When Do I Have To Be Worried About CR Drops? (12)
Sometimes I might be too faithful towards advertisers and networks, or maybe I am paranoid and have to take certain conversion rate drops for granted. But really, when do I know I am getting screwed by an advertiser/a campaign has tracking issues? I have been in the game for quite some time which makes me a bit blurry about this subject.
For example I am running a pin submit offer on a 900k audience with daily 1000 clicks or so. So volume-wise I am oke to have a feeling of what the average CR should be.
Most days it's around 8/9% conversion rate, but I have days doing 4 or 5% only. That's half!
I am curious how you guys are monitoring these things daily and how to act on it. Back in the days I was a publisher manager for example and some pubs really were whining about a drop of 1/2% only.
And are CR drops of 50% for an app install less worrying than 50% CR drop when running nutra for example?
Thanks!
PS: with the 4/5% CR days I am still profitable big time by the way 
I'm having the same thoughts sometimes ... on some days, the CVR simply goes to shit without any obvious reason, I think it's the advertisers scrubbing. Sometimes I do complain to my AM and sometimes it seems to help. But when looking at the bigger pictures, I take it as the necessary evil, the numbers have to make sense to both sides and this way, they are probably fixing the equation. It sucks and it messes the optimization up too, but I'm afraid that's the way it is.
Especially when you are on the verge of getting into green or not. It makes me lazy in some way when I am already in green but because of that I think I am losing money too often.
Regarding conversion rates, aside from traffic changes being an obvious culprit, the lower the overall conversion rate per visitor the more volatility you'll see. EG 1 conversion per 10 visitor vs 1 per 200, the the latter going to way more ups and downs especially if you're trying to scale.
Originally Posted by stickupkid
I recently had a campaign plunge from 100-150% ROI to -50 to -10% for 3 consecutive days so I paused only to resume it several days later and its fine again. Try not to stress over it, and keep diversifying with more campaigns.
And if I ever make my own tracker, having some semblance of intelligence to answer basic questions like "What happened to my ROI today?" is high up on the list. I hate having to dig through date ranges and widgets to find out what if anything actually changed.
I've been hit by this in the first few months of starting AM - it was a tough lesson. The affiliate network and advertiser had "technical issues" which ended up killing campaigns.
The conversation I had with the affiliate manager back then revealed to me that my 25% conversion rate from mobile display was too high and they thought I was making too much money so they cut it to 18% from one hour to the next. If you are wondering, that 25% meant more like 8% because the network only counted people after they clicked through my landing page, so I paid quite the price to get people there.
There are plenty of things happening on the backend that we cannot know about. I agree with Matuloo, usually will be scrubbing I think, aka balancing their side of the equation, haha.
The sad part is networks are keeping this vicious circle alive themselves. Scrubbing = higher payouts, means competitors are getting nervous since most (ignorant) publishers are reaching for the highest payouts. So competitors do the same ending in a payout war. Totally neccesary ofcourse.
Happens all the time.
The best thing I like to do if the offer is on more networks then I just simply balance it through each of them.
Sometimes it happened that the CR dropped on network 1 and network 2 and 3 were totally ok, so I raised the traffic there.
The other days network 1 was ok and network 2 was worse etc. you get the idea.
I felt like the advertiser itself is scrubbing the network.
Not easy to deal with these and not always we have options to run through multiple networks, especially when the offer is exclusive.
I think it's part of the game.
I had some retargeting campaigns with $2-$3 eCPA for a $30-$40 PO offer. I was getting 2-6 conversions per day from those campaigns for months and then suddenly 90% of the conversions stopped just as my regular campaigns stopped working. They say they don't scrub but I can't believe the new stats from my retargeting campaigns which used to be very stable for months. What I did was:
Telling my AM that they should just cut the payout if they are not making profit and never scrub, It breaks all my stats and I have to pause everything but if they cut the payout I can still keep some of the placements running. He understood it very well I think. haha
I keep sending traffic as long as I make enough profit worth my time. If a network scrubs they will most likely lose me as my campaigns won't be green enough anymore. We have enough offers and affiliate networks! By the way, I already found much better offers somewhere else!
Tip: Act like you are suspicious about scrubbing, Every time conversion drops a lot message your AM ask for investigation say something is wrong. You can't believe the new stats, etc. You have to find some other offers, etc... lol
I think they will think twice before they play with your conversions if scrubbing is really the case and it's happening at the affiliate network side and not advertiser.
Originally Posted by kian_superaff
Those are some solid tips there.
Would just add to not do it in a way that you are accusing the affiliate manager. Sometimes it's not the affiliate network, and even more often the affiliate manager doesn't have much power in this - if the network doesn't make money with the payout and their rule is to compete on payouts, not on EPCs, he cannot go against company policy.
From my experience 70% of the scrubbing is done by the advertiser (only), not the affiliate network. Networks rely so much on publishers (unless the network has real good exclusive advertisers, Awin for example) they think twice before hit the scrub-button.
Hey stickupkid, add me on skype black.emil . I have the same problem. I also run pins and i get screwed by advertisers.
It's really sad, but scrubbing and shaving seems to be common practice.
I still remember the first time I was profitable with an offer, asked for a pay bump, got it, observed a drop in CR that put me in the red again; then optimized back to green, asked for another pay bump, got it again, observed another drop in CR...
And I still remember the feeling I got when I finally realized what was happening.
After I got over those feelings of betrayal and hurt, I stopped taking it personal, and just accepted it as a part of doing business in this industry.
But I got smarter. I would test the same offer from different aff networks, and as soon as I saw a CR drop I'd rotate in the next-best offer.
And I would use this as leverage to negotiate pay bumps on more than one aff network, essentially making them compete for my business.
Even for exclusive offers (that are only offered by a single aff network), when I see CR drop drastically for no apparent reason, I would sometimes cease all traffic, wait for the AM to ask me why, then tell them about the sudden CR drop and that I've had to "settle for" another offer that is converting less well compared to the original offer's initial performance, and drop a hint that I may test their offer again to give it another chance, just to give them a chance to adjust the scrub rate back to its original setting.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. And it's not always because of scrubbing/shaving. But when desperate times call for desperate measures, tactics like these may be worth a shot.
Amy
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