Marketers have come a long way in the journey of advertising. In traditional advertising, marketers use mediums like television, radio, and billboards to advertise. These mediums were effective but had their limitations. With traditional advertising, targeting the right audience has always been a black box.
Digital advertising came with a broader opportunity for advertisers. It has helped brands to reach the right audience and track the performance to optimize the campaigns better. As digital advertising broadened its horizon, many options came into the limelight. One of them being affiliate marketing. Let’s understand Affiliate marketing in detail:
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the method of marketing where an affiliate earns a commission from the advertiser against every action taken by the customer.
Affiliates either run PPC campaigns to drive users to the advertiser’s website or use their audience or influence to increase the awareness of the advertiser’s product.
The Shift in The Advertising World
Digital advertising has evolved drastically over the past few years. Earlier digital advertising was limited to search and display campaigns. Today, marketers are broadening their horizons by considering varied advertising opportunities in the digital space. Many social media-based campaigns or incent campaigns have also emerged as a possibility for digital advertising.
Incentivized campaigns are often referred to as a form of advertisement where every action is driven in exchange for a reward. For example, download an app and get Rs. 50 cashback.
The loophole in Incent Campaigns
Many affiliates run incentive campaigns to increase their revenue and fool the advertisers. They run incent campaigns on messaging platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp to reach a larger audience and make the advertisers think they are getting high traffic.
Incent campaigns sound like a win-win situation for marketers as it helps them grab more users. However, in reality, only the affiliates win.
How do affiliates keep you in the dark?
1. Showing High Installs
The affiliates use incentive campaigns to lure users into installing the app in exchange for a reward. This way the affiliates help the advertisers get high installs and make them believe their campaign is performing well. However, the users installing the app are often interested in the reward instead of the app.
The users often uninstall the app after a few days, resulting in a high uninstall rate and low lifetime value. In the end, the advertisers fail to connect with genuinely interested users and waste their budget on paying affiliates for installs that don’t add value to the business.
2. Faking Events
To grab the interest of users, affiliates post offers with incorrect messaging. They often use shiny offers to lure customers into taking action to ensure they meet the KPIs. For example, “Make your first transaction and get Rs. 30 instant cashback”.
Based on this, the advertiser makes the payment to affiliates based on events received. (In this case, making the transaction). However, the quality of users is low as they take the action only to avail the benefit.
Real Case of One of the largest private sector Bank of India
Incentivized campaigns were live on Telegram for one of the largest private sector banks in India where users were lured into downloading the app by offering them cashback. Users were also asked to do a 1 Re transaction so that publishers’ KPI could be met.
Some of the messages we found on telegram groups:
Solution Against Incent Fraud
We at mFilterIt use our advanced brand protection solution to track the platforms running incent campaigns. Using our capabilities of AI, ML, and data science, we provide a transparent report of the affiliates running incent campaigns on Telegram and WhatsApp groups. Using our report, the brands can either penalize or block the fraudulent affiliate.
Collaborate with Confidence
Affiliate marketing is a strong channel of marketing to widen your audience reach. With the right partner to detect fraudulent affiliates, you can partner confidently and take your business growth in the right direction and leverage the benefits of affiliate marketing
