ZeroPark Does Not Want Clean Ad Spend
I'm surprised to see that no ZP representative has commented on this post yet. I think they've been having so…
I have had hundreds of campaigns rejected over the years; many quite rightly.
Today marks the first time I have had a campaign rejected for the reason:
“No monetisation”
Yes, ZeroPark rejected a campaign because I had made no attempt to monetise the traffic that I was buying.
There was a good reason for this lack of monetisation on my part.
The site in question was an online magazine — not an affiliate website — and I launched it three days ago.
Naturally, I contacted support, thinking it should be pretty easy to resolve.
I was pushed to provide more information:
Hi,
please let us know how you plan to monetize the visits you send to this landing page.
Best,
To which I reply…
I have no plans to monetise the traffic.
I launched the site three days ago.
I wanted to test xxx related keywords to see if these users would stick around and engage with the site, hence the Google analytics in my tracking code.
Sounds pretty reasonable, right?
No plans to monetise the site, but wanting to test ZeroPark traffic to see if its users would engage with the website.
Sounds like normal brand advertising to me.
Not so…
“Hi,
such a campaign will not be approved on our network.
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.Best regards,”
Now, call me a cynic, but is this not the most retarded ad policy in the history of self-serve advertising?
I’m not allowed to buy advertising on ZeroPark, for a completely legitimate white-hat website with no tracking link… because ZeroPark is concerned that I won’t make money from it.
Take a bow, lads.
Take a bow indeed.
A shit experience, with a platform I like, backed up by some astounding logic that I will never forget as long as I am buying advertising:
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.
If there is no monetization whatsoever then it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website.
UPDATE:
ZeroPark have since contacted me to explain their reasoning behind the ad rejection:
Links pointing at innocuous pages are a common footprint of cloakers and unscrupulous advertisers spreading malware — of which there is no shortage.
An affiliate announcing that he has no plans to monetise a campaign is likely to trigger a red flag. And, it appears, in this case it triggered many.
ZP accepted that the campaign should have been approved, and that the back-and-forth emailing shouldn’t have escalated as it did.
For my part, I regret blowing my gasket in public.
If there’s something we can all learn from this moment, it’s that “it makes absolutely no sense to send visitors to a website“.
(I want that on a t-shirt.)
It sounds like this was rejected because they couldn’t learn anything from it Finch…
Well, yeah, I moved most of my traffic away from Voluum, although not for those reasons.
It’s a shame really. I had only good experiences with them.
Wouldn’t want to be in charge of recruiting brand advertisers to ZP, or startups!
Come spend your money on my network! You can “un-monetize” as much as you wish LOL!
Is that too much to ask?
If anybody else has an advertising platform that would welcome my harmless white-hat magazine with little immediate commercial interest and no sign of virus alerts, please get in touch.
Where did you go instead? Selfhosted?
Lightweight self-hosted custom tracker for heavy traffic loads (pops, redirects).
Display traffic switching over to Thrive
SelfAdvertiser.com has a pretty nice platform with zero-click traffic.
thanks
Alright – I recently saw some posts on FunnelFlux – any thoughts on that one?
Probably were afraid that you are cloaking something shady behind your “magazine” I had Adwords ask me similar questions earlier this year, too
Yeah, I’m sure. And those doubts are well founded. But there’s got to be an acceptable manual review process otherwise the saga descends — like it has done — in to ridiculous situations like this.
I wouldn’t have had a problem if they turned round and told me: “Finch, are you cloaking, you bastard? This looks shady as fuck.”
But after 2 days of emailing only to insist that ‘no monetisation = no approval’, the only thing I know for sure is that there can’t be many brand advertisers on ZeroPark.
The biggest irony of all is that I am actually monetising the site in question.
But because it’s only Google AdSense, there’s no way I’d admit to it!
Ridiculous
ZeroPark has the worst customer service in the ad-serving business.
I don’t know, haven’t read much about it. Will check it out though.
Ha ha that was a quick response form them , You should have better contacted someone at higher level before posting this article , But never mind it was a good read.
Hahaha, They must love you. Its their best interest to make sure you should always make money
You have the full right to be cynical heres why.
Zp owned by same people as voluum.
Voluum has mega in house media buying team.
They can see everyones campaigns and more.
Connect the dots.
This is super rare considering most want brands that dont care about monetizing at all.
Fishy!!!
lol this is funny. ZP wants you to make money so they can eventually make double the money you make
Was Voluum just getting too pricey with pop traffic or did you need the multi-user functionality? Kind of in the same boat.
Sorry, your ads have been rejected because you don’t use the exact same landing page that 13,851 affiliates are using right now, claiming that our visitors have won an iPhone.
Please make the change so we can add another 13,851 page that is misleading as fuck for our visitor.
@disqus_ANnMSihK7B:disqus What makes you say that they have huge media buying team ?
I am using voluum since their beta and never had campaigns stolen.
On the other hand facebook also bans for the same reason, no metization = ban
And @FinchSells:disqus the reason why they didnt call you out for using a cloaker, is the same reason facebook or adwords wont tell why they are banning you but give you canned response, the reason is that they dont want you to reverse engineer them. 🙂
Hi Finch, great article… lmk when you get that t-shirt made. I want one.
I’m surprised to see that no ZP representative has commented on this post yet. I think they’ve been having so many issues (with people running creatives against their TOS) that now they’re wary (a bit too much actually) from approving campaigns that are not typical.