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How to stop my manager from stealing my ideas/campaigns? (22)

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i have one manager (in push traffic network) whom i talk to daily for 15-20 minutes...and one thing i know is that... she hates her job...like literally hates her job...and one day, i accidentally told her....i make xyz amount of money...and then she got very curious and was asking me all sorts of questions...as if she found some get rich quick scheme...and wanted to run the stuff herself. From that moment i am very paranoid that she might have copied my campaign.

Being an affiliate marketer, I always have this fear. Most of the managers that are assigned to me(by the network) are dead lazy and they hate their job. And i feel all these people who are doing some boring 9 to 5 job are looking for some get rich quick scheme that might help them get an exit. And ripping campaigns of their own affiliates is the easiest way to get rich.

Big sophisticated traffic networks might not be doing this, but there is always this fear with small networks.

And my manager always tells me what exact offers my competitors are running and i am pretty sure, he might be telling others what i am running.
Infact i have certain managers who have shared me the exact landing pages of the other users(when i asked them to do so) and i am pretty sure, they might have obliged others too(with my landing page).

How do you deal with this situation? and prevent someone from ripping your stuff.
Or am i getting too paranoid?

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I think you may be over-worrying in this specific instance... if her attitude is as poor as you say she probably wouldn't be able to find success even if she did try to steal all your camps...

In general though certainly its probably good not to over-share too much and give all your secrets to everyone gotta give some of it of course, to build trust and for logistical purposes... but you don't need to show the "secret sauce" to every entity you work with either

Also you gotta remember that you have a skillset that others don't have. Even if some random person had ALL your knowledge and data and assets, the chances of them replicating your success are slim if they aren't already doing something very similar

But yes, you're right... if an AM gives you a "hot tip" on another affiliate's landing page that's working, its entirely logical to assume they'll do the same with yours

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I can understand your concerns but in my opinion there´s not that one general approach how to deal with it.

Yes, it can happen that a trafficsource/manager steal campaigns and the only way to prevent it as good as possible is to give the trafficsource as less info as possible.

For example only send postback info when needed (CPA campaigns) and don´t tell more about your campaigns than needed.

In the end you sometimes can´t prevent it 100% and when it happens it really sucks but when you give away too much info about your campaigns it´s also your own fault.

Apart from all these things it also depends on how big your campaigns are.

It´s a bit similar to beginners here when they run a follow along and don´t dare to post all details because they are afraid that someone could steal their $5/day campaigns

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There is definitely a potential for networks to rip campaigns. I've had personal friends that worked for traffic sources and affiliate networks, that would tell me about colleagues (or themselves - after leaving the network of course) that were running campaigns "on the side". Some networks have company policies that forbid staff from doing this, but I haven't actually heard of anyone getting fired for doing it. In addition, some affiliate networks and traffic networks have internal media buying teams. And I wouldn't believe for a second that they would NOT take advantage of all the data available to them in the backend.

What we can't do: Keep them from seeing our landing pages and offers and targeting and volumes - unless you want to cloak to keep them from seeing your landing pages and offers.


What we can do to make it less easy for them:

-Pass as little info as possible. When passing traffic source info to aff networks, use IDs instead of actual names. For bigger campaigns, refrain from posting conversions to the traffic source.

-Build solid relationships with affiliate networks / offer owners so you get exclusive offers that nobody else can run. And/or get your custom landers (I mean pre-landers) approved by the network/owner so no other affiliates will be allowed to rip them (but then you'd have to be vigilant in spying and reporting people who do - which may be worth it for a big campaign but definitely not for smaller ones.)


Where there's lots of money involved, you can be sure there will be dishonesty. We can only do what we can to reduce the likelihood, and just try to stay ahead of the curve by taking fast action and milking every opportunity until it dries up.



Amy

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Yup, it's happening and there is not much you can do about it. Just like the guys above suggested, it's always good to NOT share all the details and keep as much a secret as possible.

When it comes to AMs from an affiliate network, I don't care much because even though they can see my results and possibly the LPs based on ref data, they can't easily check my ads and they can't check the targeting... so it's hard to rip the campaign in ful..

With a traffic source, it's worse since they can basically check your full funnel... but they can't see your revenue so keep that private and don't post conversions back to the source, if you're concerned about the campaign getting stolen.

But in general, the real threat is not that high. These "lazy" AMs likely don't have the money to run the tests themselves and they likely would have to start with lower payouts than you do... so it's not THAT easy to copy your winning campaigns as it might seem to be.

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It's very hard to prevent someone from ripping your creatives due to the existence of spying tools. You just need to be one step ahead from everyone else and be diplomatic when affiliate managers want to see all your works.

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This post opened my eyes... I was about to share my Pinterest campaign that is working for me with my AM and ask her to help me with similar offers. Not anymore. She knows my website, but I don't care.

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If the AM is kind and honest, i wudn't mind sharing details with my AM. Infact on my current affiliate network, i am taking a little bit lesser payout so, my AM cud also earn some commission off me, because he played a huge role in my journey and he always takes my side when i get into trouble.

