Industry News | Finch Sells

Google Drops The Banhammer On Bizopp Affiliates

Jul 03 2009

I’ve been getting bombarded on MSN so I thought I’d address this with a single post.

If you haven’t already heard, Google has decided to bite back against bizopp affiliates. If you’re one of the guys who received this email over the last couple of days, you’re probably too busy scratching around for new traffic sources to be reading this post. I’ll paste it for everybody else.

It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.
This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.
As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.
We appreciate your cooperation.
Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdWords product or account.

This has, quite understandably, caused a large number of Adwords-only affiliates to shit uncontrollable bricks over where the next pay cheque’s gonna come from. As I’ve said on a number of forums, you’d be a fool to believe that it’s impossible to get another account up and running on AdWords. But then, you’d be an even bigger fool to actually bother.

Time to face facts. If you’re looking to run ads that promote a Google bizopp on AdWords, you’re living on borrowed time. I’ve heard more than enough reason to believe that the hottest keywords in this niche are now auto-triggering a manual account review. When that review comes, you better have your ass wrapped up in some pretty shit hot cloaking to stand a chance of escaping the ban.

Guys, this isn’t the sort of ban that you get on a forum. You can’t just choose a new email address (and maybe a new IP), and then go re-registering. There’s much debate over how sophisticated Google is when it comes to tracking those who opt to game the system after a ban. I’ve heard opinions ranging from the quick fix of emptying cookies and using a pre-fill credit card. And at the other end of the spectrum, some think nothing less than buying a new PC, shaving your fucking head and going under the knife is going to be enough to dodge the Adwords Suspendo team.

If you’re really such a lovesick puppy dog that you can’t bare to make a dollar away from Adwords, you will definitely need to:

Get a new credit card.
Get a new address on the credit card.
Find a new IP to access your Adwords account from.

Ironically enough, my Adwords account was registered to an old home address. I’ve since been given a new credit card and my new Internet was installed yesterday so I’ve automatically got a new IP. I could go and install a brand new sparkling Adwords account with no back history of bizopp abuse, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered to waste my time with them.

I’m sure many affiliates are actively hunting out new credit cards to get their Adwords accounts back up and running. But why? It really doesn’t matter if you were running a campaign that was making you a five figure sum of profit every day. If you didn’t immediately explore your traffic options after you established that profitable campaign, you’re a fucking retard and you deserve to fail.

I’ve said this to PPC guys and I’ve said it to SEO guys too. If your entire business is built around driving traffic from Google, it’s no more than a castle built on sand. Especially if you’re operating in the shady business of rebills where it’s quite obvious that changes are necessary to regulate the industry.

If you’re one of the affiliates who’s woken up to a suspended account and no other source of traffic, it’s time to consider whether you’re in this game for the short term riches or the long term success.

Adwords can be an incredibly profitable source of traffic. If you can find a way to keep campaigns ticking over by Google’s rule of thumb, you should feel entitled to enjoy those large cheques. But don’t expect anything less than a steep, harsh learning curve when Google changes it’s rulebook and leaves you staring in to the abyss.

Look at all the options available to you. Diversify your traffic, test new waters, and don’t be afraid to stop living as Google’s bitch. The same can be said for every major traffic source. Diversity and flexibility are the keys to establishing successful campaigns that last longer than it takes for an Adwords teaboy to press “Ban”.

Are You Target Number 1 For The Scrub & Shave?

Jun 22 2009

If you’ve had your ears to the ground recently, you’ve probably heard quite a bit of discussion on the murky business of shaving and scrubbing. No, I’m not talking personal hygiene but rather the constant struggle for transparency between affiliates, networks and advertisers.

People will bitch and moan about these issues until they’re blue in the face. But you’ve gotta know what you’re dealing with before you throw the toys out of the pram. And most publishers refuse to see both sides of the story.

No affiliate likes being scrubbed, and no affiliate likes getting the shave-o treatment. But it happens and it’s probably happening to you right now.

Scrubbing is a widely used tactic by both networks and advertisers. You might never know that your leads are getting scrubbed until it reaches such a point that your profits are turning in to losses. On the network side, this works by simply scrubbing out some of your leads. You might be pushing through 100 leads a day, but only 95 are showing up in your stats because there’s a 5% scrub going on behind the scenes.

The network will usually only resort to scrubbing if it’s concerned that the quality of the leads you’re sending is low. I’ve heard of advertisers striking up contractual agreements that a scrub is applied across the boards to every affiliate on that network for a particular offer. This is generally a precaution taken to compensate for the poor leads that a certain set of publishers might be sending.

Zip submits and short email submits are the widely used example of a vertical which has been brought to it’s knees by excessive scrubbing. If you push a lead through which is already registered on the system, you’re going to get scrubbed. If your leads don’t meet the quality criteria that the advertiser has in place to make a tidy profit, they’ll scrub you until the margins add up.

As for shaving, this is a much darker area. Once again, it happens with both advertisers and networks. While most of us affiliates who’ve been doing this for a while have come to expect advertisers shaving leads, you can bet that there’s gonna be a backlash if it’s discovered on the network side.

