Dark Side of CPA Networks?
Sorry guys, I really *wanted* to share this with you, 'cause my jaw dropped down for a little while after reading it. I knew (many) CPA Networks shaved leads, but I didn't know about all this other shady practices that can occur.
This stems from a thread in BHW, I copied text and pasted it in here (search for title and you'll find it).
"I will not name the affiliate but it was a major one. What I will start with is they screw everyone. Me. You. Does not matter. We would have meetings about our shave percentage and laugh. For screwing me over I thought I could best get them back by turning over trade secrets to you. First, we know every bad lead you get. Every. Last. One. We used an algorithm to determine lead quality across all offers, as we had reports on every lead that came back. So if you did 20 bad leads on twenty different offers we knew about it. Surprise! I say 20 because that was door time. I can not say if other networks track like we do. I have read where people brag about hundreds of fake leads. Please. First of all if you do your own leads go find another line of work. Second, no way. We bounce you at 20 or less, and your payout is not happening.
What you need to know about email shaves is that no matter what the requirement is, a certain percentage of email or zips have to fill out the following pages or no convert. Of course we do not tell you that. We would have a hard time getting afiliates to do an offer that read "Simple Email and Two Thousand Offer Signup". So even though you know for a fact your friend filled in his email, if that is all he did, do not expect a conversion.
On to VCC's. Do. Not. Use. Them. We track by bin, and we know a fraud trial offer from a mile away. Faking trial offers is one of the quickest ways to get banned, so do not do it. You need to know the average trial offer cancellation rate is below ten percent. Which means for every hundred trials you send us we expect 90 to stick. The news is not all bad. I will reveal a near ban proof niche if you are not a total idiot. Dating. The reason is the phone number, or lack of it. There are dozens of dating offers and if you stick to 50 or less per offer, you are good to go. Beyond 50 with no paid signup and they complain, but the conversion rate on free to paid is 2 percent, so there you go. Run through 50 on one, then 50 on another, and so on and so on. Do not be a total idiot. Grab some friends, give them ten different dating offers, and pay them ten bucks. It is not hard. CPA though can be huge money. Find one good product to monetize, send quality traffic, and make big dollars. They do not ban you for good traffic. They shave like a mother, but they will not ban you. CL. The reason they ban CL is because they want exclusive access. Most of what you see on Craigslist is the CPA network itself, so in a sense you are competition to them. Easy work around. Landing page, redirect, again you can not be a total idiot. We figured 70 percent of all leads came from Craigslist, so our response is ban it, and take it for ourselves. Do not tell them your traffic source. These mothers will ban your own website and then approach you to advertise on it. This actually happened. If they know a good source of traffic they will ban it to make it theirs.
PPC is soon to be banned. If you look at your offers you can tell that less and less offers allow search. What they are doing is using your money to use as guinea pigs to get high paying keywords. Here is a big secret for you: they can learn your keywords through the referrer, for instance, they look at the referring landing page, scrape the keywords, and do a search. When the sponsored links pop up we move the mouse to bring up the link, if it is your affiliate link they take note of the keywords, save them and move on. Not only do they do it, they have software to automate it. I was told to tell one affiliate his keywords were banned. The advertiser did not approve of them. You can guess what happened to the keywords next, and how they were used.
Yahoo answers is the second biggest source of non PPC leads and they ban that too. Why? Because of exclusive access. As I close my first post I also want to tell you a secret, a deep dark one I heard at a convention a while back. The Can Spam law was written for and by Google. I checked and sure enough the year that law was passed Adwords came out. Funny thing is adwords is nothing but spam on blogs, but in the United States as in other countries, he or she who has the money can make the law."
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I can't really tell if this is 100% true or not, and I guess not all the networks work the same way. But, it is very disappointing to hear when you are someone who really wants to help out and deliver legit leads to the network and be treated fairly in return. I guess, after all, this industry is one characterized by shady and 'corrupt' practices on all sides of the equation (affiliate, network, advertiser). But one should never generalize.
It would be very interesting to hear the opinion of network owners and AM's that usually post on this forum.
