Traffic Gets Redirected to Someone Else's LP! (19)
Hi guys,
I wonder if anybody encountered this before. I had a campaign running on Avazu mdsp which was converting very well for a few days. It was doing 500 to 700 conversions per day across 10 geos (the offer is global). Then on day 3 it started to deteriorate and then on day 4, the best geo that was doing about 200 conversions daily got 0 conversions. I thought that was quite strange. If the users are just tired of the same ads, I expect the CR to go down but not to 0 conversions in one day. This morning when I open the dashboard, I see 0 conversions in all geos that I had running. So I tested my campaign link from the emulator and the VPN connected to one of the geos. It turns out that my link gets redirected to another affiliate's LP! The LP header says "This campaign is currently not running but we have other offers for you" and then has like 10 different offers on the page.
Looks like someone is stealing my traffic? What should I do?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Originally Posted by kathy_k
First of all, lower daily budget on these campaigns by a lot. And then try to figure out what exactly is happening and who may be responsible. Try having any friends in any of these geos click on the link and see what happens.
In the meantime replicate these campaigns so that any identifiable information in any of your URLS and tokens have been changed, and see what happens.
Maybe you ripped lander and there was hidden JS in it?
I was direct linking... no lander
I also just tested the affiliate link by itself given to me by the aff network and it redirects to this LP instead of going to the offer like before. Maybe this offer is not active anymore???
Yeah sounds like they've redirected it, check with your AM. Offer could have been pulled. May be checking traffic quality, lots of things! So pause and check with network 
Yes probably the offer got pulled by the network.
If they didn't tell you about it, though (check your emails) you definitely have the right to get upset with them
Thank you all for replies
This exact thing happened to me. The advertiser redirected it to another offer and leads dropped to zero. No one else was running the offer on the network at that time, so the network didn't know about it until I told them.
There is nothing you can do I suppose except to pause the offer and rant in a forum like this (just as I am doing right now).
Don't worry i've had 12,000 leads stolen off me by NEVERBLUE (Crooks) - All paid traffic from FB $6k out of my pocket and I didn't see a bean returned neither did I get the emails from all the customers that I rightly paid for for them. Apparently 2 days after they said to ramp it up because they loved quality they decided they didn't like it mmmm righto. So yeah rant on haha
Wow, i guess I am lucky I did not manage to spend that much on traffic. From now on will be checking all offer links daily. I thought it was networks' job but I guess I am too naive.
Originally Posted by wildfing
So yeah rant on haha Originally Posted by kathy_k
- Sign up with advertisers with a minimum contract. There are some advertisers who come, stay for a week and leave. All the efforts from the affiliates trying to work on their offers are gone. poof! I mean I understand if an advertiser has tech issues or issues with carrier, but app installs going out in 5 days? Nah
- Make it mandatory by contract that any changes to the landing pages will be announced in advance so that publishers are informed about it.
- Work in multiple timezones or at least have servers in multiple locations.
Someday I will have to do it myself. </EndRant>
Originally Posted by arunbasillal
could be that the advertiser have paused the offer and the network want aware of that till you mentioned this, unfortunately these things may happen.
there are many different advertisers working in each network and "human mistakes" can happen if some AM forget to mention this or if there was something wrong with the API connections.
That's why its your (affiliates) job to keep being on top on all your active campaigns,
Lucky you saw the trend of CR dropping when its started and not going to the weekend and find this after 3-4 days, that could really hurt (from experience)
Simple case of either the advertiser and network pausing/stopping the offer and redirecting the leftover traffic to a landing page they can still make some money on. Companies like The Parking Place are specialized in monetizing residual traffic like this (we make +30K a year with this; its a nice extra).
What you can do as an affiliate in order to counter this is to make clear agreements with the advertiser/network that they have to give you a 48 hour notice to stop sending traffic, meaning that if they need to inform you by latest eg on monday and then you have until wednesday to stop the traffic. If they don't inform you, you can make an agreement with them that they will pay you the 30day average eCPC as a compensation for the traffic you have send. Having such agreements in place can prevent you from losing a lot of money in case the advertiser suddenly decided to cut your links.
Is this from personal experience? Do networks let you make such arrangements with them?
I guess when you are a high volume affiliate, they would be willing to make such custom deals. I have had a network compensate me for testing an offer in the past, but whenever the offer goes down without warning, all I get is a "that sucks" from my AM.
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
If you consistently generate +1K$ a day everything becomes open for discussion.
WOW...i think u need to user another network or at least switch your AM
pausing offer without informing you!?
I will not work with them anymore.
At the end of the month, sometimes campaigns hit monthly caps.
This is the prime time to keep an eye on all of your offers that you are running.
Find an AM who will tell you an exact date and time as to when your offer(s) will cap for the month.
Frankly, in this day and age of SaaS, fully web-based apps, cloud computing, etc., I think it's absolutely unacceptable - even laughable - for an affiliate network's platform to not notify every affiliate of any change to the offer e.g. cap approached, offer needs to go down, etc.
The fact is it's a pretty simple concept. Send email to all affiliates where their ID has been recorded as sending traffic in the last e.g. 14 days. If it's an urgent change then have the emails sent with the high importance flag and/or send out an SMS or a notification via an app.
If this technology is there and the network or employees are too dumb to use it, they should be yelled out repeatedly.
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