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Sweepstakes - Is the game rigged? (50)

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Hi everyone,

Been a while since i posted, but I'm still around.

I have tested sweeps when i just started my journey while following Amys 40 days guide, but quickly left that vertical as i couldn't seems to get it working successfully.
I moved on to the finance vertical via push, specifically loans and been doing quite well with them. Nothing serious, about $40-$50 daily net, but at least i was able to consistently get it in the green

This week, i was inspired by reading a lot of FA and case studies in sweeps and decided give them a shot again.
I browsed around Clickdealer and maxbounty for some offers (SOI US), setup some landing pages and started testing.

After burning through about $300 with barely any conversions, i decided to dig a little deeper into the offers themselves to find out why the fudge there are no conversions.

Using remote desktop to my sis computer (to ensure my cookies have no effect) i started testing each and every offer with a several fake email accounts i created, here is what i discovered:

1. SOI is not really SOI - Only 1 out of 15 offers i tested fired a conversion after filling up contact details & address (email, name, address, phone number). Non of the others fired a conversion after the same test.
*** I also waited a couple hours in-case they fire the pixel late.

2. The 14 other offers i tested seems to require the user to go through the entire survey process with what i am naming as "Conversion armor" built in their funnel.
Most of the time, its a popup to another offer which takes the user out of completing the entire survey, others you are simply being redirected when selecting yes to one of the offers in the survey and don't have a chance to actually finish the sweep.

3. Even after finishing the entire process, including signup + long survey, a lot of the offers didn't fire a conversion. So it looks a lot of the offers actually cheat and don't really report the conversion.

So here is my quick take on this vertical.

1. You are generating A LOT MORE leads than you think. The offer owners get a lot of email & address info into their DBs, but don't pay for them.
2. Get a good VPN ( i use the free TunnelBear for now) and actually test the offer yourself. See exactly when the conversion actually fires, if there any tricky redirects and if the offer is rigged.
3. To avoid doing something wrong and getting flagged for it, I use {test-conversion-xyz} as my hit ID for the test. Which later you can skype your AM to tell him to void that conversion.

This should save you A LOT OF $$$ in testing rigged offers

P.S
I test only SOI, but i would do the same testing for DOI from now on.

Have a great weekend!
Yossi

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Only way to counter is to test multiple offers from multiple affiliate networks and just pick the one that performs the best and cut the rest quickly.

You should be doing that anyway.

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Sounds like a good candidate job for hiring out a cheap VA in India / Phillipines!

Thank you for telling us how rigged the game is. Well it was common knowledge but didn't know it was that bad.

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Interesting.

Maybe this could cause the convert not to occur. Or maybe they detect you use a VPN and does not give you the conversion? Especially in the US.

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So true. I did a small camp with sweepstakes after doing research on AM as a whole. Was getting quality traffic but hardly any conversions. Did same test as you with totally diff device and IP, and same results. Taken down long funnel and conversion didn't fire.

I made my own offer with similar fundamentals and, low and behold - all the leads that registered via FB were logged on my back-end. I was super turned off by this.

Hope @stickupkid can make an update or maybe brief us on the state of the industry today.

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I even had a friend out of state do it, still no conversion. And the publishers are sneaky because they'll squeeze a pop in there which will basically get more date for other offers. SMH.

Maxbounty at least most offers are like this (SOI).

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It’s a gigantic mystery how any of us are getting sweeps to work, then

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With the setup you are testing, there are some gaps to fill tho';

- SOI means single optin, that means only people have to fill in the form, but dont have to CONFIRM their application via their e-mail for example. so the survey can still be very long and extensive, its still SOI lead gen, since no confirmation needed.

this also means upfront checks (on the actual submit form) are high level (not all advertisers to this by the way, ask them); it doesnt fire pixels when 1) data is already in the database (de-duplication) 2) fake/mickey mouse leads (so a fake name, on a real address, will not go through)

- you have tested through a network, so their is DOUBLE chance you get scrubbed by either the network or the advertiser (or both!). lets say advertiser pays 2 euro to the network, network makes payout 2,50 to attract pubs with higher payouts, but at the back they cut 25% of the leads (so dont fire pixel) although you still generated them. they do that to make up with the higher payout and still get margin.

