Creative shaving and affiliate manipulations
 

Okay, here are some of the best "shave and manipulate" techniques I have come accross... feel free to add yours on the list:

1 - End of month sales: Good programs will shave you like a motherfucker all month, and then in the last few days of a pay period, suddenly you will get sales, which is enough to encourage you to keep sending them traffic for another month.

2 - Declining traffic sales: Because programs shave everyone enough, they can grant occassional sales to affiliates who have shown a decrease in traffic, to encourage them to "come back". These are usually the "no referer" or "no data" sales.

3 - Opps, we turned off the shaver: Suddenly flurry of sales on a program that is out of line with normal traffic, usually as a result of the shave percentage being set to zero or turned off by accident. Never lasts!


On the worst / bad side:

1 - The difference between blank and zero. Nothing shows a program to be shaving hits more than a program that doesn't report traffic on days when you have no hits (blank line) and then the next day shows 0 hits (not blank). Obviously, the shave software rounded down, and there is a diference between shaved to zero and no hits.

2 - second page join link only counts: One program (nameless) counts less than 10% of the hits I send, and claims it to be uniques only... unique to what, the year?

Anyway... add on your experiences and comments!

send a TON of sales per day to a sponsor, then watch it slow down after some pay periods, stop sending traffic all together and continue to get 2-4 sales a day for about a month

i call that the "throw em a bone" technique

1 day send 10k hits get 0 sales
2 day send 200 hits get 9 sales
3 day send 10 hits get 8 sales

As to point 1, I've noticed the opposite effect. With a certain program I get enough sales in the first day or two to make minimum payout, then one or two over the rest of the two week period. Unfortunately, it'd be too much work for me to remove/change all the pages, so I just live with it (for now) and move on.

As for point 2, the same program I referred to above does the same thing. Counts about 1/10th of my hits. I'm assuming they count join page or 2nd page hits, but I wonder what happened to the rest of the traffic I sent.

Hmm. Upon reviewing my post and quickly checking my account, if I outed the program they could probably accuse me of generating false signups because the activity on that account looks suspicious - as most of my sales come in clusters at the beginning of the period. Son of a bitch.

garce, that is often an effect of more or less scrubbing on the processing end as well. If they were very good on chargebacks and whatnot in the previous period, they might be a little more lenient when it comes to allowing signups for a couple of days, until they start going the wrong direction. It is also why it happens near the end of the month, because they are far enough under to take some more risks.

Let me add:

4 - The mystery recur: This is one of the most amusing ways to create income where none exists. I know of at least one program where I will occassionally gets recurs on sites I have never sold on before... and usually just near the end of the month and when conversions have been fairly bad. Another "throw them a bone" move.

We're testing all our sponsors for shaving all the time...

We usually have several accounts where we split up the traffic equally to each...

If we get the least suspicious we make test sign ups - and don't let the sponsor know about them before we have them in our stats...

Bisk, interestingly, some sponsors will actually kill your account for making test signups without previous notification. I always found that an interesting concept, tells me usually that they have something to hide.

Makes sense, but I just got two more sales today after not getting any since Nov. 2. This happens every pay period. Just seems odd...

What it boils down to, is the webmaster needs to know his/her traffic and how well it converts. From there the webmaster can determine which sponsors convert well and which sponsors convert terribly, or "shave."