Paid Search Ad Protection helps protect your affiliate program from affiliates who bid on your brand keywords in search engines. It has two separate settings that work independently: one flags suspicious affiliates so you can review them, and the other blocks commissions on orders referred from search engines.
How It Works
Go to the Settings > Advanced tab in your dashboard and find Paid Search Ad Protection. You can turn on either toggle by itself, or both.
Flagging suspicious affiliates (Enable Paid Search Ad Detection)
If you toggle on Enable Paid Search Ad Detection, affiliates suspected of running paid ads to drive referral sales will have a warning sign next to their profile. This warning will appear next to the affiliate’s name in the Affiliates tab, Payouts tab, and also on their profile in Social Snowball.
The flag is for your review only. It does not block or change the affiliate’s commissions.
We recommend reviewing flagged affiliate profiles and taking appropriate action, such as contacting or banning them if they violate your affiliate terms and conditions.
Blocking search engine commissions (Block Paid Search Ad Commissions)
When Block Paid Search Ad Commissions is on, Social Snowball blocks the commission on any order whose referrer is Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
This applies to every affiliate, whether or not they’ve been flagged as a fraud risk.
It doesn’t look at the fraud risk flag at all, so a flagged affiliate still earns commissions on orders from other sources, like their social posts or a direct link.
Because blocking is based on where the order came from, not on the affiliate, an affiliate can have a commission blocked without ever being flagged. If you want to act on a flagged affiliate, review their profile and contact or ban them.
We offer several other ways to mitigate the risk of affiliate fraud. Please refer to this help document for more details.