What can you say 'against'/'for' this declaration?
I'm intrigued
This stems from a thread in BHW, I copied text and pasted it in here (search for title and you'll find it).
Code:
"Former Affiliate Manager Here Spilling CPA Secrets
"I will not name the affiliate but it was a major one. What I will start with is they screw everyone. Me. You. Does not matter. We would have meetings about our shave percentage and laugh. For screwing me over I thought I could best get them back by turning over trade secrets to you. First, we know every bad lead you get. Every. Last. One. We used an algorithm to determine lead quality across all offers, as we had reports on every lead that came back. So if you did 20 bad leads on twenty different offers we knew about it. Surprise! I say 20 because that was door time. I can not say if other networks track like we do. I have read where people brag about hundreds of fake leads. Please. First of all if you do your own leads go find another line of work. Second, no way. We bounce you at 20 or less, and your payout is not happening.
What you need to know about email shaves is that no matter what the requirement is, a certain percentage of email or zips have to fill out the following pages or no convert. Of course we do not tell you that. We would have a hard time getting afiliates to do an offer that read "Simple Email and Two Thousand Offer Signup". So even though you know for a fact your friend filled in his email, if that is all he did, do not expect a conversion.
On to VCC's. Do. Not. Use. Them. We track by bin, and we know a fraud trial offer from a mile away. Faking trial offers is one of the quickest ways to get banned, so do not do it. You need to know the average trial offer cancellation rate is below ten percent. Which means for every hundred trials you send us we expect 90 to stick. The news is not all bad. I will reveal a near ban proof niche if you are not a total idiot. Dating. The reason is the phone number, or lack of it. There are dozens of dating offers and if you stick to 50 or less per offer, you are good to go. Beyond 50 with no paid signup and they complain, but the conversion rate on free to paid is 2 percent, so there you go. Run through 50 on one, then 50 on another, and so on and so on. Do not be a total idiot. Grab some friends, give them ten different dating offers, and pay them ten bucks. It is not hard. CPA though can be huge money. Find one good product to monetize, send quality traffic, and make big dollars. They do not ban you for good traffic. They shave like a mother, but they will not ban you. CL. The reason they ban CL is because they want exclusive access. Most of what you see on Craigslist is the CPA network itself, so in a sense you are competition to them. Easy work around. Landing page, redirect, again you can not be a total idiot. We figured 70 percent of all leads came from Craigslist, so our response is ban it, and take it for ourselves. Do not tell them your traffic source. These mothers will ban your own website and then approach you to advertise on it. This actually happened. If they know a good source of traffic they will ban it to make it theirs.
PPC is soon to be banned. If you look at your offers you can tell that less and less offers allow search. What they are doing is using your money to use as guinea pigs to get high paying keywords. Here is a big secret for you: they can learn your keywords through the referrer, for instance, they look at the referring landing page, scrape the keywords, and do a search. When the sponsored links pop up we move the mouse to bring up the link, if it is your affiliate link they take note of the keywords, save them and move on. Not only do they do it, they have software to automate it. I was told to tell one affiliate his keywords were banned. The advertiser did not approve of them. You can guess what happened to the keywords next, and how they were used.
Yahoo answers is the second biggest source of non PPC leads and they ban that too. Why? Because of exclusive access. As I close my first post I also want to tell you a secret, a deep dark one I heard at a convention a while back. The Can Spam law was written for and by Google. I checked and sure enough the year that law was passed Adwords came out. Funny thing is adwords is nothing but spam on blogs, but in the United States as in other countries, he or she who has the money can make the law."
---
I can't really tell if this is 100% true or not, and I guess not all the networks work the same way. But, it is very disappointing to hear when you are someone who really wants to help out and deliver legit leads to the network and be treated fairly in return. I guess, after all, this industry is one characterized by shady and 'corrupt' practices on all sides of the equation (affiliate, network, advertiser). But one should never generalize.
It would be very interesting to hear the opinion of network owners and AM's that usually post on this forum.
What can you say 'against'/'for' this declaration?
I'm intrigued
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Kenster -
Thanks
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robingbg -
Thanks
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