5 Weird Facts about Affiliate Network Offers
Post by Dan Palanchuk
Post by Dan Palanchuk
Do you know why you aren’t able to make money with your affiliate networks? Have you tried testing every affiliate vertical out there and nothing is working?
There are two reasons behind each of them. The first reason is plain and simple which is that you’re not testing enough and jumping from offer to offer not giving time to fully test out the offer.
The second reason might have to do with the factors below. It really might not be your fault on why you aren’t making money with the offer.
It’s interesting how advertisers are stealing money from affiliates through several ways.
The Five Factors:
- Mobiles scrub 30-50%
- Rebills payout $40, but the advertisers make up to $250 back. Chargebacks, etc ends up making them pay up to $90-$100 per user.
- Email Submit/Download offers scrub insanely
- Single people usually visit a dating site 7 times before signing up. If you send them straight to the offer, you are losing a ton of money and wasting money on branding the dating site.
- Affiliate networks have different redirecting times based on how many times the offer is brokered and the link tracking service they use.
While not all these factors apply to all affiliate offers at affiliate networks, a majority of these factors impact most offers. I did not know mobile offers scrub at 30-50%. Did you? Imagine how much more money you could have made more if you had double the epc. You would be able to scale a lot more and much more quickly.
The second factor apply’s to you if you are running rebill offers. The price of rebill offers have definately gone down in the last few years. FTC changed regulations and became more strict. Advertisers have a lifetime value of 3-4 months for an offer, but they have a small payout. With a lower payout, it would be harder for you to run at profit levels.
As most of you already know, email submits scrub hard. They have a nice, juicy payout requiring the user just to fill out their email when you get paid the lead. In reality, they scrub up to 90% on some offers. The conversion rates and epc’s might be nice the first few days of running the offer, and then drastically reduces after that.
Not many people do this, but it would be a better and viable way to go. What most affiliates don’t do is build assets such as email lists, websites, or their own products. Statistics show that single people see a dating website 7 times before they decide to sign up. A majority of single people are at work surfing on facebook, and they really are interested in signing up for the offer, but don’t have time to do so. The simple solution is to build an email list. Entice people to sign up with “dating tips” and after they submit their information, send them to an affiliate dating offer or offer wall page.
Did you know that your network may be the reason your offer is not converting? The affiliate network may have offers that are brokered multiple times thus increasing the redirects and decreasing the speed. Another factor may be the tracking system the affiliate network uses. One of the major reasons to slow redirections is because of the advertiser who has a crappy slow host. Seriously? Can they not afford to get a decent host for a few thousand dollars?
Conclusion
The simple solution to overcoming the challenges of all these is go direct with the advertiser. Find out who the advertiser is, and do anything to try to contact them. This is after you are making at least $1,000 a day in revenue with them. Build your own affiliate network wit HasOffers if the advertiser doesn’t have their own system. Be sure to have quality traffic if you plan on going direct. They will be willing to increase your payout in return. Karma. 
P.S. If you really want to have control of your own destiny, become an advertiser and promote your own products. I am planning on creating my own products and services in 2012. It will be an interesting experience which I will blog about. 
What are some other things you have experience with affiliate offers that may have impacted your revenue?
Mobiles only scrub 50% to keep historic high payouts. If they stopped scrubbing, your payout would be halved. In other words, no one is really being cheated but the end user (if it’s incentivized).
Affiliates are being cheated because they believe they are getting the paid $10 per pin submit when it’s really only $5.
They should put the payout to $5 and have no scrub.