How Can Networks Tell If You Incentivize Offers?

[ISeemToBeAVerb]

Kinda curious as to how networks verify that they are adhering to their client's standards?

Assuming you cloak all your links, how can networks actually tell if you are giving incentives on the offers you run?

In a more general sense, how can they even tell if you're sending them traffic from a disallowed source?

Link cloaking seems pretty standard these days, so do networks just not really give a shit unless your conversion rate is either too low or abnormally high?

 

[wannamakemoney]

In most cases I guess they cant tell given that you blanked the referer, not sure though. But as far as I know your EPC probably doesnt have a bearing on how they decide if you are pushing legit traffic or not. I guess its mostly when the leads dont convert on the advrtisers end that they feel your traffic source/leads should be investigated.

 

[ISeemToBeAVerb]

I guess its mostly when the leads don't convert on the advertiser's end that they feel your traffic source/leads should be investigated.

That makes sense, but begs another question; do CPA Networks actually keep track of all that data for each affiliate? I guess I kinda figured they just lumped all that data together when passing it on to the advertiser. In other words, if affiliate X generated 1000 leads and affiliate Y generated 5000 leads, the network would just pass that info to the advertiser as "our network generated 6000 leads". Lets say only 3000 actually ended up being quality leads for the advertiser, is the network really able to say "oh, affiliate Y was the culprit, his traffic must be crap." It seems to me that in order for an investigation to occur the advertiser would have to gather up all the non-converting leads and make the affiliate network sort through them to find which affiliate each of those leads came from.

 

[machinecontrol]

The network passes through your affiliate ID to the advertiser, they know exactly what the quality is for every affiliate.

 

[rgillispie@ecom]

Don't you worry. the network does keep up with all that info or at least it should. We monitor our data very closely to insure(as best we can) that the leads being sent are coming from a legit source. But when it comes down to it in the end it falls on the network. If the traffic is labeled"bad' then its usually the network that will end up eating that. although the offer will be pulled from who we believe is the producer of the "bad' traffic. i may be way off base here but I tried to answer as best as I could

 

[-God-]

People seem to think they can get away with sending trashy leads to networks and if they mask the referer or some such trick, that all will be well. The trouble is, most people who run offers don't just set something up and go, although obviously some do, but they monitor everything against everyone.

If you've ever listened to Mike Hill, it's clear that monitoring customer value at 15, 30, 60, 90 days is what anyone with any sense does. If you have a large enough number of leads coming in, then any affiliate or sub-affiliate sending trash is clearly going to stand out like a saw thumb,

I've always found it amusing actually tha some people believe they can get away with throwing junk traffic at a defrauded offer to water it down a bit. It makes fuck all difference, because the leads that did go through are quickly dropping to $0.00 in long term worth.