Shaving is where the advertiser simply doesn’t report a certain percentage of leads. It can get even murkier when you start having networks taking a cut to go along with the shaving – and yes, ultimately it’s the affiliate who gets fucked over.

It’s long been suggested that Direct Track – one of the most popular systems used for lead tracking – has a built-in function which can automatically shave leads to a set percentage. I can’t speak on the subject for sure because I’ve never had access to the software and I’ve heard mixed reports on that being the case. Don’t be fooled though. Many advertisers will REFUSE to run an offer with a network unless there’s a percentage of leads shaved from the final payout.

More recently, some of the lesser known networks have gotten real aggressive when it comes to using the scrub and shave tactics. But they do it in such a way that you’ll barely notice a difference in your profit margins. They do it by simply offering higher payouts.

What’s the number one way to bait a fresh inexperienced affiliate? It’s probably something along the lines of “Oh hey dude, we offer the same Acai berries, but with a few extra bucks thrown on top.”

The affiliate thinks he’s getting a stellar deal and switches network. Now the network has to balance the books and actually sustain it’s own margins. So what you’ll normally see is a small but significant scrub. The affiliate won’t notice a massive change because although the conversion percentages are down, the higher payout keeps everything even. The network wins because that’s one more affiliate working for them that would have been working for somebody else.

Network issues like this are generally pretty straight forward to resolve. You should be actively split testing your offers to see how they perform when funneled by different networks. You could spend a whole year promoting Offer X and making $2.50 EPC, only to switch to a different network and see it bumped by 30 or 40 cents. Those margins add up over time.

It’s also important to network and stay in touch with affiliates who are working the same verticals. Believe me, put a bunch of guys making $xx,xxx/day in the same chat window and they’ll soon smell a rat when a network starts getting dirty.

I try to avoid the issue by only working with networks where I know the guys at the top are just as serious as the affiliates when it comes to these type of issues. I recommend Convert2Media on the simple basis that Ruck will fuck any advertiser that tries to put a foot out of line straight up it’s ass.

So what can we actually do about the bigger picture as affiliates?

Step one – look at things from the advertiser’s perspective.

This entire system is not designed to fit in with an affiliate’s ROI. We are the tiny fish in a massive pond. While it’s feasible that lawsuits could be bounced around where proof is had, you’ve gotta understand that the affiliate is much lower in the food chain than the network and the advertiser.

The only real way we can negotiate the scrub and shave is by providing what the advertiser really wants. What the advertiser is paying your ass to bring in the first place…quality leads.

You’re never going to weed out the shadiest advertisers who scrub for the sake of greed, and shave for the sake of upgrading a yacht. But in many cases, the advertisers are resorting to underhanded tactics because affiliates are providing low quality leads.

Low quality leads? How do we know what we’re sending? It’s all just sales and clicks right? No, it all goes back to the presell. How honest have you been in promoting an offer?

I was promoting an offer which was converting around 14% just a month or so ago. Without any warning, that dropped to under 5% overnight. I wasn’t the only one. Wickedfire members caught on pretty quick and it soon became apparent that one particular advertiser had decided to pull the shave-o trigger. This royally decimated the EPC’s for a lot of high flying affiliates. It happened on a reputable network so I think we can say for sure that the advertiser was acting on it’s own accord.

Of course, this just so happened to coincide with a warning that was sent out to all networks about promoting more than one offer on a page. To use the Google bizopps as an example, many affiliates decided to upsell an eBay work at home opportunity. Worse yet, some idiots decided to promote TWO Google bizopps on the same page in a way that suggested that the customer somehow needed both products to get maximum value.

Now, issuing a rebill on a Google offer is pretty unnecessary in itself. The information is all there once you make the purchase. You’re not getting anything new at the end of every month. Misleading customers in to signing up for two of the same thing…it’s kamikaze marketing if you give a shit about the quality of your leads.

Can you imagine how pissed off that customer is going to be when he discovers that he’s being charged $150 or so monthly for two products when they’re essentially the same and he’s getting nothing extra for his subscription in the first place?

Naturally, that customer is going to be on the phone canceling his order faster than you can refresh stats.

Cancellations and poor quality leads might seem pretty irrelevant to you. It doesn’t matter if a customer cancels if you get your $36, right?

That’s a completely destructive attitude to have as an affiliate. Can you blame the advertiser for wanting to shave the hair off your ass if you’re sending them leads that are not only going to cancel, but are going to be ranting expletives on the phone while they do so?

No, the advertiser is soon going to catch on. That’s exactly what happened recently when my conversions fell from 14% to 5%.

The advertiser looked over their financial sheets for the last few months and did some high school maths. They obviously decided that a little shaving was necessary to boost profit margins and that’s exactly what they did. A few affiliates taking a completely destructive approach to acquiring leads via any means necessary completed raped the rest of us out of the market.

Widespread shaving on that level is quite rare. But if you don’t want to be target number one when the advertiser points at a subid to shave in to the ground, take a little more pride and care over the leads that you’re sending. If they’re not good for the advertiser’s business, believe you me, they’re not good for YOUR business. And we’ll all feel the consequences as a result.

