Basically with email submits the experience falls into one of the following 5:

1. No conversions from the start. Complete shave, throwing money to the wind. Run like hell.
2. You’ll get a conversion on the 1st or 2nd clicks, then no conversion at all, while the clicks stack up. They wave a carrot, then cut you down. Particularly amusing when they give you a conversion on a test click, without you even filling out the offer. Chuckle, then run like hell.
3. You start off with a realistic CR then it suddenly drops as they start to shave, after you get a few conversions- sometimes 10-20, sometimes more. This is irrespective of how the offer is backing out for the advertiser, as they’re not checking – ie, they’re simply waving a bigger carrot, before sucking you dry. These can make money initially, but you have to watch them like a hawk. Grab a few similar submits from this advertiser on that network and throw them into Prosper 5 at a time, rotating out the ones that go dead. Careful, the advertiser may drop block you from their offers, and even fresh ones will start off as cat 1. I found a lot of Amped Media’s submits behave like this. Another strategy is to network surf – milk the offer on one network, then find it on other networks and throw them into that same campaign til you run out. One offer that performed really well for me like that is A Maybelline submit that was around a while back. However the last two times I saw it on a network it was already a cat 1! An offer going from 30%+ CR to nothing on another network was obvious bullshit. These first 3 categories are all shaving, rather then scrubbing.
4. From the start they aim for a certain EPC, say 5c. No matter what you do, you get shaved down to that EPC and either you beat it or not. Can make money if you can get an ultra low CPC. Don’t confuse you own crappy, untargeted traffic which is simply not converting with this though. Technically, if the advertiser is evaluating the data before limited creditted leads its scrubbing, if they’re just doing it across the board, its shaving, but who in the end, who gives a shit.
5. Offer converts at a reasonable rate for that offer, which can be anything from 10% to 40%. Unlike category 3 or 4 the advertiser actually checks whether its backing out for them on a case by case basis. If it is they may let you keep going, if not your AM tells you to change traffic source, take a lower payout or stop running the offer.. if you have a good AM and are running with a decent network and the advertiser bothers to inform them. The advertiser may start to shave you down to a lower EPC that matches their own before the AM tells you anything or you ask. This is scrubbing, rather then shaving, btw.

Fact is most advertisers know its just not going to be worth it for them to actually pay out listed by the network. They know most pubs won’t bring a decent enough quality on something as shitty as an email submit, so they skip the quality control and simply rely on noobs running up conversions for them – there’s always more standing in like waiting to be shaved to oblivion, hoping to find that magics submit that actually converts. Why would they bother wading through the flocks of fraudsters, noone actually holds them accountable anyway, one offer runs dry, hey, they’ll throw up 5 more next month.

The better submits have become harder and harder to find over the last few months.

As an example, the other day I ran iPad campaigns from 5 networks – MB, NB, LFM, XY7 and Flux.

Of those 3 fell into category 2 – I got a conversion on 1st or second click, the dozens more clicks with conversions. These were LFM, MB (one of the 1.10 I think, the $3 submits behave differently) and Flux.
The NB was a category 1 from the start.
The XY7 seemed to be a shave down to an EPC, category 4. I had 2 conversions from the first 3 clicks. Then it went down to about 5c EPC and stayed there til I shut it off after a few more leads.

So all these were a waste of time. I cannot 100% guarantee shaving/scrubbing on each of these, you can always argue my traffic just didn’t convert, target being saturated after everyone and their bot army ran the offer, but it sure seems to fit the profile from past experience. Odd also that I was getting conversions on the XY7 (I paused at 6 conversions, as it was going nowhere), but none or just the 1 on the others..

When you get hit with the shave it may transfer to other offers from the same advertiser that are on the same network. They can even drop you down categories, eg all of a sudden all submits from an advertiser give you no conversions at all, even ones you have not run before, as in the Maybelline example above. They used to also blacklist you – your AM sends you an email saying your traffic sucks for the advertiser and they want you off all their offers. Doesn’t seem to happen anymore – they just shave you completely now more often – they’ll still take your crappy traffic for a few conversions if they dont have to pay you anything.