one of the reasons I stick with direct advertisers yeah, I can easily explain I want a low payout, with no scrubbing or de-duplication so I get a clean payout and more important, a steady CR.

there are a lot of cowboys out there for sure, try to find direct/small advertisers who are flexibel and growing.

i can imagine if you run offers from BigBangAds, and they de-duplicate, you will have a shitty CR because they been in the game for so many years. ofcourse they launch different labels eventually to create more databases, but still.

edit: about the VPN's I can tell from here if thats correct way to test. a lot of VPN's are weak and a lot of advertisers have good ways to detect IP-adresses properly.

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No secret. Jaybot is known for working 300plus hours a week. Soon he will scale up to 300hours a day. That's the magic to break the mystery game.

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Yup, leads are getting scrubbed left and right, it's a known fact but in the end, it doesn't really matter all that much. Why you might ask?

All advertisers are scrubbing some leads, the % may vary but the legit ones do that in order to stay competitive with the rest.

If they go the fully-legit route and credit you for every lead, the payout would have to be something like 10 cents per lead (just made up this number as an example) and when all the others offer $2 per lead, nobody would even test their offers.

In the end, they still want to make their share, so they offer a payout that attracts affiliates and do their magic in the background to stay profitable. That's why it's important to test MANY offers, so you can weed out those who scrub too much and find the ones who're scrubbing just as much as they need to stay afloat.

It's not an ideal situation for sure, it definitely makes campaign optimization more complicated since we have to work with incomplete data, but well, that's the way it is.

But anyways, thanks for sharing your findings, even though I knew it was happening, I had no idea they would scrub this many leads.

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@mywebexperts Thanks for posting about this!

@matuloo said a lot of what I had wanted to say. I have personal friends that are affiliate managers, tell me behind-the-scenes stories on how they're "forced" to shave and scrub leads. Some networks have automated shaving in place where only a certain percentage of conversions would even show up on the dashboard. Then of course there's the dreaded "due to lower lead quality we can only pay you for xx% of the leads for this month".

I'm not saying all networks do that, and I'm not talking about any specific network in particular. I just know about the challenges a lot of affiliate networks face, and the tactics some of them have resorted to in order to stay profitable.

They're basically caught in the middle, on the one hand needing to offer competitive payouts to attract affiliates, and on the other hand needing to please advertisers enough to get paid.

Which is why veteran affiliates are always advising to go direct once you've found a really promising offer on a network, if your cashflow allows. Affiliate networks have their place though - they have more offers to test (convenience) and have shorter pay cycles which can help newer affiliates with limited cashflow.

At the end of the day, an affiliate will only continue to run an offer if it's profitable. Learning to spot dud offers early on, to save on ad spend, is important. This is why I like the approach of testing lots of offers, on low spend going to each offer. Yes I'd be risking cutting out good offers once in a while, but the massive savings more than justifies the approach.


Just thinking out loud here: Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to build our own "sweeps offer".

Sweeps lander -> opt-in/sign-up -> a multi-page survey to get as much information about the user as they're willing to offer.

Then segment the audience according to the answers and send suitable offers to each segment - referring to this post for more details:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post286280

These days many autoresponder services allow audience segmentation based on answers collected on the opt-in form. Costs can be significant though for larger lists.

To comply with legal requirements there must be prizes being given out. I'm not sure how often prizes need to be awarded, but if it's something like one ipad every year (don't quote me - I have no idea) then it shouldn't eat into profits too much.

A ton of work would be involved for sure, and upfront investment on infrastructure. And a large database needs to be built before you can justify the time and effort of sending different offers to different segments.

And that's why most of us like to promote offers instead of running our own offer.




Amy

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I know that some networks will specifically tell you that they DO NOT accept VPN traffic. I would expect even more networks will not count your conversion if it detects it has been done through a masked IP of some sort (VPN, hosting machine etc).