The Rebill, Compliance & Why You Should Care

Jun 13 2009

Now is one of the hardest possible times to be getting in to affiliate marketing. I consider myself at an automatic disadvantage being relatively new to the business. Disadvantaged by joining the party when the days of being able to promote an offer aggressively are coming to an end.

I can’t stress highly enough how important it is that affiliates start paying greater attention to the pages that they’re publishing online. The industry has been allowed to get away with some outrageous liberties in the way that we promote offers. I can’t see it lasting much longer. At the heart of the CPA industry we have the rebill offer.

While the rebill offer has been around forever, it’s also true that we haven’t seen it promoted or taken to the mainstream in the same way that we do today. The reason we have jobs as affiliates pretty much comes down to the volume of leads and sales we can generate. No company’s internal marketing department can compete with the volume driven by hundreds of Internet marketers.

I don’t care what the industry says. Affiliate marketing may get a bad name, but we have some of the greatest marketers in the world operating amongst us. It’s no longer a niche industry though.

Affiliate marketing is getting more and more exposure, and with a huge rise in network sign-ups, we can expect to see more Acai offers finding their way on to the web. More Google bizopps on the Content Network. More idiots using Oprah as a marketing wheel.

The rise in exposure is going to lead to an increase in scrutiny from the FTC and government agencies. I can see some affiliates getting hit hard and hit where it hurts. The rebill is already causing a much louder chorus of complaints than it was 6 months ago.

To get things straight, I think the rebill is a totally legitimate method of running a business. There’s nothing wrong with offering a free trial to a customer and a contracted payment plan afterwards. That’s if you do it fairly and explain the terms clearly.

But of course, not many of these shady companies are actually explaining those terms. The customer is utterly blind to the payments that they’ve just committed to and the resulting complaints are quite understandable.

For this kind of marketing to work on such a scale that we’re seeing in 2009, two things need to happen.

1. The companies selling these products need to get their shit together and be more upfront about the T&Cs.

I don’t care if it decreases my EPC by a few cents, I’d rather be safe in the knowledge that the customers know what they’re getting themselves in to. Charging the ass out of a rebill is one thing, upselling a bunch of products the customer isn’t even aware of – that’s a bunch of crap. It needs to be explained.

Super small white text hidden on a grey footer of a page is not good enough. It might be now, but when the crackdown comes, these companies are going to have to offer a lot more disclosure and transparency.

2. Affiliates need to pre-sell the facts, not the fiction.

The market has become so fierce that it’s no wonder we see so many flogs popping up. They produce the greatest EPCs and the greatest conversion rates.

Again, I think the flog is a perfectly legitimate marketing method – if it sticks to the facts and steers well clear of any suggestion that the product is an amazing “freebie”.

Have you noticed how some of the hottest converting offers in CPA actually reveal very little on their merchant landing pages? We get a bunch of testimonials and a bloated promise, but not much else.

This is because the companies selling the products KNOW that they can rely on their increasingly sophisticated affiliates to pre-sell the living shit out of their products for them. Their sites often act as no more than a payment page. The responsibility is falling on the affiliate to explain what the product does, what it is, and this is dangerous. Dangerous because so very little is revealed to us in the first place.

Most of the time I have two lines of description to work with. Offer accepted in USA/CAN…converts on 2nd page, etc.

The bizopp market in particular is absolutely hideous for explaining what actually comes with a purchase. We, as affiliates, are marketing in to the unknown and that’s part of the problem with these flogs. They’re inaccurate and misleading. They shouldn’t have to be.

I’ve had to deal with customers calling me on the phone, emailing me and adding me to instant messengers. Why? Well I fucked up with one of my WHOIS records for a start. But also because my affiliate landing pages are typically where the customer has read about the offer. The affiliate is revealing more information than the merchant, and the customers are pinning the blame on us when they don’t like what they find.

The responsibility is firmly on the affiliate to presell an offer. That’s why direct linking results in a much lower conversion rate.

If we’re going to be the ones doing the main presell, we need to be even more diligent than the merchant when it comes to making sure that nobody is posting their credit card details under false pretenses.

I don’t think we need to explain the exact financial aspect of the rebill. But we DO need to mention that a rebill applies with the offer.

Affiliates are becoming so hyper-focused on making that sale, they’ll often throw the T&Cs out the window. Calling it a “no risk, free trial” might increase conversions, but it won’t sit pretty with the FTC for much longer.

I’ve become increasingly paranoid about the offers I’m promoting. I think we all have a duty to be. I find it highly unlikely that the FTC is sitting there, legs crossed, with no plan of action for dealing with the kind of misleading marketing that is sweeping the Net.

The affiliate marketing industry is simply growing too fast for this kind of negative publicity to go unaswered for much longer.

Instead of spending your time looking for the next offer, I’d suggest affiliates set aside a day and look over the offers that they’re already promoting. Ask yourself whether they would comply with the FTC regulations now, and the inevitable regulations tomorrow.

Or go one step further. Get yourself hooked up and ask that an FTC representative personally reviews your landing page before you put it online. Better to be safe than sorry.