Because people don't come in to say how much they love a network.
As for me, I'm doing xxx,xxx /m with Azoogle and they take good care of me, but as with everything,
a lot depends on how well you get along with your AM.
Does anyone else think azoogle is cheap?
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As for me, I'm doing xxx,xxx /m with Azoogle and they take good care of me, but as with everything,
a lot depends on how well you get along with your AM.
I agree with you. But before, at least me didnt see anynegative threads about azoogle. now im starting to see more often..
If anyone has specific problems, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll be happy to try to help (as I have with several people). I may not respond to you till next week though (I'm in Hong Kong right now - looking out the window at heaviest rain i've seen - stupid typhoon).
As for your landing pages, Azoogle has no reason to look at your landing pages unless we have to show them to advertisers. There are many ways to generate traffic and if you have to hide your sources then your chances of doing something shady are higher than those who have had their landing pages approved by advertisers. With the recent compliance efforts all across the industry (read any networks' press releases), advertisers are demanding ever increasing levels of insight into where their traffic is coming from. The BEST thing you can do for yourself is SHOW your landing page to your affiliate manager, have the affiliate manager get that page approved and work with you to tweak it to make it convert better, that's what they're there for. Affiliate managers aren't just meant for increasing or decreasing your payout, they're your conduit into making campaigns perform better and those publishers that work closely with their affiliate manager instead of trying to hide from them, do best.
Whatever you do is up to you, take my above $2 Hong Kong dollars and do what you will with them
As for your landing pages, Azoogle has no reason to look at your landing pages unless we have to show them to advertisers. There are many ways to generate traffic and if you have to hide your sources then your chances of doing something shady are higher than those who have had their landing pages approved by advertisers. With the recent compliance efforts all across the industry (read any networks' press releases), advertisers are demanding ever increasing levels of insight into where their traffic is coming from. The BEST thing you can do for yourself is SHOW your landing page to your affiliate manager, have the affiliate manager get that page approved and work with you to tweak it to make it convert better, that's what they're there for. Affiliate managers aren't just meant for increasing or decreasing your payout, they're your conduit into making campaigns perform better and those publishers that work closely with their affiliate manager instead of trying to hide from them, do best.
Whatever you do is up to you, take my above $2 Hong Kong dollars and do what you will with them
Bullshit.
Let me ask you this: Do your AM's run their own personal PPC campaigns? (hint: this is a rhetorical question.)
Affiliate managers in general don't know a good converting landing page from a hole in the ground. This may be the SOP where you are, but I assure you it's not almost everywhere else. I think you're entitled to ask if I'm spamming myspace for my traffic, beyond that, I'd be taking my shit elsewhere if you start demanding to know where my traffic is coming from. The ONLY reason you or the merchant, for that matter, need to know this shit is to duplicate and reporoduce for yourselves, or to give the info to your other affiliates to help them bring in more rev, which in turn generates more profit for you.
If advertisers are allowed to demand knowledge of the traffic sources, does that mean we get to demand an end to them scrubbing leads shitless?If anyone has specific problems, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll be happy to try to help (as I have with several people). I may not respond to you till next week though (I'm in Hong Kong right now - looking out the window at heaviest rain i've seen - stupid typhoon).
As for your landing pages, Azoogle has no reason to look at your landing pages unless we have to show them to advertisers. There are many ways to generate traffic and if you have to hide your sources then your chances of doing something shady are higher than those who have had their landing pages approved by advertisers. With the recent compliance efforts all across the industry (read any networks' press releases), advertisers are demanding ever increasing levels of insight into where their traffic is coming from. The BEST thing you can do for yourself is SHOW your landing page to your affiliate manager, have the affiliate manager get that page approved and work with you to tweak it to make it convert better, that's what they're there for. Affiliate managers aren't just meant for increasing or decreasing your payout, they're your conduit into making campaigns perform better and those publishers that work closely with their affiliate manager instead of trying to hide from them, do best.
Whatever you do is up to you, take my above $2 Hong Kong dollars and do what you will with them
nickycakes, I have a lot of respect for you, your blog is read by almost everyone in our office and makes a lot of us laugh, so I'll let you be entitled to your opinion; however, I founded this company 8 years ago and a lot of our affiliates have made a lot of money, and we've done well along the way too, so I know what I'm talking about. You do as you please though
I'm not questioning any of that man, just saying, if you have a real reason why a network or merchant would require campaign data, I'm all ears. As it stands now, the only obvious reason would be to fuck the affiliate. Nothing against azoogle personally, as I've never really done any serious business with you guys, but this is just an issue i feel strongly about.
I agree with Nickycakes. If an advertiser insists on seeing a landing page or traffic source data, there are a great many flags that are raised.
It may be my brick and mortar mentality, but I only believe 1/2 of what I see and none of what I hear, so when I hear an advertiser asking me to establish where my traffic is coming from so they can 'qualify' it properly, that kind of screams double-cross in my mind.
I guess it comes down to trusting the people that you work with. The only reason we have to ask for sources of traffic is to verify that they're legit. The last scenario we want to be placed in is to have the advertiser question the traffic and us respond to their questions with "We have no idea where it comes from." There may be networks that take this approach, but it's not the game that we like to play. I've said it to many of our publishers before, but we make money only when they make money, so our sole goal for being in business is to help our publishers generate more leads/sales. I doubt any of our successful publishers will say that their volume of traffic decreased after they shared their traffic source with us. If anything, getting an advertiser to approve a placement will likely lead to a higher payout. Keep in mind, most advertisers build in a "buffer" for "bad traffic" and pay a lower CPA because of it. If you can prove to an advertiser that all the traffic you're supplying to them is premium, you'll be getting the top payout from the start, since the advertiser doesn't have to budget for crap leads.