In theory, while the testing of the offer to see if you're getting shaved or not is a good idea, I would choose a different/legit method if you really wanna go there. Maybe test from a friend's computer to see if you get the same result. I know a lot of people that would help me with this if I gave them a few pints.. just saying.

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From my understanding, scrubbing leads is a part of the AM game. It's how networks keep their head above water while still being able to compete with other networks. But, it is up to us affiliates to weed out the offers from networks we're testing that are scrubbing more than the others or better yet go straight to the advertiser (which may require deeper pockets due to payment schedule).

I personally don't have the bankroll to go straight to advertisers so how can I verify/test/confirm that a particular offer is being shaved? Is it only matter of:
1) Strong/High Quality VPN
2) New device

Or is there other ways as well, maybe another thread that goes through this?

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I have worked for 2 networks in the past, and both did not scrub. Maybe a coincedence but I don't think it's common that a network as a standard scrubs on all camps. On some camps maybe, or on certain publishers maybe.

If your conversion rate fluctuates certain parts of the day, or daily, it's a sign of scrubbing. Often they dont spread that over the day but in small chunks.

Keep an eye on your daily CR, lets say it's between 12-16% that seems quite "steady". But 2% - 10% is a big difference for example.

Also compare the payouts you get, with other networks/similar offers. More than 25% difference, on exact same flow & monetisation, might be suspicious already so stay sharp! Ofcourse some advertisers have more clients in their survey, so they can offer a higher payout. It's a big difference you sell your info to 5 or 15 companies ofcourse :-). Thereby some advertisers monetize the "thank you" page too with a CC submit. At the end those extra conversions give the CPL eventually quite a boost. More room for higher payouts (but also higher chance of getting complaints).

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Well, you definitely got people's attention.

But some things really need to be cleared up.

SOI is not a vertical. DOI also not a vertical. Nor is pin submit or CC Submit.

Sweeps is a vertical.

Try running the same test on your sister's computer for CC subs or Pin submit next

You had some XX days on the $1 guide (which direct linking multi-geo pop traffic to push subscriptions), and moved on to some good success with the Finance vertical on push. That's pretty good!

OK. You decided to dip your toe back into sweeps, because it is easy, and went straight to the US (the most competitive and expensive geo possible) and blew through $300 with only a few conversions. Obviously, something is wrong with sweeps.

So wrong, that you decided to put your detective hat on and investigate by using Remote Desktop to your sister's computer and a free VPN to check up on all these offers using fake email addresses and dummy clickIDs, which the advertisers have never seen before, and definitely are not equipped to handle fraudulent leads on a massive scale.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying your testing method is not the best.

I’ve seen this pattern a few times before. Blame the vertical. Blame the traffic. Blame the geo. Blame the tracker, etc...

Sometimes, it totally is warranted. People and companies make mistakes.

But much of the time, as @caravaggio has pointed out a few times, the problem usually lies elsewhere.

Sweeps definitely has issues. It's really fucking easy to play around with and get some conversions at small scale and in cheap geos. But to be successful in sweeps is not easy. Competition is high. In worthwhile geos, traffic is expensive, even on pops (compared to FB or Push).

But I'm a tiny fish, so my opinion isn't worth much. I barely spend $200 a day on sweeps and I'm not that successful.

If the point is: 'But you can spend the same in XX vertical/traffic/geo and your ROI will be higher!' This is true. I can't argue that.

It all depends on tolerance for things. You can crush offers with really good ROI and low budget on FB. If you don’t consider cleaning comments and dealing with accounts effort.

Sweeps is pretty low maintenance, unless you hate checking your domains for flags constantly and switching your domain often and constantly testing shitty offers.

Too many variables. It's silly to paint with such a broad brush.

Damn, I wish I could get Finance offers to work. But that shit looks hard

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Any tips, or info on developing your own offer to send to your own lists?

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What makes this "manual test conversions" method difficult, is that there are more variables than just how much the network may be shaving.

Network A may be shaving, but they may have better infrastructure (better loading speed etc.), and their advertisers may be building new databases so there would be less issues with duplicates, or their advertisers may be promoting offers in the backend that are less sensitive to "lead quality" - leading to less of a need to scrub.

