Reverse Shaving?
 

I use countless sponsors and with probably 35% of them have noticed a disturbing trend.

Usually over the course of the first few days, I generate sales. In some cases good sales, in others mediocre. Sales nonetheless.

However, after I generate a few sales it dries up...fast. I use the same methods to promote them as I did when I was generating signups and the same methods I use with my other sponsors, but all of a sudden the sales dissapear.

Normally, this is no big deal, because you just change sponsors. But when there is a minimum that amounts to say, 3 sales and you got 2 the first day, you figure, fine I'm gonna dump your ass as soon as I hit my minimum.

This isn't limited to programs with limited sales, this is just a worst case scenario.

One sponsor in particular, I generated great sales for about 2 weeks. So, I up the traffic that I was sending and generated NO sales. I stopped sending traffic about a week later. Through cookies and such I was still getting a TINY amount of traffic though, and miraculously, sales started to reappear. Bumped it up a little again, and sales disappeared. I stopped sending traffic again, and AGAIN sales started to appear. No, I didn't send anymore traffic their way.

So my question is this. We've all heard about sponsors shaving, (blah, blah, blah) but do any of you think that sponsors ADD sales to mislead you and have you generate more traffic to their sites?

Start your own affiliate program, have your own merchant account

I quit using sponsor programs all together and just give porn away for free. Now that my rich grandfather died i just live off the inheritance.

I've noticed that with a certain sponsor as well.

:BangBang: Free Porn

too much free porn!!

i have gas

I won $8,000.00 on 3 scratch lottery tickets last week so I took all sponsor banners and links off ALL my sites and pages... for 2 weeks...

where can I get me some of this 'free porn' everyone is talking about?

I once pulled EVERY single gallery and freesite I made to a sponsor at once down cuz they pissed me off and miraculously, with absolutely no way of generating traffic or sales, I was still getting both. I think I made $105 on shit that didn't exist. Amazing. Try it for yourself.

And now, the sponsor wasn't batching from the previous day.

those were probably all AOHell users viewing your pages on AOL's cache servers..

Nope....uniques stopped too...I got 3 sales on like 5 hits. Heh

or maybe lucifer X

Knowing a little about billing (as our company built a billing solution), plus owning a new sponsor program (to be realesed next month) I may have an insight into this issue.

We all know and understand shaving, and can guess what it does and means.

But to understand how an affiliate program works, you need to truly understand the billing behind it.

For example, chargebacks and refunds affect the bottom line every time, and each affilliate program out there handles these in different ways.

But the one transaction surrounded in mystery and is never really discussed is the "Retry"

Essentially a Retry is when a sale is made to a good credit card, but the funds arent there, so iBill (or whoever the processor is) keeps trying and trying the card in an attempt to get the money.

So in this situation we have a real sale, but no money :(

Invariably I get many days where I collect many of these sales, only to find I actually havent got the funds.

So as a webmaster, I would have to make a tough decision on how to show this easily. Some webmasters show the sale, then shave afterwards when the money isnt retrieved, and others dont show the sale unitl they get the cash.

In the second instance, even if you stopped sending traffic through, you would still be receiving sales.

So Voila - me thinks I may have answered your question Kronic

Also, some surfers remember where you sent them, and come back at a later date to join the site. All going well, you still get the sale!

Regards
Daniel

ICQ: 92462894



:2 cents:

You know... I can relate as well. I noticed the same exact thing...
Test the sponsor out with small amounts of traffic - nice sales/some sales... up the amount by a lot - WTF?! No sales...

Don't think they ADD signups... Seriously that would be sort of... umm.. impossible.

Ah... whatever... I'm thinking if I should just use a per-click program instaed of all those others...

Yes they do that. I've know more bizzare instances of programs actually adding signups to to appease impatient webmasters like you.... You have to remember that 2 sales in nothing... you need to have a good statistical sample size.... But sponsors definitely do treat you well at first to get you hooked.

Impatient webmasters like me???

If I send 3 signups in 2 days to a sponsor (which is by NO means spectacular conversion on the number of uniques that I send) I don't expect to receive NO sales for the next 8 days when I increase the traffic by the 200-300%.

Gullible? Perhaps. Impatient? I don't think so.

1) Most webmasters do not make money
2) Most adult webmasters do not make money
3) Most adult webmasters do not make sponsors money

The idea that sponsors would actually pay people more money to get your business is just funny. Unless they were doing super duper analysis on their affiliates - they would be paying money to people that would most likely never generate business in the first place.

I have noticed sales being credited later than they are supposed to be. I think there are many sponsors out there that do not understand how their system works on all levels.

It just isn't that important to them. Name ANY major sponsor - and I can (but won't) show you problems with their stats.

This doesn't mean they are cheating - quite the contrary. If they wanted to cheat - they would always make raws higher than uniques - sales never possible without uniques and other such things.

Fact is I know I have gotten credit for other peoples sales - I can see it in the referring urls for sales and I have had people write me claiming they got credit for my sales. It all evens out for me - and I am not complaining.

Things just don't always work they way you think. AOL caches pages for way too long. I change websites for this one person that uses aol and they can't see the changes for hours and hours. They think I did something wrong.

Cookies last for god knows how long - some sponsors use them - some don't. Conversion rates differ based on zillions of factors.

Sometimes referring urls get skipped over so it goes one too far.

I don't understand it all, but I know what I have seen.

It just doesn't make sense for these companies to do it on purpose. You really need to send a decent amount of traffic to a sponsor to tell how good they are - AND THEY NEED a decent amount of traffic from you to do the same.

All I care about is a put such and such an ad from sponsor A on my site for a week. If I get X amount of money from them and it is better than another sponsor I try for a week - I might change to their site - and this is at the site level.

I did this for adult platinum - one of their sites (That I thought would do better) I put up and replaced an existing site - it didn't even do 50% of what I was doing.

Does this mean adult platinum is shit? No - I took another one of their sites and replaced my ads for them. They did more than twice as good. So it kind of evens out. I changed back the ads for the one site that sucked ass - and kept the ads for the one that did great. I will probably add more of this site to some of my other pages.

Just my :2 cents:

Some affiliate systems allow the PaySite owner to payout $X amount for a certain duration, like let's say 5 cycles. Then that commission drops off. It's not truely "shaving" (not to say that this doesn't happen), however, it is more of a finite commission structure.

User signs up... affiliate makes $X amount for the first signup, and continues to make this amount for X cycles.

Pretty standard stuff.

So, when the affiliate says things like "Earn $40.00 recurring"... It truely IS recurring... it is recurring for X bill cycles.