Scrubbing by direct advertiser (9)
I am working directly with an advertiser on CPL basis.
I asked them to send me the back end conversion report so that i can see which traffic converts best and try to optimize for it. The report had number of sign ups for 2 months. When i compared each month numbers to what is being reported to me in the affiliate dashboard both months were off by 27%.
I know advertisers and networks scrub but i did not expect 27% from direct advertiser that i have pretty good relationship with. Overall this has been a profitable relationship from my end and they have been pretty helpful in terms of new landers etc.
In fact they recently did a few custom offers with custom/higher payouts for me. Which is now making me wonder if they turned on scrub while they increased my payouts.
I also took a few random subid2 from their report and manually loaded them into my tracker which created additional conversions, so i know i am not imagining things.
So BIG QUESTION do i bring this up with them or pretend i did not notice anything???
Yeah, ask about it.
Tell them you'd like to know why they scrub so you can improve the quality.
Shouldn't be a big deal if you keep everything professional.
Hi,
A few things to mention:
- There will be some clickloss from their system towards your tracking.
- Are you talking about Short form (filled in only the first field) or Long forms (filled in the whole dthing.)?
Clickloss is also worse, when you work with a CPA-network, because there are more connections.
Now, when you 100% sure you got the right numbers, yes i would adress them about this. However, there is not much you can do about it tho. They can set it correct for a week or so, then your cvr drops again slowly. Then they will argue that it is your fault. Even when you split test several offers next to each other. I am sure that all offers scrub 
.
I also work direct. They help me out and i help them out. The limitations are in the fact that I cannot easily switch geo's or offers. Overall it has my preference.
The 27% discrepancy is between their spreadsheet report and THEIR tracker/dashboard so click loss is not an issue.
First lets clarify one thing, you asked for a report of signups as you said, what do you mean by signups? Are those leads that you get paid for or conversions from free registrations to paid customers?
Since these are numbers they gave you, it would be a pretty silly move on their part to disclose the fact they are shaving you, this easily.
Im gonna asume that the reports contains free leads/registrations and my bet is that the extra leads are bogus/fake/fraudulent registrations that they didnt pay you for. These can be invalid emails, duplicate registrations etc ... are you sure its not the case?
Here is the description of the Excel data that i got
Column A is all signups/leads by SubID and column B is all the paying upgrades from these leads by sub ID. The totals in column A are 27% lower than what i am seeing online in my dashboard.
I have no way to know if the ones they did not include in the dashboard/payment were not "bogus/fake/fraudulent registrations that they didnt pay you for. These can be invalid emails, duplicate registrations etc". In fact if i do confront them about these this is exactly what they might say and i have no way to know whether it is true or not.
Yup, it will most likely be invalid leads. Couple years ago, I was running a free membership (email registration) site and I was surprised by the large number of bogus registrations. I cannot think of any other reason why they would show those numbers to you anyways.
EDIT : Oh btw, could it by any chance be SOI leads when they pay you for DOI leads?
It is SOI leads.
Could have emailed it to me by mistake.
Just ask them about it? I don't see any company spazzing out and ending your mutually beneficial business relationship because you ask nicely about a discrepancy in stats? "Hey i noticed there's different numbers reported here compared to what i see in the other stats, why is that?". Ask them without accusations. See what they say and try to figure out if it makes sense.
If they are scrubbing,
At the end of the day, an advertiser is going to scrub if they want to, and there's not much you can do about that if you want to continue running their offer. You have to evaluate how replaceable you are to them, and how much value you bring them. Perhaps they have 500 affiliates that run way larger numbers than you. If that's the case, and you run in and start threatening to stop running the offer because you think they scrub, they might not care that much. If you on the other hand are a top affiliate of theirs, it's easier to make demands.
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