with no backspacing or errors in the typing of the data. So you know it's not a human entering the lead.

The tool that can help you catch these fakers is called Clicktale.

The funny thing is that Clicktale doesn't even mention this as a benefit on their sales material.

If you're concerned about affiliate fraud and want another weapon to catch those scammy affiliates red handed, check out Clicktale.

There are a TON of benefits to having visual analytics. And Clicktale provides them.

But catching bad affiliates is not listed as a benefit to this tool, and I think it's a great little gem of a feature that Clicktale hasn't even mentioned yet.

It's not an advertised benefit, but from an affiliate management point of view I highly recommend you give Clicktale a try.

I tried it out on a client's landing page and not only did we catch some weird affiliates doing strange things, we also found an affiliate who was converting very highly that turned out to be a totally legit affiliate. Normally we would have accused them of converting too well but now we could SEE the leads actually converting and that they were legit.

Check out Clicktale... but first read the steps to follow below.

1. check out Clicktale
2. Follow the instructions to start recording movies of visitors to your site's landing page
3. After a while, go to the dashboard and select the "Form analytics" (assuming you have a signup or lead or sales page where information is being entered into a form)
4. Sort on the URL's - click picture for full screenshot















5. Then click on the URL you want to inspect. You'll need to know the affiliate id and possibly subid of the affiliate in question.
6. Sit back and watch the movies to see what sort of leads they are sending you.
7. If it's a robot form submitter you'll spot the pattern pretty fast.
8. If there are backspaces/corrections to the data being entered - e.g. a the person is correcting their email address typo - then you can be pretty sure it's a real human entering the data. But don't be fooled as some scammers will hire real people to submit fake leads!

Check out Clicktale here

Cheers,

Peter

--- (Edited on 6/8/2009 10:19 am [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---