Network B does zero shaving, but they may have primitive infrastructure, and advertisers that have saturated databases and are more fussy about lead quality.

This is why I prefer to just spend 10-20x payout on each offer to get a quick initial idea. Although the lead quality and scrubbing may not be apparent until later, that would be a start.

Another difficulty: For a fair assessment, you'd need to send maybe 10+ test conversions from different IPs that haven't already been flagged by networks as being VPN IPs.

Having said that, vetting offers by doing manual testing conversions to eliminate the worst offers can still save money, if we'd just compare the conversion rates between offers, and not assess individual offers based on its conversion rate (from our test conversions). For example eliminate the worst 30-50% of the offers and test the rest.



Amy

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Can you please provide more info on the nature of your lists? Demographics? Interests? How the subscribers were collected?



Amy

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@vortex -- Basically if you have a niche you have been collecting data for, "Cat Owners" sending them tips and what not but building that audience. And you have 1000's of emails

Isntead of blasting aff offers, your own offer pdf course etc. Any tips on how to "make one". Especially a product that has quality and will make the customer want to buy more/expand CLTV. etc.

Not even sure if I am wording this all properly.

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Hi Everyone,

Didn't realize there was so much response to this thread.
But i am glad i started it, because it helped all of us understand the vertical deeper and how the players in it work.
I wasn't aware of scrubbing, price competitiveness and other concepts everyone has mentioned here, so great info in this thread, we should add some of it to the sweeps guide.

I want to clarify something, i have not said sweeps as a vertical doesn't work. Nor did i say its easy.
I have been making my living from the internet for the past 20 years and I am well aware that AM like all internet businesses is a consistency game that requires a lot of hard work and most importantly innovation.


The point of this thread was to recommend that instead of just setting up 50 offers behind a lander and throwing 3x-5x the payout on the offers to know which ones to eliminate (like i did until now)
Spend the time to walk through the offer funnel, see if there are any popups in the way or signals that will cause the user to drop out without you getting paid.
Yes, it takes a lot more work to check them one by one, but at least than you can make your money work into testing 10-15 offers that do have potential.
And even than, there is no guarantee you found yourself a winning campaign. Especially now that i know that networks and advertisers can play a role as well.

I do want to explore the idea of making our own sweeps offers, it does seem like a way we can make a lot more money and retain a lot more control.
The programming part is not the issue, we can build a very detailed DB and collect tons of information. There are even open source mail servers and auto-responders we can setup on a digital ocean droplet...

The question is how to sell all of that data?

It seems some offers had some serious advertisers involved such DD & McDonalds, and from the questions you can see that they work with credit repair companies, insurances etc..
I even saw some funnels transferring data back to these survey offers, which i assume they are doing with an API and skip the need for the user to even register on its own.
So the main question is, how can we build our own infrastructure to resale and reuse all this data?

And just for a final note,

@jaybot since you have been very inspiring and sharing without end, here is a little treat from me on what worked for me in the finance vertical which your welcome to copy paste it.
I am promoting payday loans, specifically in South America via push.
I discovered when visiting Mexico to sell an eCommerce software we built that loans is way of living in many of these countries. (my main business is high volume low margin ecom)
In fact Citibank highest profits are generated in Mexico, because they easily charge 30% interest on tons of micro loans.

So i tested (quite a few) loan offers across south america and found a few that worked.
However, to actually make them profitable i had to go the aggressive route and created simple landers that looks like are part of the bank website.
Here is an example to one of my MX funnels where BBVA is one of the main banks there:


The best ads that worked for me also included the bank logo (some publishers rejected them, but many are unfamiliar with such TMs)


I duplicated this approach across several countries, with several funnels for each (different banks), eliminated what didn't work well and kept the green ones.
Some days i see quite high ROI, others i even lose a little, but overall its pretty consistent and generates around $1000 per month. (It was doing really well around November i guess because of the holidays)

Work hard & smart
Yossi

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Hey @mywebexperts - thanks for all the info!

Do you mind if I ask where you find those Mexican loan offers? Those sound great-

Is that through an affiliate network or are you running those direct?

Thanks for the valuable post too!

