MadPPC

Happy day after V-Day.  Hope everyone got a little something, something. *wink* *wink* *nudge*

We are going to take a break from the programing / VPS’s / technical bullshit (and what not) for this article to focus on one of the more volatile type of offers out there that you can run.  There’s been a lot of discussion about them lately, people don’t understand what goes on behind the doors.

There are special kinds of offers that your likely to run into in the internet marketing (IM) game, there called submits.  Although there’s arguably a few different kinds of submits, today I am referring to e-mail or zip submits.  We will discuss what they are, some terminology, and what to watch out for.

Submits look like great money makers.  The goal is to have the user submit their e-mail / zip / whatever to the page.  Here’s an example:

Anyone else notice how fucked up the hand in this image is?

Submits on normal pay around $1-$2 (usually on the lower side) for non incentive traffic, and typically under $1 for incentive based traffic.  What’s incentive based traffic you may be asking?  Basically it’s when you tell the user that your going to do something / give something extra to get them to use the service.  It could be money, or items, or whatnot.  The important part is your sweetening the deal to get the user to fill out this form.  This in turn would yield less return for the website and hence pay you less.

Compared to a CPA (Cost Per Action) where the user has to buy something, these look like great money makers, after all the user just has to put in their e-mail right?

Ah, if only it was that easy!  Notice how on the LP (Landing Page) it says “Just For Participating”, or often times you’ll see “with participation”, either way there is more than meets the eye.  The system is set up to have the user complete other offers which in turn makes the site money.  After the user completes X amount of offers eventually the user gets the offer advertised to them (in this case a McDonald’s gift card).  That’s the jist of it. Whether or not the user would ever actually ever get the gift card is another question all together.  You’d have to be half bat shit crazy, and actually want to lose some money, to compleatly make it though the ladder of crap you have to do.

Why They Suck

If you ran submits for even a couple days you’d realize something really fucking bizarre happens – that is assuming the offer is relatively new.  What you would notice is probably decent conversion rates, and then out of the blue – total tankage.  You’d be scratching you head wondering why all your traffic magically stopped converting.  It’s quite simple, it’s called scrubbing.  There is also another term that is similar called shaving.  You don’t want to confuse the two, even though both terms are used interchangeably for the most part.  So I’ll let MaxSteve of MaxBounty from WF fill in the details from a post:

There really are two completely separate actions being discussed in this thread. Shaving and scrubbing. Although the end result is very similar (lowered conversions), the reasons are significantly different. Briefly:

Real-time scrubbing: A merchant validates the surfer data real-time and counts a lead only if it passes all of the validations. You might see conversions go down month-to-month if a merchant adds new validations that are important to their business model (i.e. we can no longer accept leads from Alaska, because we cannot resell them to anyone). However, you should not see leads get reversed once they’ve been credit to you.

Delayed scrubbing: A merchant validates as much as they can real time, but cannot validate everything at that time. So you might get a lead credited to you, but reversed a couple of days later. This typically applies to higher CPA campaigns that require credit cards. For example, if someone had purchased a satellite dish system on Monday, you’d get the lead credited to you on Monday. But if they called and cancelled their order on Wednesday, the merchant would go ahead and reverse the lead.

Scrubbing is legitimate and happens across the board on all campaigns as it is a reflection of a merchant’s evolving business model.

Shaving: A merchant (or network for that matter) find themselves in a position where they are not meeting their revenue targets, so they put code in place to RANDOMLY not credit leads to an affiliate or RANDOMLY reverse the leads already credited.

This is extremely shady (fraudulent actually) and no merchant or network would risk their good reputation to do this.

You Just Got Shit On

Here are some common stinky situations:

Situation A) The merchant has been in the game for a while, has a lot of e-mail addresses.  The user submits their e-mail, however this address is already in the merchants system.  Very possible considering that merchants typically run multiple offers.  The lead is not unique and is scrubbed.  Did not meet quality guild-lines.

Situation B) The offer has been running for a few days, there’s a few people pushing all kinds of traffic at the offer.  Even though it’s a non incentive offer, some user is throwing a ton of incentive based traffic it at it.  Some other users are throwing some really shitty traffic from some ghetto website at it.  Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.  All the merchant knows is that the traffic coming in overall isn’t producing the kind of results they need to see.  Merchants don’t like pay if they aren’t making money, so it’s simple shave the shit out of it until its profitable on their end.  Remember they are not here to lose money.

Special Submits

Some networks try and create “no scrub” submits, and from what I hear that’s bullshit too.  A marketing ploy to the marketers – awesome!

What You Need To Know

• Always talk to your AM first and see if they have any inside info on how long the offer has been running and how it’s performing.  You would not want to start running an offer while it’s in tank mode.  They should have an idea on how much scrubbing is going on.
• While talking to your AM have them submit a test lead to check the tracking.
• Be prepared to move to another submit very soon, could be as little as a few hours if you got some bad intel.
• There’s been a few networks totally dropping submits lately, or at the very least getting rid of the incentive traffic version.  From what I understand these merchants haven’t been wanting to pay up for the leads.  I’m not saying all the submit merchants are like that that, but it was really weird that a few places dumped them off in a weeks time.  Not that there isn’t a lot of bad traffic being sent to them or anything……
• Don’t be surprised if they get deactivated on a network wide scale, without warning.  Yeah, that’s always fun.
• You have to have a source of cheap traffic, you should be aiming to stay (depending of the offer) under 20 cents.
• Incentive offers, I think, get scrubbed / shaved horrendously.  I’d advise just staying away, far away.
• Work with a network that does a lot of submits.  They are likely to have a better relationship with the merchant.

Conclusion

That’s about it, go out there and try them out.  There’s money to be made in them, don’t get me wrong.  Kind of a pain in the ass, and you have to be on your toes, but could be worse.  Now go make monies.