How to recognize shaving

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Vin

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Feb 10, 2007
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Hi Guys,

I've been strugling with this for a while now. And before anouncing it to the public I want to make sure first. My top dating sponsor I send + 100 paid joins a day. For the last week I've been doing +1000 free joins a day, then suddenly after a conversation about payouts the clicks and free accounts dropped by 50%, while the adwords traffic send to this page is still the same amount.

The reason I've been strugling with this, is that it looks like that with every payout upgrade the conversion seemed to worsen. Coincidence or ?

Does this look like shaving to you ? Could there be another explenation for the sudden drop in clicks / free joins (I track this per keyword and this was for all the keywords) and could there be a way to see if this is shaving ?

Thanks for your 2 cents..
 


Is it an exclusive offer?

Find other networks running the same offer even if they have a lower payout and split test.
 
I've been working with tis company for over 2 years and over the years they have increased the payout numerous times because I increased traffic.

But it seemed that everytime they increased payout, the conversion decreased.

And with this last incident, I am on my toes..
 
I wonder about this myself with one of my sponsors. My conversions were dropping in half, and it was put off to a summer slowdown. The thing is, my traffic is not dropping, so I dunno.....

Good advice to put eggs in different baskets, I think!
 
From a network's view i have seen this happen before with campaigns that i have placed on google and run through our own network. Without a mention of increasing traffic, conversion rates have declined with an increase in traffic. I would suggest lowering the traffic levels down and seeing if the conversions increase. Go backwards, if the last set of traffic you sent came from source abc, remove it and see if conversions go up to what they were prior to the increase in traffic.
 
I'd recommend starting to track clicks on your own. Because if they know you don't, they can shave the clicks and leads. This to the publisher when they look at their epc makes it seem like there's no difference.

I recommend to all publishers that they monitor their epc's on a daily basis. Some unmentioned companies are notorious for playing with conversions.
 
Thnx for the comments,

What would be a good way though to track the times a link is clicked ?
 
Mask it with something like out.php?o=affiliate_id and insert a row into the database before you redirect them.
 
chatmasta said:
Mask it with something like out.php?o=affiliate_id and insert a row into the database before you redirect them.
Click to expand...

How do you mean exactly ?

I'm allready using a redirect script. that says. /more/brandname.php which then redirects them to the url with my ref id in it.

Why should I use a database ?
thnx
 
If you don't track your own clicks, you'll never be able to effectively see if shaving is going on.
 
I don't think any network will shave clicks. Some advertisers, however, will shave conversions.

If another affiliate network has the same offer, I would split your traffic 50/50 between two different networks. If one network converts the traffic significantly better, then something may be suspect. If one network has signifcantly more clicks (10%+), then something's gone wrong with the click tracking.
 
chatmasta said:
Mask it with something like out.php?o=affiliate_id and insert a row into the database before you redirect them.
Click to expand...

This will help, but don't forget that you will need more than just the above if you want to be entirely accurate. If you just use the above quote with nothing else, then your stats will also track search engine robot clicks, invalid clicks, etc. The affiliate program actually will not track robot clicks or invalid clicks, which will mean that you will have more clicks reported on your stats than the program.
 
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