Are Advertisers Cheating me?

February 25, 2008 on 1:41 am | In Questions and Comments | 2 Comments

Hi,

I’ve been involved in search marketing for about 4 months now and monitor my performance a few times per day.  One of my links generates a fairly consistent conversion rate.  Then all of a sudden it came to a halt and I was not getting any sales at all for a couple of weeks.  I emailed the advertiser about the situation and they claimed everything was fine.  Well, later that day my conversion performance returned to it’s normal level.  Sounds suspicious, right?

Also, another advertiser I was affiliated with did not award me any commission for a fairly large purchase that was made by a friend whom I directed toward this company using one of the links provided.  I emailed the company multiple times and got no response.  Finally, I was able to make contact with someone in their affiliate sales department whom I exchange a few emails with about the situation.  Well, when I gave them the order information and requested if they could submit the commission manually, I never heard from this person again and they will not return my emails or phone calls.

I guess what my question is, how do I know if a purchase was made through my link and is there any way that I can be sure that I am not being cheated out of my commissions after putting much effort and $$$ into creating ads?

2 Comments »

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  1. The first example sounds to me like they may have checked into things after your call and found a problem they were unaware of and fixed it. Not very professional of them not to follow up with you (if indeed this is what happened), but at least you are making money again.

    Keep in mind though, “rare” co-incidences are pretty common, and may look suspicious but only when you forget all the long odds that didn’t come up. In other words, you can always expect a small number of the billions of unlikely co-incidences to actually happen. I’m not to worried about this first one.

    As for your second example, this is a little more worrisome, but there are a couple possible non-fraudulent reasons for not getting the commission. If they had viewed the site or the item recently by clicking on someone else’s link first (or last), the commission might have gone to someone else,or it might not have been commissionable at all if they’d already visited the site that day/week/month before using your link. Program terms vary.

    They certainly should have explained it to you though, so there might really be something up there.

    The bottom line, though, is it doesn’t matter what the cause is, either you are making money, in which case you stick with them, or you aren’t, in which case you leave.

    Tony

    Comment by Administrator — February 29, 2008 #

  2. Thank you for the follow comment, Tony. The first advertiser has done this to me twice in which case I do believe something was wrong in which they fixed. That still worries me because how many sales do I lose out on before I have to inquire?

    The second case indeed I believe is completely fraudulent. I don’t know if I can mention the company’s name here but I would stay far away from them at any cost. Still to this day they will not return any of my calls or emails.

    Again, thank for comments and your book. It has helped me greatly.

    Comment by dstv — February 29, 2008 #

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