How I had profitable campaigns and didn't know it... (10)
Ever set up a new campaign for an offer that, according to your sources, converts very well and is generating cash money, only to find EPCs of $0.001 and credit card debt? Or have a campaign that was working just fine but suddenly decides to teach you a lesson by refusing to convert ever again?
I have, and in several cases I've chalked it up to poor timing, scrubbing, technical failure, or perhaps some insidious affiliate who hacked into my prosper202 and is magically receiving all my commissions, even though i'm still tracking all impressions. But I just discovered another potential campaign killer that hadn't even occurred to me.
We all know that the likes of Facebook use services like mywot.com to decide whether to let your advertisement run. But have you considered that other, less stringent networks will let ads run for URLs that some major anti-virus software companies now commonly label with warnings and blocks? For example, I recently set up a campaign that had good potential, only to find that the actual offer URL is labeled "Malware/virus" by Avast, one of the largest consumer security tools. So if 25% of my visitors are getting a big DO NOT USE THIS SITE warning, my ROI is not going to be good. But the ad network may not know or care, so they may continue to take my money indefinitely.
In other instances, I've seen anti-spyware companies suddenly label all tracking URLs from an affiliate network as threats, and the conversions go dead. Wonder why EWA links are now http://www.trackamps.com instead of www.trackleads.net?
I used to assume that these blocks on offer URLs only applied to download offers, since other offers don't involve installing something on your computer that might hijack it. But now these companies are using consumer feedback to label the trustworthiness of sites in general, regardless of offer type. You could have a rebill offer for Bible subscriptions, and if enough Avast/Mcafee users click a button that says "this site blows", then they'll stop showing the offer to their users, or warn them to stay away.
This may be super obvious to some of you. But it hadn't occurred to me that companies were now blocking URLs that had nothing to do with installing .exes on your machine.
Going forward, I'm going to be running all offer pages through Avast/McAfee security scans, to make sure I'm not just throwing money down the drain. Having since checked out several URLs for top offers out there, I''m a bit shocked how trigger-happy these warnings are getting...
ive had a similar issue in the past, actually had an ad account suspended it because they thought i was pushing virus-ridden software downloads. i was totally unaware of the fact, since my antivirus software never even raised any kind of warning flags at all. but some of the other antivirus softwares did, apparently.
another thing is RSS feeds. had rss feeds on a site and one of the feeds must have had a link google didnt like, so they suspended my account until i removed the link. of course i couldnt even find it since i had no idea which site it came from since the feeds were always changing and never static so i had to just completely remove rss feeds from that site to get account back on.
What sites do you guys use for url checks. I know of this one, but are there others? https://www.virustotal.com/#url
Are there really problems with tracklead.net urls? I'm still using them.
Originally Posted by brianb
Did EWA send out a notice when they made the change from trackamps.com to trackleads? It seems like a pretty major thing their affiliates should have been warned about.
http://i.imgur.com/b5QlI.jpg
Do you think that McAfee users are blocked when reaching my website if it has this rank?
Could be the case. I would switch URLs. I'm now checking the Avast free version and anything with a bad rating I skip...
^^ Or iFrame...
Is there a bulk virustotal scanner for URLs?
Originally Posted by brianb
The antivirus checks the HTTP requests for what i know, not the URL in the browsers' address bar.
For this reason a Framed offer page would load the main HTML page but not the iFrame contents..
I'll check later today BTW
Originally Posted by dario
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