-Jack

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Wow! That's a generous share!

Thanks so much, I never even thought to go aggressive or use bank branded pages as many of the loan funnels were already long as-is. Now I have a new tactic to try out

I've run a few through networks and they generally do OK. I ran Solcredito (on Wewe) last year and it did pretty well, but not enough for me to dig into. There are also quite a few offers on Clickdealer (and other networks) that work as a DOI + CPS offer which can work really well (I'm told).

But I'm really not very good at finance offers for some reason, so I've never focused on them

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The thing is, and it might seem weird to you at this point, it's easier to throw a bunch of offers into rotation and quickly test them with real traffic, instead of making detective work and trying to judge the effectiveness of the signup sequence.

As has been mentioned in the discussion here already, there are several monetization methods that are not so obvious by going through the lander alone... co-reg, upsells on the welcome/confirmation page/email, selling clicks etc... and these MIGHT be calculated into the payout.

Some advertisers are definitely shady, some can't put together a strong sales page, some have no idea what they are doing... but exploring each offer in-depth would be an overkill, a quick test with real traffic, using a proven funnel... that will tell you whether it makes sense to bother with the offer at all or not.

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Everything stems from customer need, so the first thing I'd do would be to get to know my target demo better.

I'd join a few forums in the niche, join a few relevant FB groups, read all the forum posts and group posts that have received the most engagement (likes, thanks, replies), find out their pain and pleasure points, and what types of products/services they're already buying.

And it's ALWAYS a good idea to build your own audience! FB page fans, a FB group, a messenger list and/or an email list. Figure out what kinds of free stuff you can provide to "lure them in". Running contests would be another good way:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...764-in-one-day

When you have your own audience, you have your own traffic, plus you can then get to know their needs better - whether it be through conversations in the FB group or messenger, or through surveys you send to them.

Once you know what people need, it would just be a matter of giving it to them - whether it be recommending them to products/services that have affiliate programs (by sending them affiliate links), or recommending them to your own products/services.

I'm not quite understanding what kind of offer you're thinking of making, but generally speaking there are 2 categories: Digital and physical products/services.

Examples of physical products for your sample niche: gourmet cat food, cat bowls (I just saw an ad for a "anti-vomiting cat bowl" on Visto) litter boxes (I've made quite some money in the past by promoting automatic litterboxes that had affiliate programs), litter mats, grooming gear, gps tracker, ID tag, cat toys, custom cat-themed apparel/products (tshirts, mugs etc. with people's cats' pictures and names on them)...

So you could build a Shopify store and either drop-ship, or stock up on the products in your garage/warehouse, or use FBA or another local fulfillment company. I bet subscription boxes with various sample-sized cat treats can work as well.

For digital products: Infoproducts on how to train cats for example, to eliminate behavior problems such as spraying. Doing a search on Clickbank will give you ideas, and in addition to promoting CB products of course you can write your own (or outsource it).

A quick browse on amazon and an FB spy tool (e.g. Visto which is free for now) will give you plenty of ideas as well.

As for services: Animal reiki is becoming more popular these days, and you can complete a course in 1-2 weeks, and get certified after a few more weeks depending on how quickly you get your practice sessions done. It can be done remotely too - perfect for promoting online to multiple countries.

And I know there are local services in North America (and probably elsewhere too) that make fresh cat food and deliver to the door. See https://www.rover.com/blog/fresh-cat-food-delivery/ for example. Wouldn't be a bad business to start in your own kitchen (may need to renovate and get some equipment to meet local laws).

I know the cat lover's niche is just an example, but the approach for any other niche would be similar: Once you get to know your target audience well, you'll know what kinds of products and services they need, and provide it in some way.

Hope that answers your question! If not, please clarify and I'll do my best.



Amy

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@mywebexperts Holy cow if that isn't the titanium nugget of the year! Thank you for the tips!


The capture and delivery part is easy - just use a lead distribution platform such as Leadspedia: https://www.leadspedia.com/lead-distribution.html

The hardest part is actually finding buyers and/or coreg partners, especially if we're just starting out at small scale.

