Affiliate campaigns in India were once built mainly for English-speaking metro audiences. That’s changing rapidly. Millions of new users are now online in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, and more.

One affiliate running a food delivery campaign saw conversions double after translating creatives into Hindi and Tamil. This proves that localized messaging is no longer optional it’s essential for scale.

For years, affiliate emails have been built around promotions. A flashy subject line, a discount code, a product link  and the hope that readers would click before moving on. But inboxes today are overflowing with the same formula. Readers are no longer impressed by another sale; they’re looking for relevance and connection.

In 2025, the affiliates who win aren’t those who send the most promotions, but those who send the most human emails messages that feel like conversations rather than campaigns.

Affiliate fraud has always existed, but today it’s more advanced than ever. From bots faking millions of clicks to fraudsters hiding behind proxies and exploiting tracking gaps, the tricks are smarter and harder to detect. The result? Wasted budgets, lost trust, and real affiliates getting sidelined.

Automation at Scale  

Fraudsters now use bots to mimic human behavior. With automation, they can generate millions of fake clicks, sign-ups, or installs in minutes. What looks like strong traffic is often nothing more than empty numbers that drain advertiser budgets.

Hiding Behind Anonymity  

VPNs, proxies, and fake profiles make it easier for fraudsters to mask their identity. This anonymity creates the illusion of global, diverse audiences when in reality, it’s the same bad actor recycling fake traffic through different channels.

Exploiting Attribution Gaps  

Affiliate systems rely on complex tracking models, and these gaps create loopholes. Fraudsters use cookie stuffing, click injection, or pixel hijacking to steal credit for conversions they didn’t drive. While advertisers pay commissions, the real affiliates who add value lose out.

A core part of programmatic advertising, real-time bidding refers to the automated auction process where advertisers bid on impressions in real time, usually on a CPM basis. Multiple advertisers compete for the same inventory before the page even loads, with the highest bid winning. The entire process happens in milliseconds.

Fill rate = filled impressions ÷ total ad requests.
A healthy fill rate means your supply is consistently attracting buyers. On the surface, 100% fill rate looks perfect but it rarely tells the whole story.

Where it goes wrong:

• Low-value demand fills everything → buyers with remnant budgets flood your slots. CPMs stay depressed.
• IVT flags lower buyer trust → fill rate looks high, but advertisers are underbidding because of quality concerns.
• Coverage without competition → one SSP fills everything, but you lose the CPM lift that comes from true auction density.

In other words, a high fill rate without strong CPMs usually means you’re overexposed to low-quality demand.

Before diving into tactics, let’s clear up the difference between the two terms.

• Retargeting usually refers to display ads that follow your audience across the web after they’ve visited your site.
• Remarketing is often email-based, targeting people who have interacted with your content but haven’t converted yet.

Both share the same goal: keep your brand and offers top-of-mind until your audience is ready to act.

Affiliate marketing works best when you care about people. Good campaigns don’t just sell products, they help solve problems and meet real needs. When you focus on your audience’s goals and challenges, they start to trust you. That trust leads to sales naturally, because people feel supported instead of pushed.

Empty impressions aren’t harmless. They drag down viewability, frustrate users, and signal weak supply to exchanges. Yet, even large publishers let them slip through when bidders time out or SSPs pass back.

Where it goes wrong:

• GAM returns a blank because no line item is set up for passback.
• Prebid doesn’t trigger fallback creatives.
• On CTV, pod breaks aren’t filled completely, leaving dead air.

Example: One mid-sized publisher left 2–3% of impressions unfilled because their GAM line items weren’t chained to a backup. At 50M impressions/month, that’s 1.5M empty calls and thousands in lost programmatic revenue.

Fix:

• Use GAM passback line items or house ads to catch unfilled impressions.
• In Prebid, configure a default line item with safe fallback creatives.
• On CTV, structure pods with guaranteed backup campaigns.

Even if your fallback is a house ad, it’s better than serving nothing. Buyers see a clean, fully filled auction, and your site looks trustworthy.

Adding more demand partners feels safe. More buyers = more bids = more money, right? Not exactly.

What actually happens when you overload your adapter stack:

• Latency creep: every new adapter adds to the waterfall of calls. Even if they respond quickly on their own, the cumulative effect stretches your auction time.
• Timeout attrition: when auctions are slowed down, faster bidders get trapped waiting for slower ones. Eventually, your timeout settings cut them off.
• Bid duplication: many adapters resell the same DSP demand. That “new bidder” might just be a slower, less efficient path to the same buyer you already had.

Example:
We worked with a publisher running 15+ adapters. In GAM, it looked like they had “healthy competition.” But bidder logs showed that 40% of winning impressions were actually duplicates the same DSP bid routed through different exchanges. They were slowing down their auction for no net gain.

Fix: Instead of chasing adapter count, analyze incremental revenue contribution per partner. If a bidder wins <1% of impressions and adds 300ms latency, cut them. Smart publishers run leaner, not fatter.

The fastest way to get banned is by disguising ads as content or tricking users into clicking.

What this looks like in practice:

• Hiding ads inside navigation menus.
• Formatting ads to look like native editorial content without disclosure.
• Placing ads under “Download” or “Watch Now” buttons that push accidental clicks.

Platforms classify this as misrepresentation a direct breach of Google AdSense policy. Even if your CTR spikes, you’ll see invalid click deductions, and eventually, full account suspension.

How to fix it:
Label ads clearly. Use “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” markers. Keep creative distinct from editorial. If your engagement metrics look too good to be true, they probably are — and they’re raising flags with exchanges.