Honey’s affiliate credit-stealing scandal (which also involves Klarna, Microsoft Shopping, and Capital One Shopping) is nowhere near the first controversy of its kind. Cunning actors have been leeching credit from the Creators and publishers who actually drive sales for nearly two decades, causing billions of misattributed payments and incalculable losses to companies due to lost partnerships and inefficient spends.
Famous past examples include:
Overstock.com changed its rules in 2004 to prevent affiliates from using “Overstock.com” and other trademark-related terms in PPC search advertising because many affiliates were running ads to get credit for high-intent, low-funnel purchases - thus wasting Overstock’s search budget as Overstock was competing for its own traffic.
Shawn Hogan (2013) and Brian Dunning (2014) both received prison time for engaging in cookie stuffing - a fraudulent activity where someone places an affiliate cookie on a user’s computer without their knowledge in order to steal credit for a sale. They were huge affiliate partners with eBay, who paid them $28M and $5M respectively in affiliate fees - until the company figured it out and worked with the FBI to prosecute them.
In 2019, Uber sued over 100 ad networks that it worked with because they allegedly falsified app installs records to make it seem like their performance advertising efforts drove installs, even though Uber’s data and testing (including turning off all advertising) showed that users were downloading and installing Uber at the same rate regardless of if there were ads running or not.
What do all these stories have in common with each other and the Honey scandal?
Last click attribution is the tail wagging the influencer marketing dog. Of course the purchase is the most important action, but that last click often not what actually drove the sale. That’s why we’re so focused on multi-touch attribution: the customer journey is long and the best marketers guide it.
Tracking awareness through cross-platform engagements, consideration through Google Analytics-measured website traffic, and of course that last click through integrations with all major affiliate platforms means you can better allocate your capital to drive more customers through your funnel and generate higher ROI.
