Affiliate marketing is on the rise, becoming an even more lucrative channel for brands, affiliate marketing platforms, and affiliate marketers themselves. Like any other marketing channel, it is also ever-changing. Along with more spend and more participants come more challenges and fraudsters. As we gear up for Affiliate Summit East, we’re looking at some of the top trends in affiliate marketing and the always-trending fraud associated with this industry—and how we can work together to stop it.
There’s no shortage of opinions on what’s the latest in affiliate marketing trends in 2023. Still, we see the top five as an across-the-board increase in affiliate marketing spend, post third-party cookie strategies, video content, voice search, and link building.
By the end of 2022, voice shopping sales were on track to reach nearly $20 billion, a massive jump from $2 billion in 2018. With the increase in voice-enabled assistants, we can only expect those numbers to increase. In fact, by 2025, those sales are projected to reach $164 billion.
High-quality backlinks from affiliate marketers, influencers, and content creators can drive customers to your site. Help these partners help your brand by providing fresh, relevant content on your brand’s site.
Trends can change over time, but fraudsters often keep running their same old schemes in different ways. In the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2023, more than two-thirds of marketers were concerned about affiliate marketing fraud. We’ve found that fraud accounts for an average of 45% of affiliate traffic, and most of these trends won’t have a significant (positive or negative) impact on that number.
Many affiliate marketing fraud trends we’ve looked at before are still going strong today. As trends and techniques get more sophisticated, so too do fraudsters’ schemes. They’re smart, slippery, and ever-changing.
It does stand to reason that an increase in spend does increase the opportunity for more fraud and could lead to a loss of legitimate affiliates and fewer customers or leads. Fraudsters know the value of affiliate marketing and can see the opportunity to get their not-fair commission share by generating more fake clicks.
Brands looking to partner with new affiliates should do their homework. Make sure any influencers you partner with are legit, with engaged human followers in your target audience. Check your traffic sources and verify they come from your affiliates, not bots.
An ad fraud detection solution that is even smarter and constantly changing its detection and prevention approaches, based on trending fraud techniques, is the best defense in fighting affiliate marketing fraud and maintaining integrity in your affiliate marketing program. As a small sample, read more about three companies that successfully put a stop to affiliate fraud.
Anura detects where fraud occurs and which affiliates it is coming from, so you can determine whether to end those relationships or work with them to eliminate the fraud in the event they were victims themselves.
Affiliate marketing is big business. One way to keep up with what’s trending now and what the future holds is by attending Affiliate Summit East! Anura is proud to be the Headline Sponsor for this event, and you don’t want to miss our own co-founder and CFO, Beth Kahn, who is on the agenda speaking with the women of Link United.
Can’t attend this year? Contact us to find out how we can help you fight affiliate marketing fraud and strengthen your affiliate marketing program.