You know what would really kick some ass? If there are affiliate networks or direct advertisers that wouldn't mind us collecting the user info ourselves using a form on our site (i.e. fill out this form to be entered in the sweepstakes), then using automation such as zapier or our own custom script to automatically fill out corresponding fields on lead gen offer pages.

I can see that being a huge risk from the perspective of the affiliate network or direct advertisers, but for those of us that have good relationships with networks/advertisers, maybe some special arrangement can be worked out.

The offers will need to be in non-competing niches though, or else lead quality would be low.

I have no idea whether a model like this would back out. It would be interesting to chat with some of the networks/advertisers that specialize in sweeps offers to get more insight.



Amy

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@mywebexperts which is the go to network for sweeps?

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While waiting on @mywebexperts' insight - here's a list of some good ones:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...mp-Advertisers



Amy

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Ill be honest, im the wrong person to ask. I have just started testing sweeps again which is why, like @jaybot put it, i put my detective hat on. (i find that once you understand how something works, you can innovate around it)

I have been doing ecommerce for the past 20 years and built a lot of technology & automation around it, so if there are any questions there i might be able to help :-).

@vortex
I started digging deep today into the back-end & code of sweeps offers to try and reverse engineer how to create my own offers.
Any CoReg brokers companies you can recommend i speak with? I found OptIntellegence powers quite a few of the sweep offers we promote (in the US at least), but seems like their front end is focused on selling leads and not buying them (would love an intro if any of you guys know them). I did call them a little late today, but ill call them again tomorrow morning.

Also, thanks for the recommendation of Leadspedia, but their prices looks crazy ($0.10 per lead management), ill try to find a good open source CRM/Lead manager, or ill have my team build something we can implement in our own offer pages.
But according to the leadprice they are charging, i can definitely perdict that there is a lot of potential in having our own offers and our own leads.

Also i recommend everyone to take a look at @Mr Green post from a few years back, still got a lot of info to help understand this vertical:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...stakes-secrets


Yossi

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Clickdealer

(or Gotzha, Wewe, Mobidea, Big Bang Ads, Yep Ads, etc.)

or Clickdealer

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I'm clueless in this area I'm afraid - never did coreg directly myself. Even the existence of coreg brokers is an eye-opener for me! Would be very interested in knowing what you find out!


Yup there are lots of other leads distribution platforms. And it would be REALLY nice if you can find an open source one!

If you don't need all the bells and whistles in the beginning, I'm pretty sure you can get a script custom-coded for cheap.

Or - use something to capture the lead data and write to a spreadsheet, and then use zapier to distribute the leads:

https://community.zapier.com/ask-the...ng-zapier-2654

Unlike yourself, I'm pretty technologically-challenged. But I'm sure you'll find a solution - I feel that the tech part would be easy once you figure out the coreg part.

Again, would be really interested in seeing what you find out!



Amy

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What are your guys' thoughts on the different types of sweeps offers? I think most people who have run sweeps have probably experienced this scrubbing situation when running SOI offers but has anyone noticed the same or similar scenario for more complex flows, e.g. pin and CC offers?

I would think that the monetization of these flows are different than the simpler SOI offers, so they would be less likely to be scrubbed. Especially considering their side of things, where affiliates can hide behind a VPN or proxy and self-fulfill an offer, I can understand some paranoia on the offer owner's end if that's a potential reasoning behind the scrubbing.

Sent from my SM-G9550 using Tapatalk

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Whenever a payment or at least a CC-based verification of some kind is involved, the scrub rates should be minimal. There will be some, but that should cover mostly fraud attempts and funding/expiry problems.

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This scrub you're talking about is from the advertiser (I'm assuming), how about from the affiliate network?

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Same should apply in case of networks, since there is a payment involved, they are less likely to get into disputes with the advertisers, so they don't need that much of a security cash bumper.

It depends on the particular network though, some scrub more, some less, some don't at all... it's not really possible to say something that would apply to all of them in the same way.

On top of that, advertisers who are billing their customers have to stay within certain chargeback/disputes %, so those running more shady products are more likely to lose their billing providers... which can translate to higher scrub rates as they need to operate with higher margins etc...

