Quote:
Originally Posted by The Walrus
And unless you are seeing it physically happening, how do you propose that you enforce this?
Can it be done?
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I'm one of the co-owners of Gaybucks.com, which runs several twink and fetish sites and uses NATS for affiliate tracking.
We fortunately have not found any evidence of this sort of behavior yet, but some of the things that we would look for (and do keep an eye for) would be
-- unusual traffic/join patterns (large number of joins coming from different places that don't fit the statistical pattern of other affiliates with a similar amount of traffic)
-- Atypical conversion rates
-- Affiliates that can't answer questions about where they are marketing our program
A good program manager is always keeping his or her eye out for potential fraud. Unfortunately, it's a fact of life in this business. This is one more "pain in the ass", but I'm sure that if some sharp programmers with a statistical background spent any time with this, it would not be difficult to write a small script to analyze the NATS logs and identify the affiliates that are sending (stealing) this sort of traffic.
Of course, the sponsor has to *care* about its affiliates in order to go through the effort of doing that.