Anyone here ever flipped an offer on another network successfully where they just noticed a great payout and figured some affiliates on another network might not be shopping around well enough & would push some volume and would make enough to cover the network's cut?
"Flipping" offer to another network
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It sounds stupid but I've actually seen it done on a particular network and people are sending them leads.
it MUST work some of the time. Where you could get completely fucked though is if the affiliates on network b send crap quality leads, you could lose your relationship with the advertiser on network a or even worse they charge back the leads and then you are stuck paying network b.
Interesting subject, this method has been in my mind for a while.
It is done. And I asked a network if it was ok to do it with one of their own offers and it was ok.
Didn't tried it yet though...
It is done. And I asked a network if it was ok to do it with one of their own offers and it was ok.
Didn't tried it yet though...
its called cross publishing or brokering and no network in their right mind wouldn't just go to the network you're using or the merchant themselves to get the offer at a better payout.
I've seen cross published offers that pay more than the offer at the original network. Obviously because they have volume and negotiated a better payout, not bad for testing the offer but if you start doing volume yourself with decent quality you can obviously get a better payout from the original network or even the merchant.
Cross-brokering/flipping an offer can be a very dangerous game and you have to be careful if you try to do it yourself. It's dangerous because of the high risk of your offer being abused by fraudulent affiliates. Example: JoeFraud is running the eFax campaign through MaxBounty. We turf him because he's sending fake leads. You take the eFax campaign from MaxBounty (as either a network or as a pub bringing the campaign to another network) and JoeFraud decides to run the campaign through you. You don't know JoeFraud was previously booted, so you wind up sending a bunch of fake leads from him. You wind up not getting paid for the leads, and you could even damage MaxBounty's relationship with eFax because eFax is seeing the same fake leads again from the same fraud publisher and they could get pissed off.
Not only that, not all networks do a thorough job of screening their publisher applications, so you could wind up getting TONS of fake/fraud leads. I've seen this first-hand the few times we've tried cross-publishing our campaigns with other networks. Because of all our bad experiences, we've pretty much stopped exploring the cross-publishing of our networks as it exposes us to too much risk.
Not only that, not all networks do a thorough job of screening their publisher applications, so you could wind up getting TONS of fake/fraud leads. I've seen this first-hand the few times we've tried cross-publishing our campaigns with other networks. Because of all our bad experiences, we've pretty much stopped exploring the cross-publishing of our networks as it exposes us to too much risk.
Hey MaxSteve, thanks for the heads up. I realized there would be a concern for fraud but I didn't realize it could be that prevalent.
Can you tell me how fraudulent traffic is shared and dealt with between an advertiser and a network? Because when I imagine the cross publishing as an affiliate scenario I see that as the only bottleneck - not being able to monitor fraud yourself. And being dependent on the original advertiser of the offer to report the fraud to you.
By the way, I'm not necessarily thinking about network to network, In-House affiliate programs are also an option. And that has the added benefit of shortening the communication line (cutting out any network).
@ nickycakes
Right, I agree, unless you have your own landing page and other strategies in place that make the offer convert better so you can offer a higher CPA.
Can you tell me how fraudulent traffic is shared and dealt with between an advertiser and a network? Because when I imagine the cross publishing as an affiliate scenario I see that as the only bottleneck - not being able to monitor fraud yourself. And being dependent on the original advertiser of the offer to report the fraud to you.
By the way, I'm not necessarily thinking about network to network, In-House affiliate programs are also an option. And that has the added benefit of shortening the communication line (cutting out any network).
@ nickycakes
Right, I agree, unless you have your own landing page and other strategies in place that make the offer convert better so you can offer a higher CPA.
Typically, the merchant provides a report of fraudulent leads to the network. If they see a large volume of fraud from one specific publisher ID, then they'll flag that publisher ID as fraud. Fraud leads get reversed by the network. Fraud publishers get booted from the network. At no time does the network provide the affiliate name or contact info to the end merchant, so if the end merchant is working with other networks, there's no way for that merchant to warn the other networks of this particular fraud publisher.
Now don't get me wrong - not all traffic to rebrokered campaigns is fraud. It just seems that the extra layer of invisibity provided by a rebrokered deal attracts more of the bad publishers. And it gets worse as more and more layers of rebrokering are in place. I really don't know how some of the lower-tier networks manage to deliver anything but bad leads.
Compounding the problem of bad pubs on rebrokered traffic is that it's harder to get any higher volume affiliates to send any traffic to rebrokered campaigns and even out the quality for the merchant. These higher volume affiliates will undoubtedly follow the links and find the real source of the campaign. If they see it's a publically available campaign, they'll just run the campaign at the source.
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