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Let's say I'm running sweeps CC Sub in IT, I requested an offer payout from my AM intensively (they resisted but I seduced them :P), they didn't want to, but at last they did, will they now scrub more? and why?
Did my AM request that bump from sales manager, from the advertiser, or was it his own initiative? I wonder why my AM didn't really want to raise the payout.

And scrub. Is it just a percentage slider? let's say scrub percentage is 5%. But I'm running a CC submit and payout is 28$ and I got 4 conversions, will it now be 25%?

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I heard it's common. When someone asking too much about payout they just set scrubbing on x% more and give you what you want (bigger payout). But on the end you'll earn more or less the same.

I think @twinaxe mentioned it one day, it's good to ask if you can get another link to split-test between bigger and lower payout. It's not always possible though.

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I'm doing that right now. Split testing the same offer at different payouts from the same affiliate network (they had to create a special offer for me, apparently no one has asked this before me). But I'm always the guy to wonder about the ins and outs of things

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At the end network and/or advertiser want traffic and revenue too, so they always try to find a good balance of squeezing conversions without getting complaints from the affiliate. So before launching an offer talk about this upfront. Ask for a pure payout without scrubbing. And be open what you really need to make profit as you wish (realistic ofcourse).

I am always open about my cost per lead/sale towards network/advertiser (if its -50% ROI, but also if I run +400% ROI), so they have insights too, thats where you build a relationship!

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Depends on where the bump comes from, will explain below.


I'm not saying it's the same with every network, but based on the info I have, it works like this:

Advertisers agrees to pay for example $30 per CC submit, the network set's a default price of $25 for all affiliates, so they have a bumper of $5 for possible bumps on the network side. Your AM can give you part of it, let's say $2, if they want to bump higher a manager has to approve it. At the same time, the network tries to get higher payouts for certain affiliates, who send high quality leads, so the quality bump can come directly from the adevrtiser too.

In the end, they all want to make more $$$... so if you send a lot of leads, your AM or their manager can give you a share of the networks profit as they will make more in the end, thanks to the high volume. If you want higher bumps, the quality has to be high in order to get a further bump from the advertiser.

I've never seen the setup live, so I would just speculate here, but I assume the system would scrub every Xth lead, so the % would fluctuate a lot with lower volume. With higher volume it should settle at certain %. But again, this won't be a one-fits-all setting. Scrubbing leads of affiliates that send very high quality leads and the advertiser loves them, that would be pretty silly. While those sending shitty leads would certainly be scrubbed more.

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I wonder will the AM earn less when a payout bump happens? @matuloo @stickupkid

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Depends on the commision model they work on. Most companies give a bonus on monthly profit, not on revenue. So bumping will not help getting their bonus quicker. But if the payout bump gives the affiliate more room to scale, then yes ofcourse.

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This is the golden ticket right here. Communication is everything with advertisers.

When you are running an SOI campaign the most important thing is the EPC that the advertiser is earning on your traffic. High volume SOI advertisers usually don't look at the lead volumes so much as they look at the EPC your traffic is generating them (based on back-end funnel conversions, co-reg sales, etc).

The problem most new affiliates have is that they promote SOI offers through affiliate networks. SOI advertisers will generally scrub affiliate networks traffic at a set % (Let's assume 50% scrub) because that is usually the rate they profit at. When a new affiliate runs their offer it will start out being scrubbed, but if it is quality traffic you will notice they increase the EPC you are earning over time.

Now, this is much easier to do if you are running direct with the advertiser. As Stickupkid mentioned, communicating the costs and earnings can work very well.

I've had campaigns that were decent volume, but were -15% ROI. So I contacted my rep and said "hey, this source (I always pass different source ID's in subids to the adv) is able to provide consistent volumes, but based on my calculations I need to be earning $0.36 EPC to become profitable on my end."

