who doesnt is the question? so im saying I assume they all do it. Not to mention one of the leading affiliate tracking software has a filter right in it that asks how much you want to shave off the affiliates earnings.
I have said this 1000 times and I will say it 1,000 more. Crush Ads DOES NOT shave. We actually audit stats every week and ADD in any untracked conversions. :angryfire: --- :angryfire: --- :angryfire: --- :angryfire: --- :angryfire:
See, people say "go with the big ones" yet I see earnings on the same offer differ widely across networks. Im watching numbers for comparison and see that there *is* a notable difference in networks and conversions and I cannot seem to explain this other than the ones who do less must be shaving. And those are bigger networks...... So just curious all in all who to trust for direct click/display tracking. No mail. Just pure real clicks from display ads etc... Same banner, Same offer, different network.
i agree with critical. ive run indential offers of my own with the same landing page as other offers and mine always outperform the networks for whatever reason. Maybe they have a huge dupe file that goes back months but its still money lost. Other ways to shave are they shut down servers for unplanned maintenance at night. Ive even seen guys throw up false error message when they didnt want leads. They script it so it was random and would cut down the leads to the level they could sell etc.. ive never tried Crush ads. Maybe i should. ALSO i think most mailers consider unknown or unannounced or last minute 'filtering' as shaving and THAT does happen rampantly just about everywhere. (except for Crush Ads i guess).
Every serious network has a scrubbing operation going on in the background somewhere... Scrub rates/%'s get lifted and changed depending on the authenticity/conversions of your traffic. What smart business wouldn't want to be critical and aware of their traffic, especially from newly acquired partners. Get real now. Get close with your AM, bring daily trustworthy traffic and you'll reap more of the benefits of having those rates be lifted and having better payouts.
Just seems to me if that is the case they should not hide it and call it their "insurance" clause or something. When they hide it, it looks a bit schemish.
I have to chime in here. Guys I am also an advertiser. I will not mention any names, so don’t ask. I had my offer up on a really popular network. I found my offer on OfferVault from this network. My offer was listed at 25% more than we were paying them. Well I thought this was a mistake so I asked a very close friend of mine if he had an account on the network, he did. Guess what my offer was the same price in the network as it was on OfferVault. So my question to them was how? Needless to say they lost my offer. These kinds of activities hurt an advertiser’s brand. Among other things. Now I will tell you, a lot of the advertisers in the industry do shave. Most of my dealings with networks, from an insider’s point, have been great and I don’t see any pixels being pulled or misfired. But now that there are two platforms out there that will autoshave it is hard for me to detect these practices.
There is a difference between filtering and shaving... i have a big post in the PH somewhere about it, so I won't bore you with all of the details and my normal rant. Some of our advertisers do filter, but pay more per lead because of it. Filtering is legitimate if publishers are compensated for it. Filtering is typically not accepting leads in a certain state, or within certain criteria, because they are unable to monetize them. The advertiser can either pay less and take all leads or pay more for the leads they can actually use. In the end, it all ends up being about the same. Shaving is straight up firing the pixel for say 9 out of every 10 conversions. Which apparently some networks do... and we do not. Pixel technology is inherently flawed and on average we see 3 - 6% of the conversions go untracked, mostly because people have cookies disabled. We do not keep these conversions, we audit stats every Monday and credit them back to our publishers. Thanks sooooo much! :07:
This is the inherent problem. If you're a legit network that doesn't shave, how can you compete when other networks go out and list offers and more than what anyone gets paid? It's like this ugly vicious cycle.
Well even in my own marketing/monetizing I stay away from any network that pays more then the rest. If its to good to be true then it is not true!! These networks are only after one thing, that is publisher signups. The only people that get hurt are Affiliates and Advertisers. The network will get these Pubs in, then when that offer is not preforming the best that the Pub expected, because of the network shaving, they get them to run a different offer. This is a win win for the networks but a black eye for the offer and in a lot of ways a black eye for the advertiser.
Shaving? i refer to it as "my dial", when i see it happening, i just shoot a nice freindly text saying " can you please turn up my Dial a little" LOL Nobody likes it and not saying they all do it, but a lot do. What do they think i dont have any tracking software, cause when they do shave i notice my clicks are way off as well. All i say is on to the next one and why cant we all just get along, lol. Now paying on time is a different story, some shave but pay on time and some dont pay on time but shave, go figure. Just part of the business.....
Filters are fine when they are announced. When they are added without notice or not disclosed that is the same as shaving. IF the ad says "pays on blah blah and blah" I expect Blah blah and blah to pay. Pretty simple idea really but we find that filters are changed very frequently without notice. The funniest is when we randomly send in test leads if conversions are down and they DONT show up. Then we ask why. 1st you usually get denial. Then you show them what didnt get credit then almost invariably they explain they added some filters..... Thats when i stop mailing for them.
And what do you do about the ones you have not caught? There is absolutely no difference between filtering, scrubbing, shaving or just poorly converting offers from mailer's perspective. The only thing that matters is EPC / eCPM you are getting.
This is exactly right. I call it all scrubbing because that's all it is, there is legit scrubbing and scam scrubbing, and no one ever wants to hear about either one happening to them. Coreg has HUGE scrubbing problems, and again, no offer path wants to deal with it either, so yes they all probably do it to some point, its just the ones that do it out of pure greed that you have to look out for. When a network gets a call from an advertiser saying they aren't paying for certain leads from certain sources, they do fight for you (to keep u happy and to keep their own profit on those leads up) but in the end if the advertiser doesn't pay then you won't get paid either. I think a lot of the shaddy-ness of some networks that truly aren't just straight up stealing conversions from you, is just trying to not directly explain to you each month that the advertiser bitched about your leads. So as Dk said, all that matters is if your ecpm off your drops is worth continuing to drop offers from that network. I am also not recommending to just accept it either, talking to your AM is important, if you don't complain they might shave your leads to avoid scrubbing someone who will throw a fit, its just all about balance. Make sure they know you are watching, question everything, but also realize the advertiser might be who is screwing you over some of the time, other times its your own fault sending the wrong traffic to a page, etc. Bottom line, don't assume its always a scam without tracking what happened and listening to their reasons.