One last tip – if an email submit allows only “Email” as a traffic source it is more likely to be higher category – email traffic converts better for email submits, so the advertiser can afford to shave less. If you have well converting traffic you can ask your AM if you can run the Email only version of the submit, I dont recommend just doing it without asking, before you know it you’ll be getting an email asking your traffic source.

For more info on how email submits work, check out Smaxor’s posts for the perspective from a network owner (he owns Ads4Dough): Understanding How Email Submits Work and My Prespective as an Affiliate, Advertiser and Network Owner on Scrubbing and Shaving.

Brad over at MadPPC.com has a great post on the same subject too, with some further details on the above, if you’re interested in the hows and whys: Submits: How they work and why they are a pain in the ass. He’s got a quote there from Steve from MaxBounty who says about shaving: “no merchant or network would risk their good reputation to do this”. To which I say bullshit, plenty of network and merchants are doing just that on submits.

Anyway, you’ve read all the boring crap, so here’s some candy.

I’m going to share some of the images I used in the above mentioned iPad campaign on Facebook, simply because I got a chuckle out of it and you may too.. and be amazed at what FB let through.

I used about 40 images, mostly the expected photos of the iPad in various titillating positions. The first 20 or so were just regulars. Then in the end I threw a few more interesting images that I thought may or may not get through, for something different and a bit of fun. Worst thing that could happen is they get denied.. best thing an actually decent CTR, considering my images would actually stand out a little. My traffic ran against both types evenly, so no, the below douchebaggary did not compromise the scientific process above.

I won’t share the text, except to say the heading was simply along the lines of “Want a Free Apple iPad?” Well.. along the lines of.

I really have no idea whats going on here:

Hot girl. Apple laptop. What?

OK, this was the absolute winner. CTR above 0.25, clicks were 5c. It lasted less then 48 hours before they actually disaproved it. It is also the only one that got disaproved. On the second day the CTR dropped to about 0.10 when I unpaused it. I suspect people down voted it, so it got a worse position and thus less clicks.

Hot Ass + Apple = WIN

Dont really know whats going on here either:

Random hot girl. I think she’s using her iPad, looks like it to me, anyway.

iLame.

“Well La-De ****ing Da!”

She’s as sick of hearing about the friggin’ iPad as I am.

Feel free to use these in your campaigns! Protip: get these approved for a dating ad.

I was testing out some campaigns on there, keeping the traffic at a trickle. An hour or so ago I decided to pause the 4 campaigns I had running as the tests were not going very well. I selected them all and clicked Paused. The interface changed to say “You have no Campaign ads currently running or pending review.”, as it should have.

So far so good.

A few minutes later I saw in Prosper202’s Spy view that traffic was still going to those campaigns. Hmm, perhaps it takes a few minutes for it to stop or its just residuals? Reasonable enough. I started to keep an eye on the traffic and what happened next was the exact opposite or what should have happened – the traffic began to increase to at least 2 of the campaigns. Then it increased some more and started flooding in, relative to what i was seeing before.

Not only did the campaigns not pause, which would have been not such a catastrophic fuck up, just a major one – it appears my targeting or my bidding was reset/wiped out/changed. I am not even sure the traffic was coming from the right countries.

I triple checked everything in Adbrite – there is no question all my campaigns were paused. I resumed the campaigns and then paused them again, hoping it would work the second time and tried to find a support email address. The Help page was no use whatsoever. The Contact Us page has only a ‘press inquiries’ address and for a link to a contact form, “in case you didn’t find an answer in the FAQ”. After filling out the contact form it followed up with “You will receive a response within 24 hours.”

I dont know if bigger spenders get an account rep or something, but I’ve never heard from a human being at Adbrite. The support system sucks – had the traffic not stopped was I going to have to wait up to 24 hours to get a response? I dont know yet if I’ll get billed for the traffic, in which I’ll need to chase up a refund or that was a a gift (hey it happens – in fact 3 days ago another platform ran for a few hours without recording impressions, so free traffic for all, thank you very much), but lets see what their support comes up with. I expect them to be as hopeless as their platform.

UPDATE: Well, a couple of days later and no reply from Adbrite. It doesn’t look like I was charged for the extra traffic though, so thanks for the extra 2 leads I got from it, Adbrite! Yeah, if the campaigns were doing better then that I would not have had to pause them in the first place. Wonder if I can replicate triggering Adbrite’s free traffic ‘feature’…

UPDATE 2: Got a reply shortly after the last update, telling me that it takes a while for the traffic to stop after you pause a campaign, after I already explained to them thats not what happened. Anyway, I’m way over bitching about Adbrite and much rather give MediaTraffic an earful right now, but then the blog cant all be about the sand in my vagina can it.

