If your impact.com Performance or Creator program uses lead events for payouts, lead fraud is a risk.
Lead events involve partners submitting leads to your sales team, but they are more prone to fraud than conversion events because they are easier to fake—especially without proper validation.
Example: Your program is set up to issue payouts to partners who drive qualified leads to your brand. If the lead is qualified as an opportunity, there could be a payout for the partner based on the submission of the lead. If the lead then signs a contract and the deal is won, there could be a more significant payout based on the submission of a winning lead. Depending on the relationship structure negotiated, the partner can get paid out for either conversion, or both. Both thresholds are set based on data you send us through your lead events.
Lead fraud is sourced from malicious affiliates that collect brand payouts for producing fake leads or conversion events. It can take many forms, including partners who:
Use fake or stolen information to manually fill in lead forms on your website.
Use bot scripts hosted on a server to fill forms and hide their IP address.
Incentivize their users to fill in forms to get rewards. This can result in “real leads” that have no intention of ever converting because they only filled in your lead to be rewarded by the partner.
Fortunately, there are some practices you can employ to design a lead program with a lower fraud risk.
Track and pay out on higher value events later in the funnel that can be ‘chained’ to an initial lead. Bad actors will be less incentivized to create fake leads or use stolen information if the events are more difficult to manipulate.
Examples of higher-value events to track that can be tied back to a lead event:
Making a purchase
Signing up for a subscription
Qualified sales opportunity
First monthly payment
Set limits on the number of leads that can be awarded to an individual click. Since an IP address usually belongs to a single user, it’s common to only allow one lead per user.
Restrict payouts where leads are generated in countries where you don't do business. For example, if your target customers are in Europe, then leads coming from elsewhere are likely not valid—or they won't be of value to your business.
Use the High Risk Actions report to review actions that have been attributed by high-risk clicks. The report gives you the opportunity to review high-risk actions before paying out to partners
Use the Same Actions IP report to identify actions that have been driven from the same IP address, indicating that the same user is creating multiple lead events possibly using fake information.
To see these tips in practice, review an example of a program with effective design that reduces the impact of lead fraud attempts. Then, take a look at the example of a poor design which fails to consider the need for lead fraud prevention.
A well-designed lead program carefully considers which events are tracked and how they're paid out:
Your program tracks Sign Up and Purchase events
You pay out only for the Purchase events
You have custom terms that state a clear policy on supported countries and locations
You regularly reviews Risk reports and scrutinize actions before approving payouts
Why is this effective design? Because you only pay out for purchase events, bad actors submitting fake leads are less incentivized to target your program as an easy source of payouts. Routinely reviewing risk reports and actions further allows you to be sure of lead quality before rewarding a partner.
A poorly-designed lead program pays out for little work on the user's end, and doesn't monitor lead quality or conversions:
Your program only tracks lead events with no human verification
It pays out significant $ for leads before seeing downstream value
There are no limits on actions per click
You aren't reviewing lead quality
Why is this poor design? Because your program doesn't verify leads and instead pays out only for submission of a lead, bad actors have a lot of incentive to spam your submission forms with false lead information. Additionally, not reviewing lead quality means that you're less likely to spot these nefarious attempts.