How Can Cookie Stuffing Affect the Bottom Line of Your Brand?

1. How Can Cookie Stuffing Affect the Bottom Line of Your Brand? Affiliate fraud is a huge concern for your company’s marketing team and legitimate affiliates. Cookie stuffing is an illegitimate strategy for creating a wrongful attribution. Cookie stuffing can steal the credit of your legitimate affiliates and attribute it to threat actors. The nefarious affiliates stuff fresh cookies or overwrite the existing cookies in the system of the user. Malicious affiliates leverage cookie stuffing to get commissions from your company’s marketing team without putting in any hard endeavors. Your company’s affiliate marketing campaigns offer passive income streams for many affiliates. Malicious affiliates are finding new techniques to claim unearned payouts. Affiliate marketing refers to a marketing channel where affiliates earn commissions by promoting another brand’s product or service. In affiliate marketing fraud, the threat actors circumvent the system to get unearned commissions. When deployed correctly, affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool for driving revenue and leads to your website. Cookie stuffing makes you pay commissions on bogus sales. If you work with affiliates, you need to get a brief overview and idea of cookie stuffing. Overview of Cookie Stuffing Affiliate cookie stuffingis a type of affiliate fraud where a website drops one or more cookies onto your visitor’s system. These cookies are malicious and cause your marketing team to misattribute sales to the threat actors. Your marketing team ends up paying commissions to malicious affiliates instead of legitimate ones. The nefarious affiliates get all the credit for traffic that they didn’t help generate. Cookie stuffing is a severe type of affiliate fraud as it demoralizes your legitimate affiliates. VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,

2. Reputed and professional affiliates will leave your company’s affiliate campaigns. The affiliates who have invested all the hard efforts start to see less profit from the program. Affiliates promote your brand via websites, social media handles, browser extensions, etc. Cookie stuffing can also affect the reputation of your company among customers. In cookie stuffing, threat actors can steal the data of your customers. What are Cookies? Cookies are files present on websites that always ask you to accept them whenever you visit a new website. The main role of cookies is to save the data of the user. By saving the user’s data, the website can know the users and adjust the browsing experience based on their preferences. Affiliate marketing relies a great deal on cookies. Threat actors load up the websites of the users with fake affiliate cookies. They deliver zero promotional content, but their cookies will say that they did. When a user makes a purchase, your marketing team may use the fake affiliate cookie to pay the commission. You should know what is cookie stuffing to secure the integrity of your affiliate marketing campaigns. Some Common Cookie Stuffing Indications to Know About Numerous marketers these days rely on affiliate marketing to boost the reach of their brands. But without proper monitoring solutions, affiliate marketing may be prone to fraud like cookie stuffing. Here are some red flags you should know about cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing. Reduces your ROI Your marketing team calculates its ROI through the revenue generated from each channel. Monitoring the ROI trends can indicate if any unethical activities like cookie stuffing are happening. If you are noticing a drastic decrease in the ROI, be on the lookout for cookie stuffing. Cookie stuffing is dangerous as it decreases the overall ROI of your marketing team. Affiliates Unsatisfied with their Commissions VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,

3. The relationship between your company and the legitimate affiliates should be robust. Your marketing team and the affiliates are interdependent on each other. Cookie stuffing and other types of affiliate fraud can erode trust between the two parties. In affiliate marketing, the third-party website plays a crucial role in promoting your products. This third-party website is operated by the legitimate affiliates of your company. In cookie stuffing, affiliates might leave your network. The legitimate affiliates get less commission because of the misattribution of leads. Difference between First-Party and Third-Party Cookies First-party cookies are placed by websites. The main role of these cookies is to optimize the browsing experience of the users. They also ensure that the essential website features are properly implemented. Without first-party cookies, a user has to log in every time they want to access their account. Third-party cookies monitor the behavior of the user across online platforms. The browser stores third-party cookies by tracking JavaScript codes. The Methods of Executing Cookie Stuffing Here are some of the common methods with which threat actors execute cookie stuffing. JavaScript codes | PHP | Stylesheets | Malicious browser extensions | WordPress plugins How can Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) help to Prevent Cookie Stuffing? Virus Positive Technologies is your one-stop solution to monitor and identify cookie stuffing in performance marketing. VPT monitors your affiliate network and raises red flags during policy violations. If you are looking for an all-inclusive affiliate monitoring solution, don’t look beyond VPT. VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,