Hi, I'm planning on setting up a "pay per lead/enquiry" affiliate program for a vacation rentals portal that I am developing. I want a program similar to TripAdvisor or HomeAway's program, where I can reward affiliates who deliver unique email inquiries to my advertiser's listings. CJ tracking is done via cookies. Does this mean that an affiliate can click on his/her affiliate link and generate a series of fraudulent inquiries/leads just by deleting the cookies in their browsers? Does CJ track IP addresses? Are cookies a reliable way of tracking unique users? How can I be certain that my inquiries/leads are unique?
Yes CJ uses cookies for tracking and no it is not a good way to insure that they are all unique visitors. They may track IP addresses, but I don't know. I'm not a CJ advertiser so I'm not sure how your side of CJ is setup. However, I would look into seeing if you can supply either the form, a POST php page or an image to the form so that you can track IP's yourself. This way you could see the amount of hits the image/page gets and from what IP address and attach their affiliate ID to each link. Compare Ip's and affilliate ID's to multiple sucessful email registrations and ban them through CJ by their affiliate ID. It sounds like a lot of work, but at least this way you have more protection against fraudulent leads. Obviously this whole thing could be offset simply by the person using a proxy service (with multiple proxies or onion routing) to register emails from all sorts of different IP's. My suggestion: Manually approve affiliates, make sure they have legitimate websites. A webmaster that is making money already through other sources with a good user base is unlikely to commit fraud, be sued and lose all their future revenue. Try to incorporate either a webpage or an image into the forms they have to submit so you can track suspicous behavior yourself (on top of whatever CJ may or may not do). You can also contact CJ and ask them specifically what they do to protect you from fraud.
Indeed, it's easy to have fraudulent leads from CJ affiliates. Cleaning cookies works and CJ doesn't seem to care (they make money, after all)... Lyth0s said it best, you have to make sure the affiliates that apply have a good site or a good lead generation method...