How Can Cookie Stuffing Ruin Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns?

1. How Can Cookie Stuffing Ruin Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns? In affiliate marketing, adding cookies to your users’ browsers can help with proper metrics. Cookies play an essential role in making your affiliate marketing campaigns successful. Using website cookies can add to the success of your affiliate campaigns. Affiliate marketing is an effective tool for driving traffic. But it can also give rise to affiliate fraud. Affiliate fraud can come in many types. Cookie stuffingis a significant type of affiliate fraud that dwindles your marketing team’s budget. A cookie is a text file located in a user’s web browser. Websites rely on cookies to derive data. Cookies allow a website to track a person’s browser history, save login credentials, etc. The legitimate affiliates of your company rely on cookies to attribute lead activities. Cookies also help the publishers to attribute sales to the legitimate affiliates of your company. For users, cookies can increase their overall experience. While affiliate marketing has become an unmatched tool to drive traffic, affiliate fraud is proving to be a significant hindrance. Your company’s marketing team should be aware of the repercussions of cookie stuffing. Here are some risk factors related to cookie stuffing. Overview of Cookie Stuffing in Affiliate Marketing Cookie stuffing refers to an illegitimate technique of creating a wrongful attribution. The primary objective of cookie stuffing is to steal credit for someone else attribution. Malicious affiliates can stuff fresh cookies to create affiliate fraud. VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,

2. They can also overwrite the existing or legitimate cookies in the system of your users. With cookie stuffing, the threat actors can siphon away commissions of your legitimate affiliates. Malicious affiliates rely on cookie stuffing to earn commissions from multiple publishers without putting in any real effort. Threat actors rely on malicious cookies to misattribute traffic to them. Cookie stuffing can affect the reputation of your brand in a negative manner. It also harms a company’s affiliate marketing efforts. The legitimate affiliates who produce results start to see less profit. The malicious cookies offer credit to the threat actor if a user visits your company. Affiliate cookie stuffing involves the injection of cookies into your customers’ devices. The Repercussions of Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing is an illegitimate strategy where a threat actor drops multiple cookies in the browser of the user. The main intention behind cookie stuffing is to monetize the sales happening through that browser. Nowadays, malicious affiliates can also overwrite the existing cookies placed by your legitimate affiliates. Stealing commission and denting the reputation of your brand are the other objectives of cookie stuffing. Stuffing malicious cookies can create a violation of the affiliate marketing compliance guidelines. Here are some of the risk factors associated with cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing. General Data Protection Violation The data security regulations clearly state that it is unethical to collect the data of your users. They forbid collecting data without the permission of your website visitors. But cookie stuffing violates such rules. These malicious cookies store the data of the users without their approval. Marketing Teams Lose their Revenue Your marketing team pays commissions to their affiliates for driving traffic. By driving traffic, the legitimate affiliates of your company are boosting your sales and revenue. During cookie stuffing, there is a misattribution of commissions. VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,

3. The threat actors steal the commissions of your legitimate affiliates. High-performing affiliates tend to leave your affiliate network. Cookie stuffing is more dangerous than other types of affiliate fraud as it happens on the user’s side. Without the approval of your users, the threat actors drop cookies onto their devices. It can dent the reputation of your brand, and you may lose out on loyal customers. The Red Flags to Recognize Cookie Stuffing Your marketing team should know what is cookie stuffing to minimize risks. A vast majority of marketers rely on affiliate marketing. It is the best marketing model to increase a company’s sales and reach. It is a performance- based marketing technique. You only have to pay those affiliates who are putting in sincere efforts. You must identify the red flags associated with affiliate marketing and cookie stuffing. Diminishes ROI Your marketing team calculates performance through the revenue generated via each channel. The minute monitoring of the RPI trends can offer deeper insights to the marketing leaders. If you notice a sudden decline in the ROI, it indicates an increase in commission payouts. Lesser Payout to Affiliates If you observe a sudden spike in the bounce rate of affiliates, look for cookie stuffing. During cookie stuffing, the legitimate affiliates end up losing their commissions. How can Virus Positive Technologies help you Combat Cookie Stuffing? Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) can help your company with real-time affiliate monitoring. The data-driven publisher profiling and fraud detection platform of VPT can detect affiliate fraud. It can also analyze each activity of the affiliates. VPT allows you to track and monitor the affiliates to offer the best ROI. VIRUSPOSITIVE Phone + 91 - 124 - 2666031 Email- sales@viruspositive.com Sector-48, Gurugram-122001 Vipul Trade Center, Unit#130-131,440,