Reachoz MediaMost publishers and advertisers on a deal network are exactly what they claim to be. But performance-based payouts attract a small share of participants trying to game the review step, and the patterns repeat often enough to be worth naming specifically — so advertisers know what to screen for, and honest publishers know why some rules exist.
Coupon stacking
A visitor applies more than one discount code where the campaign only allows one — a network-issued code plus a separate site-wide code found elsewhere, for instance. The order still goes through, but the advertiser ends up paying twice on margin they only budgeted to give up once.
Screen for it: checkout logic that only accepts one code per order class is the real fix; on the network side, orders flagged with unusually high combined discounts relative to the campaign's stated terms get held for manual review before approval.
Self-redemption
A publisher uses their own tracked link or code to buy something for themselves, collecting the payout on a purchase they were going to make anyway — sometimes their own account, sometimes a friend's or family member's, used repeatedly.
Screen for it: matching the publisher's known account details, device fingerprints, or payment details against redemptions on their own links. A single flagged instance is often accidental; a repeated pattern isn't.
Cookie stuffing and forced clicks
Older, cruder, and still around: a publisher's page forces a tracking pixel or link to fire without the visitor actually clicking anything — sometimes hidden in an iframe, sometimes triggered on page load. Anyone who later buys from that advertiser, through any channel, gets misattributed to a publisher who did nothing to earn it.
Screen for it: a redemption rate far above category norms relative to reported clicks is the tell — a real coupon page converts a meaningful fraction of clicks, not nearly all of them regardless of intent.
Incentivised or non-disclosed traffic
Traffic driven by paying people to click or "complete offers" — common on reward-app and survey-adjacent traffic sources — technically produces real clicks and sometimes real conversions, but the resulting customers rarely behave like genuine buyers (higher refund rates, no repeat purchases). Most campaigns explicitly disallow it in their terms.
Screen for it: refund and repeat-purchase rate, segmented by publisher, over time — incentivised traffic shows up as a spike in volume with a corresponding spike in refunds a few weeks later.
Bot and non-human traffic
Automated traffic clicking links at a volume or pattern no real audience produces — usually aimed at either inflating a publisher's apparent reach or, less often, a competitor trying to drain an advertiser's budget on fake conversions.
Screen for it: click velocity, device and IP diversity, and session behaviour (a real visitor's session looks different from a script's). This is the layer that runs before a redemption ever reaches manual review.
The takeaway
None of these patterns are exotic — they're the same handful of tricks, repeated, because they work often enough to be worth trying. A network's review step exists specifically to catch them before a payout goes out, which is also, not incidentally, what protects the earnings of every publisher who isn't doing any of this.