WTF... Offer company takes over my ads and reports me!

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maximus

maximus

Hard Work Is The Answer
Apr 11, 2007
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LA, Ca
This has taken me 8 days to figure out but I think I've finally cracked it. Maybe it's my fault for letting this happen, but remember that I'm not a programming guy at all. I can code basic html but my specialty is marketing.

I have a few campaigns that for the last 3 months have made over $150k in revenue. The basic model is to use Adwords to send traffic to my site (full site, not LP) which then goes to the offer. Everything was great for those 3 months and the revenue was fairly consistent day in and day out.

Suddenly last week I got an email from G "disapproving" ALL my ads from my main campaign and siting the "affiliate url or bridge page" violation. Of course this is a big blow because it's 50% of my aff revenue.

This was a shock to me b/c I was using a 7 page site with content and aff links on each page, so I thought if I bulk up the site and get rid of most of the aff links, I'd get back in w/o a problem. I bulked the site up to 20 pages and included a blog and more articles. I eliminated every aff link but TWO as a test to make sure I can get approved again.

After several worthless phone conversations with G, they came back and said it's still violating the aff policy. This was very strange so I continued to dig further and didn't want to make any changes until I figured this one out b/c clearly my site now adds value to the user experience and is in compliance with policy.

Fortunately, I've kept good stats for the past 3 months and I started going to every site that I got leads from only to find that the company I was getting conversions for is NOW ON EVERY SITE I USED TO BE ON!

Then today I had another long convo with G and they tell me that one of the biggest ways they find out about sites violating policy is from people reporting other sites...

It's pretty clear what happened now. After the offer company was tired of paying me $150,000 they saw where the conversions were coming from, took my place, and then reported me to G.

Does this sound right or am I way off base?

Has anyone else been "disapproved" for a full site that adds value?
 


It seems odd that they were able to track to where your traffic was coming from? I understand if it was direct linking, but since you had an LP how would they know where your traffic was coming from?
 
m0rtal said:
It seems odd that they were able to track to where your traffic was coming from? I understand if it was direct linking, but since you had an LP how would they know where your traffic was coming from?
Click to expand...


My best guess is they came and saw the site that I was directing traffic from. Based on all the content on my site (it was a unique spin on a popular niche and I had almost no competition), they could take a lot of the same keywords in my campaign and use them. Once they saw where their ads were being shown and saw me on there competing with them, they reported me. (Just a guess b/c they were never advertising there before but suddenly they started appearing and next thing I know I get disapproved.)

The only thing I could have done looking back is somehow not letting them see which referer site was getting them these conversions.

Is there any way to redirect from my site to an offer so that they can't see where the visitor came from?
 
I would think that if you send people through an LP the merchant would just see the referrer coming from your site? If not a redirect right before should definitely do it, e.g. link.php - > merchant. Maybe as you say they just did some digging of their own and found the sites.
 
You carried the source of your traffic in the subid?

I do that with keywords, but I know I will probably get burned one day.

I assign traffic sources a number so at least that part is hidden from the merchants.
 
My subid's are always random letters and #'s. That's a must.


Rob_TID said:
You carried the source of your traffic in the subid?

I do that with keywords, but I know I will probably get burned one day.

I assign traffic sources a number so at least that part is hidden from the merchants.
Click to expand...
 
m0rtal said:
I would think that if you send people through an LP the merchant would just see the referrer coming from your site? If not a redirect right before should definitely do it, e.g. link.php - > merchant. Maybe as you say they just did some digging of their own and found the sites.
Click to expand...

if it's a 3xx redirect, they'll still see the referrer, so you have to use either javascript or a meta refresh to redirect.
 
send them through a meta refresh is your best bet, however it's not full proof. You can route them through a secure page which will strip the referer data but will bring a popup in IE so that sucks. Meta refresh with a 2 second delay is the most reliable. A 2 sec delay will almost always strip the data. Also I think if you're running the PPC link in DT it doesn't track referers but I"m not 100% on this, just something I heard.
 
Lame as shit. But I am not surprised. Usually its just other affilaites that weasel in on shit.

No matter what they are lame. Probably a marketing VP deciding to get better conversions while ditching an affiliate.

They may have figured out your keywords and then created a site-targetted ad campaign and saw what sites came up. Or did a search for your ad url or something once Google was caching them.

Some people do not know about site targetted ads yet and are surprised that you can do that. They may have tried your keywords in search and saw they werent showing.

Lame Lame Lame
 
Were you running this traffic through an affiliate network, or direct to the advertiser?
 
Bro dont let some of this bitch ass agencies take you down like that. Talk to diorex or someone who knows how to eliminate agencies and make money for themselves. This is where ebook sellers fucking kill affiliate pushers.
I am sure hes not the only advertiser in this vertical there are many more. You can get more money for your effort and still bid on those keywords. I know what i am saying is fucked up but i am sure you get the bigger picture. :)
 
Guessing

Im not sure about this, but I would think some of those new spying softwares that can tell you what keywords your competition is bidding on, is what was used to tell what keywords you were bidding on.
 
Those new "spying softwares" only monitor keywords you input into the system. Then there are a few wacked services like spyfu but none of them can give you the keywords an advertiser is bidding on with any real accuracy. Trust me on this.
 
Kill the refers on all yours affiliate links..simple trick that would've solved your problems.
 
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