Sometimes You Have to Wonder
Posted On: 2007-12-18
This past weekend a major sponsor ran a very big promo and some webmasters did very well out of it ... if you can believe what you read on adult webmaster boards. Others of course didn't do so well and some didn't score a single sale at all even though they did seem to send quite a bit of traffic.
Of course when a big offer is on the table from a sponsor many Webmasters watch their stats rather closely and the offer this weekend certainly had some looking very carefully at what was happening to the hits they were sending. And, as was to be expected, some Webmasters who count their out-clicks noticed a discrepancy between the number of clicks they sent and the number of clicks that the sponsor recorded.
Why should that be expected? Well for a start there was quite a period of time during which the sponsor's server was down so any clicks sent during that period were never going to register at the sponsor's end. And then there is the question of just how accurate any measurable data could be that's sent over the Internet.
There is always room for error in any count that is made on the receiving end and sadly that's something that we affiliates just have to wear. It may not be fair but it really is a cost of doing business as an affiliate marketer although, all too often, it's the affiliate marketer who has to carry the can for just about every recording error ... and plenty of problems at the sponsor or merchant's end of the transaction too.
A couple of weeks ago a well-known affiliate marketer who was making some big money every month with the Yahoo! affiliate programs got the kiss off simply because Yahoo! couldn't prevent fraudulent signups that were being made from links that appeared on his marketing pages.
It's quite clear that Yahoo! wasn't pointing the finger at the affiliate and claiming that he was defrauding them; their beef was that others were using his links to access Yahoo!'s sites. So why shouldn't Yahoo! have terminated the affiliate?
Simply because the fraudulent signups may not have been coming from the affiliate's sites or pages at all; for all Yahoo! knows those signups could have been coming from cached pages in the search engines that the fraudsters had found. There's also the possibility that the fraudsters could have been using a script that simply included some of the affiliates links.
All the fraudsters would have had to have done then was simply run the script, purchase the goods and pay for them with stolen credit card details. Once again, they wouldn't have had to visit the affiliate's pages to achieve that at all.
But apart from all that what was Yahoo! doing about scrubbing the cards that were being used to make these purchases? What were they doing to run a few simple checks like one that would compare the IP address of the person buying the goods with the physical address they claimed to be their place of residence?
It's all simple stuff ... obviously way too simple for Yahoo! to even think of or perhaps implement. Instead it's much easier, cost effective and fun to indirectly blame the affiliate instead and drop him from the program.
Now if you think that's the end of the story I have to tell you that, from Yahoo!'s point of view it gets even worse. The affiliate ... who happened to be one of their top affiliates - before they dropped him ... asked Yahoo! if they could supply the URLs that the fraudulent signups were coming from; perhaps he hoped to be able to do something about blocking certain traffic from those URLs.
If he did hope to do that then he was out of luck because no one was keeping tabs on referring URLs to the point where they could tie a URL to a sale. It seems as though Yahoo! couldn't even be sure if the sales were coming from his sites or not ... all they knew was that the fraudulent sales were coming in with his referral code attached to them.
There were several simple ways that Yahoo! could have fixed the problem but instead it was all the affiliate's fault so let's kick him out of the program and it's a case of problem solved. But of course the problem isn't solved is it? The fraudsters will just move on to another affiliate and work his or her referral code to death until that affiliate gets terminated too.
Now nothing like that would happen in adult would it?
Sometimes you have to wonder why anyone would want to get into affiliate marketing. Perhaps as one comment suggested ... it's better to run your own online stores and that way the only clueless sponsor or merchant you have to deal with is yourself.