Quote:
Originally Posted by pompousjohn
OK I have started the test. Initial findings are not encouraging. The retroactive switch does not affect affiliate earnings that have already been reported as far as I can tell, which makes a lot of sense but also would help to hide sneaky program changes.
I have some screen grabs but I don't know what the point is to post them unless somebody starts calling me a liar.
The program I used was a disabled program of which my own personal affiliate account was the only active member. Program was set to payout 50% of joins and 50% of rebills.
I switched it to hide joins, hide rebills and pay 0% of joins and 0% of rebills. I also set the program to Retro-Active Payout.
I refreshed stats from affiliate and admin side to see if there was any effect on existing sales and rebills, there was none.
Then I did 3 signups with a test credit card # provided by Netbilling.
On the admin side I could see the joins, on the affiliate side I could not detect any change at all, apart from one additional unique.
I guess the next step is to change it back and see if the joins and rebills show, unfortunately this program has a 7-day trial membership so those could be a long time coming.
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pompousjohn, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this and for having the integrity to come back and report results like this.
Yes the next step would be to change it back to:
Retro Active ON (should already be on), pay 50% of joins and 50% of rebills, hide joins OFF, hide rebills OFF
and then to see if those three joins made at the time when the other settings were present end up showing up in affiliate stats at all. Also to check the same for any trial conversions or rebills.
From what TMM_John states and what I understand they should show up in the affiliate stats after doing this because "hide joins" and "hide rebills" are not "sticky" (based on the settings at the time of the initial join). If they do not then this shows that the method likely can be used to "Shave".