But i wudn't do this with my other managers.

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Sometimes you can get good reps who give you access to premium traffic that only their backend media buying team gets. I've gotten that and managed to run at 100% ROI for many many weeks at decent volumes.

You 100% gotta feel it out, building a relation works at the end of the day most reps (both ways) get a % cut of adpend / payout % so there is always an incentive for them for you to do well and keep doing well. With that being said, keep some of your cards close (such as exact profit figures)

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On the Affiliate Network side, it's not such a big problem, because they don't know all the details about your traffic... ads, targeting, sources, caps, bids... they might know some parts, but not all of them. It's way harder to steal such a campaign. It's easier for someone from the traffic source to steal a campaign, because they can (probably) see all your settings and they can literally just click through your entire channel.

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I see it same as you, AMs make money from their affiliates revenue so when your AM is doing a good job it also should be rewarded.

Once I ran a $xxx.xxx campaign and could easily get better payouts by going direct but I still ran it with my aff network for exactly that reason, that my AM also makes some money from it because he did a good job to negotiate better payouts and got me higher caps and stuff.

As I already said in my previous post, there is not that one way how to deal with it.

Neither hopw to avoid getting campaigns stolen nor how much info to give to the networks.

Especially when you run big campaigns you can easily get into a catch-22 situation.

On one hand the campaigns are so big that they are worth to be stolen so you would like to keep as many info as possible for yourself.
On the other hand it can help alot to provide as many info as possible to optimize better and get better payouts then.

In such situation I prefer to give the network and advertiser as much info as needed to get as much benefit from the campaign.

Yes, it can turn into a nightmare when it goes wrong but usually I already ave a good relationship to a network when I run such big campaigns that I don´t worry that much about it.

But it´s also a difference between trafficsource and aff network.

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I think the discussion went a bit into the wrong direction

From the original post :

This is about the traffic source AM, which is a way worse situation than with an affiliate network imo.

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actually there are many company accounts on STM and mostly AM's are handling these account. I just wanted to write something good, positive about the honest AMs just so, if one of them is reading this, he/she doesn't feels bad that i am cribbing about them. lol.

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Absolutely, that´s why I said there´s a difference between aff network and trafficsource.

With trafficsources basically your only chance to really hide is to cloak and don´t send postback data.

A little story from my affiliate life:

Few years ago my AM from a very big trafficsource messaged me on Skype from his private account and offered to spy for me in the backend.

I paid him $150/week and he gave me whatever I asked for.

Whole campaigns with targeting, bid, blacklist/whitelis, landing pages and whatever.

For sure this really sucks for others but things like this happen.

When shady AMs don´t use the info to run campaigns themselves it also can happen that they just use the backend access to make a little bit extra income from giving away information.

Nonetheless such cases are very rare, in 16 years of doing affiliate marketing it only happened once to me.

By far most AMs I worked with are honest and trustworthy, at least as far as I can estimate

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I have had my share of problems with AMs at traffic sources The worst one was when I was doing flat buys with one adult network and everytime I renewed some spots several times in a row they suddenly disappeared from the offerings and I wasn't able to book them again... go figure

Yup, my overall experience is the same, most AMs I have worked with were honest and more or less hard working people.

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is that AM still providing his services? I'll pay him $200/week.
If he's still active, please DM me his skype account.

Actually it feels very good when you are getting the favours(even if it's illegal), but you feel bad when others get it. It's just the human psychology.
Still, let me know if this dude is still working.

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You know what, i just messaged this to my manager(out of curiosity - a moment ago) and here's what she said...Lol

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"Amazing" ... it always shocks me how a relatively low amount of money can corrupt some people

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As i said earlier, some people just hate their job and don't give a fuck.

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Can't say I'm surprised.

Unfortunately, when running ads, getting campaigns ripped will always be a possibility.

We can only focus on launching more campaigns faster, and establish better moats with exclusive offers and such. Worrying too much over what we can't control will just introduce more negative energy and attract more similar circumstances, and act to demoralize us.

Unless - you fight fire with fire by working with reps to buy their intel. Nobody has the right to judge as long as you're OK doing it.



Amy

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My business partner has been doing this for 15 years now and is a super nice guy, father of 3 kids, loving wife, the works.

But this man is a savage when he deals with networks and AM's, he has too many horror stories.

One of the big things is putting people on 'notice. You straight up tell the AM's that we have people spying 24/7 and if we ever see one of our creatives ripped, then the network is blacklisted to our marketing/agency communities.

We have strict rules now where we don't ever show videos, creatives, landers, etc. Even for approvals, they can get transcribed audio scripts at best.

I've only been doing this for 4 months or so and I've already had two cases of someone trying to lure me with cash and vanities with the sole intention of stealing my methods, process and creatives and then kicking me to the curb. Thankfully, I did some research and a background check prior.

It's a sad, unfortunate part of the business.

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That being said: I have zero worries about the AM's stealing my shit and running it themselves. I still have very recent memories of the shit show you gotta make your way through to even get started on internet marketing and I doubt they're going scale that wall.

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lol :-)

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