When allocating spend to paid search campaigns, marketers expect to expand their reach and acquire new customers to justify a return on spend for the channel. However, a disadvantage of paid search is that the channel’s payment model is based on clicks—a structure that creates a low barrier for entry to digital fraudsters and contributes to $1.4B dollars lost to affiliate marketing fraud annually.

Google ranks first in the United States as the most popular multi-platform web property accounting for nearly 83% of U.S. desktop search traffic—a market share of more than 61% among the leading U.S. search engine providers. With such a stronghold on unique visitors within the landscape, Google prioritizes continuous improvement of the quality of users’ search results, most recently completing an algorithm update that improves sites’ compliance with their quality guidelines and spam detection systems. More specifically, the changes deprioritize commercial links that are not correctly annotated—compliance updates that may negatively impact affiliate links.

More than ever, marketers are leaning into the affiliate channel because of its attractive performance-based pricing model that allows a cost-controlled solution to optimize in any economic climate. While the channel boasts benefits such as scale, automation and outcome-based pricing, affiliate (like anything) also carries the potential for significant risk if not monitored—compliance that is impossible to achieve through manual affiliate search audits.

It’s estimated that nearly $19 billion is lost to worldwide digital fraud each year. In response, ad compliance has become a necessity for marketers that want proper channel attribution and protection against ad spend theft.