In performance marketing, there’s a risk of a partner joining your program with the intent to run fraudulent traffic and inflate their earnings. Though there’s no bulletproof solution to partner fraud, you can better protect yourself by watching for typical signs of fraudulent activity. That’s where our partner activity fraud monitoring comes in.
TUNE provides fraud monitoring at the conversion level to show any signs of potentially illegitimate traffic being sent to your offers. By catching suspicious activity within the last 45 days, you can be quickly notified to review that partner and even automatically block partners that hit a given threshold of suspicious activity.
Because partner programs vary widely in business practices and with business partners, activity fraud monitoring is disabled by default. This article explains how to enable and adjust your activity fraud monitoring settings. Also, see our article on partner profile fraud monitoring.
Enabling Activity Fraud Monitoring
Activity fraud monitoring is available only for enterprise accounts and can be accessed from the Customize Application option in the Company menu. Click on Partner Activity Fraud from the Fraud Detection section. Set the Partner Activity Fraud option in the Fraud Overview section to “Enabled,” then click Save.
Once enabled, you can tailor your fraud criteria to your needs and experiences. The following sections detail the criteria we evaluate and how to set them.
Setting Criteria & Weights
Once you activate the activity fraud system, you can set the weight of each optional criterion to determine how much each check will influence the partner’s activity fraud score. You set which metrics contribute to activity fraud scores.
Fraud scores range from 0% (no fraud criteria triggered) to 100% (all fraud criteria triggered), with values in between meaning some but not all fraud criteria triggered. This fraud score doesn’t guarantee that a partner will or won’t run fraudulent traffic but is a best guess based on your criteria.
Why You Set the Criteria
Although TUNE has a recommendation for settings (see below), we have you set the criteria so you understand what you’re checking for. Depending on where your partners do business, some criteria are irrelevant, and others are more important.
List of Criteria
Here are the criteria for which you can set weights. To modify them, click on the Edit button in the Fraud Criteria section:
- EPC Exceeds Threshold: This is flagged if a partner’s earnings per click (EPC) for any offer is a specified percentage difference higher than the average EPC for all partners on those offers. This criterion measures only the past day.
- Daily Conversions: This is flagged if a partner’s conversions over the past day exceed a specified number.
Note: This includes any stat recorded as a conversion, including private goals (which partners would not see). - Duplicate IP Addresses: This is flagged if the partner’s conversions for offers using pixel-based tracking come from the same IP address and exceed a specified percentage of total conversions.
- Days with No Activity: This is flagged if the partner exceeds a specified number of days with no conversions in the past 30 days. This criterion counts total days, not consecutive days.
Weights & Thresholds
Each criterion’s weight can be set from 0 to 10. Any weight set to 0 will not factor into the fraud score at all. Setting a weight between 1 and 10 is a relative rating: one set to “5” is five times more important to your fraud detection needs than something set to “1” and half as important as one set to “10.”
There’s also a setting for each criterion named “Immediate Flag.” If that criterion is triggered, the account is flagged regardless of its score compared to other criteria.
Along with the weight, each criterion has a threshold for you to input. Those fields allow you to define how the criteria work.
Our fraud detection daily evaluates your platform's stats for the above criteria. Each criterion that’s positive increases the fraud score based on its weight. See the Recommended Weights section below for a detailed example.
Our recommended practice is to set those settings important to you at “5” to start and leave those not important to you at “0.” Then, adjust up and down based on which criteria are more likely in your experience to indicate a fraudulent account. Anything that immediately makes you critically worried about fraud should be set to “Immediate Flag.”
Note: If a criterion’s threshold is set to 0, that criterion will never be flagged as true, but its weight will still count for evaluation purposes.
Recommended Weights
For those unsure of what weights to set, we provide these suggestions and the rationale behind them.
- EPC Exceeds Threshold: weight at ‘5’, threshold at ’20’
- Daily Conversions: weight at ‘0’, threshold at ‘0’
- Duplicate IP Addresses: weight at ‘5’, threshold at ’30’
- Days with No Activity: weight at ‘0’, threshold at ‘0’
The criteria set to 0 in this recommendation are meant for partner programs with more specific fraud detection requirements. Use them only if you’re aware of your needs.
To see an example of how fraud detection is calculated, see our partner profile fraud article.
Alert & Block Thresholds
The final piece to setting activity fraud detection up is setting thresholds, at which percentages you want an email notification of potential fraud or an account to be automatically flagged. Click the Edit button in the Threshold Settings section to edit these settings.
If the percentage of a new account is higher than the Alert Threshold, you will receive an alert in your platform. If a new account’s percentage is higher than the Automatic Block Threshold, that account is immediately blocked, and you’re notified. The same is true if any “Immediate Flag” criteria are triggered.
If a threshold is set to 0%, it never triggers. In our recommended default threshold settings, we have an Automatic Block Threshold set to 0%, so no accounts are automatically blocked.
Managing Fraud with Individual Partners
You can adjust an individual partner’s fraud score by navigating to that partner’s account from the Manage Partners page and then clicking the View button in the Fraud section.
The Activity Fraud section of the Fraud page allows you to enable or disable any activity fraud flags raised by our system. The Profile Fraud section covers profile fraud for that partner. The Custom Threshold Settings section allows you to manage custom profile and activity fraud thresholds for that partner.
Viewing Activity Fraud Report
See our support article on the partner fraud report for information on this feature.