And by the way, my perspective on trusting people in the industry was the same as yours when I started. You'll hear any founder of a network say this, but we were affiliates first, and the reason we started AzAds was because we weren't happy with the way we were treated by agencies (there weren't really any networks in 2002 other than CJ/Linkshare) and because we couldn't trust the people we were working with. I'm sure that all the networks that started after us did so because they thought they could do things better than Azoogle did. I've said it before and I'll say it again, our most successful publishers are ones that don't try to hide and work with us rather than trying to lurk in the shadows and cloaking their links. We are honest with our publishers and I don't think there's any reason for them not to trust us.
Wow what a rant.
Could someone make this stupid typhoon stop so I can get out of Hong Kong?! WTF
The company referred to in the blog is this:
Bazaar Advertising Solutions Inc
So, how is this different than PepperJam running their own ad campaign. I mean, realistically it's fine if they want to know what sites are driving traffic, to a point.
And that point is they shouldn't give a shit about what keywords or other marketing efforts are driving leads, provided they are quality and are not tarnishing the advertisers brand..
Bazaar Advertising Solutions Inc
So, how is this different than PepperJam running their own ad campaign. I mean, realistically it's fine if they want to know what sites are driving traffic, to a point.
And that point is they shouldn't give a shit about what keywords or other marketing efforts are driving leads, provided they are quality and are not tarnishing the advertisers brand..
We've asked our advertisers and some of our publishers to place an image pixel on their landing pages so that we can re-target consumers better through our ad-server. For those publishers that are running our ad-tag, if we know a consumer has responded to an insurance offer in the past (by searching for insurance and clicking on a link), that means they are more likely to click on another insurance ad. As I said before, our goal is to help publishers make more money, so if we can target better through our ad-serving, that means our publishers will get more leads.
No one is forced to place a pixel on their landing page, and it's not really for any comscore rankings (they really don't mean all that much).
Things are different from advertiser to advertise. I work in the affiliate industry on the advertiser end of programs at networks such as Linkshare and Commission Junction, and I'm also an affiliate. I can tell you that there are advertisers who are either brand conscious (usually the large, well known brands) or are in a regulated industry or in one with a lot of legal issues (ringtones, credit cards, loan-related products, etc.) who may either demand to see landing pages themselves, or have the network or manager watch these issues for them.
Having helped out with many programs on the advertiser end, I've also seen all types of fraud, especially in lead-based offers or offers that pay out more than it costs to sign up (usually followed with recurring billing). One of the ways to head off fraud is to monitor where exactly traffic is coming from. Over the past year, I've caught close to $100,000 of attempted fraud in affiliate programs, and actually having access to referrer information has been a godsend. I understand that the CPA world is a bit different from the affiliate world in the way things are structured and managed, especially with account managers, but things do cross the two channels.
Correct. Did the part about being in every network give it away, or was it the program manager who used to work at Azoogle?Wouldn't happen to be Singlesnet would it?
Bazaar really don't run any of the campaigns available to our publishers. Bazaar manages AOR relationships with some of our advertisers that don't allow ANY affiliate search at all or that were working with other search agencies. For example, Bazaar manages search for the Blockbuster DVD rental service and other clients that don't have offers on Azoogle.
Most importantly, Bazaar gave us the ability to properly split-test multiple landing pages to determine optimal conversion. Once this is figured out, we give the best performing pages to our publishers and/or make similar designs for them. Many of our top publishers are running pages that WE created for them. We have a full staff of graphics designers that build many of the landing pages/creatives available on our network so that publishers don't have to spend money to do it themselves. If a publisher wants to do search on something and is going to work closely with us, we will build for them what they need to be successful.
I'd have to disagree. When it comes to selling a website (especially when it comes to larger companies like Epic Advertising), Comscore metrics is always used a selling point.
Lots of analysts use comscore to estimate growth at large Internet companies, so I would say comscore is important.. and we all remember the GOOG dip based on comscore's estimates (fuck comscore though).
Well this got a lot more attention than I expected. I didn't know all the AM's prowl the WF boards lol.
Look, this was somewhat of a rant and I will admit I was in a pissy mood when I posted this, and still am actually.
BUT, I do think I raised some legitimate concerns. I have no problems personally with my account manager, and I somewhat regret this post. I won't be posting who my AM is, or my name. They have nothing to do with the points I was raising especially since many of the problems came from the higher up decision makers.
The purpose of the post was to pose this simple question. Had anyone else had experiences with azoogle like I have? I saw an earlier thread about azoogle and there were several pages of unhappy people so I am questioning the company, simple as that.
You can't blame an affiliate for being sketched out about the affiliate company/advertiser knowing/wanting to know everything about their campaigns.
Look, this was somewhat of a rant and I will admit I was in a pissy mood when I posted this, and still am actually.
BUT, I do think I raised some legitimate concerns. I have no problems personally with my account manager, and I somewhat regret this post. I won't be posting who my AM is, or my name. They have nothing to do with the points I was raising especially since many of the problems came from the higher up decision makers.
The purpose of the post was to pose this simple question. Had anyone else had experiences with azoogle like I have? I saw an earlier thread about azoogle and there were several pages of unhappy people so I am questioning the company, simple as that.
You can't blame an affiliate for being sketched out about the affiliate company/advertiser knowing/wanting to know everything about their campaigns.
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