Affiliate Business Cash |

There is a post on affiliate blackhat PPC on the PPC Blog that any affiliate manager should read as a primer on cheating affiliates.

The tactics are focused on things like geotargeting and dayparting to hide forbidden affiliate PPC campaigns from affiliate managers.

“There are a number of tricks I have seen used to bend completely flaunt many affiliate programs terms & policies. One of the most common PPC policies is to disallow affiliates from bidding against merchant brand terms, as the merchant will generally get that sale 99% of the time anyway not having to pay a premium to an affiliate for it. From the other side, obviously it makes sense for an affiliate to bid against brand as it cuts away the hard work of finding a niche as & they know it will convert. It’s a low hanging fruit.

Another popular affiliate network policy is to ban affiliates from sending traffic direct to a merchants site because the merchant or ad agency are already running a paid search campaign, the merchant does not trust affiliates to uphold their ‘brand image’ within adverts or perhaps for a variety of other reasons.”

Here are the areas detailed in the post, Flaunting Affiliate Network Rules With Blackhat PPC:

1. Bidding At Certain Times
2. Geo-targeting
3. IP Exclusion
4. Advert Tricks
5. Masking Affiliate URLs
6. Sending Traffic To A Different Domain
7. Using Broad Match To Bypass Trademarks

If you don’t already cover these issues in your affiliate agreement, be sure to revise it now.

And don’t just file this away. I know a lot of affiliate managers are already monitoring this sort of behavior - if you manage an affiliate program and don’t keep an eye on this stuff, it’s time to start.

(original article)