Affiliate Fraud or Fair Play? Rethinking Cookie Stuffing in the Post-Click Era

In today’s performance marketing world, cookie-stuffing has become a serious concern. Rightfully so – injecting unauthorized cookies into a user’s device to hijack conversions undermines trust in affiliate ecosystems and threatens fair competition. Anti-fraud platforms often use strict rules to detect cookie stuffing, with one of the most common triggers being any change of tracking tags during a user session. But is every tag change truly a fraud attempt?

Telling Fraud from Fair Play

Cookie stuffing typically refers to the practice where a third party forces a tracking cookie into a user’s browser without their knowledge and without a meaningful user interaction. For example, an unscrupulous actor might secretly place cookies for several retailers when a user visits an unrelated website, attempting to “claim” any future purchases the user makes elsewhere and steal affiliate commissions.

However, not every cookie placement is malicious. Legitimate affiliate tactics involve user-triggered actions, like a user clicking on a properly disclosed promotional link, a banner, or a push notification. In these cases, cookie placement is transparent, tied to a user’s intent, and genuinely reflects the affiliate’s role in influencing the purchase decision. Understanding this distinction is crucial when separating real fraud from legitimate marketing strategies and not losing millions in affiliate revenue because of false fraud flags.

Omnichannel marketing paired with ethical analysis of customer data is a global trend that cannot be ignored by field players seeking to scale customer engagement. It makes the retailer-affiliate link mutually beneficial. Here’s why a more nuanced approach is essential in keeping this interplay transparent and fraud-free.

Real User Behavior is Dynamic – Especially After 8-10 Minutes

The quality of a user session does not necessarily improve with time. While the average session time across industries hovers around 24 minutes, the effective “conversion window” is much shorter — about 8–10 minutes. After that, even high-quality traffic shows a rapid drop in conversion rates.

After 10 minutes users tend to get tired. They are more likely to open other tabs, search for alternatives, and compare offers. Past the 10 minute mark, users hesitate and may even abandon the purchase process altogether. It is not unnatural to interact with different marketing materials or be redirected within different affiliate flows during a single session, without any fraudulent intent. Thus, if a tag switches at minute 12, it’s often because the user was re-engaged via a pop-up, push notification, or other remarketing technique, not necessarily because of cookie stuffing.

Here’s a chart showing how conversion changes depending on active session length on Amazon and AliExpress. In short, the conversion increases up to 8–10 minutes, and then starts to decline – people get tired or begin to hesitate.

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Monetization and Re-Engagement**

As users browse longer, they naturally experience decision fatigue, distraction, and doubt. Re-engagement is a critical part of modern customer journeys, aiming to help brands build lasting user relationships beyond just the initial click.

Re-engagement often means reminding the user of the offer through push notifications or pop-ups. These strategies attempt to bring the user back into the conversion funnel after they start hesitating, create additional touchpoints for brands without compromising attribution fairness, and help monetize otherwise lost traffic, ensuring no opportunity is wasted. In many cases, the tag change after 10 minutes is evidence of proactive marketing, not fraud. Long sessions are not necessarily good sessions, and this intervention is needed to “catch” the user at the right moment.

Cookie Stuffing Must Be Detected Smartly, Not Blindly

Certainly, anti-fraud measures are essential to maintain a clean affiliate ecosystem. However, blindly treating every tag change as cookie stuffing risks hurting marketing innovation.

What should be considered instead?

When did the tag change occur? (post-10-min interventions are often legitimate)

Was the user actively re-engaged or redirected?

Was there a visible user interaction (click, opt-in) tied to the tag switch?

IAB Europe’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing Best Practices encourages businesses to “validate fairly,” emphasizing the importance of clear program rules and vigilant fraud monitoring, while  suggesting that fraud detection must go beyond isolated technical events and be based on a thorough understanding of affiliate behavior. Simply put, a suspicious tag switch is certainly worth analyzing to see if it is part of a larger behavioral anomaly, not in isolation.

Only by holistically and comprehensively analyzing these dimensions and nuances can platforms truly distinguish fraud from legitimate marketing. Cookie stuffing is real – but not every session with a changing metric is fraud. At CATCH, we work for transparency and smarter attribution models that protect brands without punishing genuine, user-centered strategies. Re-engaging users without harming the attribution logic is a key balancing act for marketers, the ultimate goal being nurturing, not hijacking, the user experience.