They will usually message me back and say one of 2 things:

1. "Hmm, we are only earning $0.25 on that sub ID so the highest we can go is low $0.20's"
or 2. "Okay yeah our EPC is good on that. I've adjusted your EPC to $0.36"

Both responses are helpful because either you get your pay bump (through EPC) or you learn about your traffic quality and can work on ways to improve your backend EPC. Think about user intent.. the messaging on your page, etc. What exactly does the user NEED to do to get more money for the advertiser? If you figure out how to make them do this, then your scrub rates will disappear and your EPC's will increase drastically.

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I think that your statement is too generalised. If you go live with a trusted network which generates high volumes of SOI leads for its advertisers, you get the same CR plus better service (though a bit lower rate). Networks are interested in you to be successful so it's reasonable to recommend the right advertiser, the right offer, the right source and the right funnel. Adverts interested in getting traffic for their offers even though they might not be the market's top performers. It's much better for newbies to run with networks than go direct.

P.S. We used to run SOI sweeps but for now we're 100% focused on cc subs so I'm not interested in hunting SOI affiliates (and especial newbies) at all

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Wow, it's really 50%? I was sure that margin is much smaller, like 20% or so.

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I don't think it was meant as the default rate, but rather an example. Based on the info I have, they don't aim for such high profits, at least not "initially"... upsells, coregs, traffic sales etc can definitely drive the profits up, but it's not what they want to make straight away. Some advertisers are even willing to work with an initial loss, because they know the following revenue will make up for that. It's quite different from one advertiser to the next one.

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It's an assumption ;-). Lets say the payout of an offer from advertiser is 4 euro. This means the actual CPA would be 5 euro (advertiser is holding 1 euro for themselves).
The 4 euro CPA gets another cut, since the network has to earn too. So eventually you end up getting 3 euro.

If a network wants to attract more pubs they increase the 3 euro to 3,25, and networks cuts of 0,25cts of their margin.

Another option is too scrub, this could be done by network AND/OR advertiser, to make sure the payout bump gets corrected somewhere (so not like 50% scrub is needed, with only 25ct raise). Sometimes network does this without telling advertiser even. Sometimes advertisers scrub without telling network. So yeah, as a newbie I would start direct (although thats hard, since a newbie doesnt have a name yet, and doesnt have the connections).

But if you are able to start DIRECT with an advertiser you have;
- more margin
- less chance of getting scrubbed
- direct contact-> it's faster, more focussed on you as client, you can ask for adjustments/exclusives/landers more easy

On the long run having some quality advertisers on your side who bounce with you when needed, is a massive advantage than running through a network. Often networks have AM's which are by far not as skilled and smart as advertisers. Thereby as newbie you have to fight for attention since AM's are often focussed on the big fish only/first.

Some networks do really add something, but I think most are there just for the ease of having things tracked and an extra security for getting your money (although this is debatable too).

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Well explained with some solid advices. Thanks!

Do you maybe have method how we could try to contact advertiser directly?

I have one offer from network and I tried to contact adv through their website as they have one. I applied but never get response. Tried e-mail from their website, also zero response. Tried to find the name of the brand on Skype - no results. Any other ideas?

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Yeah be honest, tell something about relevant experience, your goals, mission, strategy etc. A newbie with a clear view is better than a newbie with no clue. Another major step to take is visiting conferences, meetups etc.

Via google, whois etc you might find some advertisers. Most websites they use are for the show and not working, or they barely check the info@ mailbox for example.

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Sometimes the advertisers have their own in-house affiliate programs, try to search for those. A simple search like "offer name + affiliate network" or something like that can help.

Some don't have the setup to work with affiliate directly, so it's a no-go. In that case, you need to search for similar offers that do direct deals.

Conferences help a lot too as stickup suggested above, but that's not an option for now due to covid.

There are also many FB groups dedicated to affiliate marketing and many direct advertisers are part of them, try to ask for direct offers there.

Using the offer aggregators such as odigger or offervault can give you an idea too, in case you find the same offers listed at several networks, chances are they should have an inhouse program too.

Another option I used, was to search in google by using keywords that are related to the niche I needed offers for, or directly the offer name ... check what ad's are running, click them and explore the offers you land on, some would have contact info or links to their programs.

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With stickupkid's help I found out people who represents the brand. Waiting for the contact from them Could you say the names of the groups on FB?

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