Turns out they are limiting impressions to ANY ads that are similar to other ads being shown, for the same reason that they limit your one same ad being shown to the same user too many times. Here’s a response from Facebook when someone from Affiliit.com asked them whether they ‘throttle’ dating ads. The response was posted on the Affiliit forums:

” In an effort to preserve a good user experience, our system monitors the number of times any given user sees a specific ad. If there is another ad that is the same or similar to that ad, our system takes that similarity into account. This similarity tracking can happen at any level (is independent of campaign or account). If the user things it’s the same when s/he sees it, then the system attempts to limit the ad(s)’ frequency.

What this means in your case is that your ads are probably not different enough from other, similar ads that your audience is seeing, or not different enough from ones that they have seen and found irrelevant or unpleasant. One reason the payout on certain dating offers is so high is that it’s difficult to drive traffic to them.

I recommend differentiating yourself in your current space (different offers, different text, different images, etc.), or changing spaces (e.g. Expanding internationally). If neither of these is possible, you will have to bid more to get the impressions, and therefore CTR that you need.”

On a side note, seems the facebook review doesn’t understand what CTR means, judging but his use of the term in the last sentence.

Affilliit.com, btw, is a new-ish Affiliate Marketing Training Program. I’ve just started having a bit of a look around, I’ll probably post a review at some point. I know the guys that started it back from my PPC Coach days and one of them gave me an account to check out what they’ve built over there and so far I’m impressed. They cover areas including PPC, SEO, Social Media and PPV, but their SEO is their strongest area and they have a huge range of SEO tools, reflecting that. Anyway, I’ll save the rest for a review some time.

I am rarely one for conspiracy theories or donning tinfoil hats but a word of warning, a lot of this post is conjecture. With that disclaimer out of the way, I would like to discuss a trend that I have noticed with the paid side of Google AdWords. I wrote recently about Google flushing out affiliates that use AdWords. A lot of people didn’t agree with me yet Google published an update just days afterward to it’s “website types to avoid” document about the exact topic. A lot of commenters made the very valid point that Google owns and operates it’s very own affiliate network.

The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next….

Interesting theory, will keep an eye out on how it pans out.

As for my situation, my older accounts seem to be in order, as are other accounts in my MCC.. Will be keeping an eye on that too. While throwing my campaigns at anything but Google.

So now onto the good news!

Got one of these in my email today:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

What ghastly things have I done to deserve this tragic fate? Well, the ONLY campaigns I EVER ran in that account were for 2 Amazon affiliate stores that I had written about earlier. One of those I had bought and know that the previous owner ran Adwords campaigns for (hey, I knew why he was getting rid of it and knew what I was buying, as I explained before) and the other is one that I made myself. I only ran the campaigns for a short time before they got ‘google slapped’, but I was going to turn them off anyway, as they were not profitable and I was doing better with organic traffic.

A google slap for a thin affiliate site I can understand. But a permanent ban from Google? Seems a little excessive. Again, there were never any other campaigns in that account, which I opened around the beginning of this year, but never used until August. I also have two other accounts, which do not appear to be banned and are connected by an MCC account, which includes client accounts (campaigns for local small businesses). Only the client campaigns are currently running in the MCC and I’ll have to keep an eye on whether they keep running. The only other campaign I’ve personally had running in those accounts was an old Clickbank campaign which I turned off about a month ago. Might see if I can reactivate that one. Another funny thing I noticed – a couple of campaigns that had been google slapped a year ago and got zero impressions on for months have been getting a trickle of impressions again after months of inactivity. I have no idea why. I think I’ll delete all those slapped campaigns anyhow, before I get these accounts banned also, if anything they’re the ones I would have expected to be hit for. I’m not sure I’d be able to create new campaigns in them anyway, will have to try. As you can tell, its not like I’ve been doing much with Adwords this whole year anyway, but this still complicates things for the future, if I cant run campaigns for local business clients.

One other reason for the ban hammer may have been that I didn’t have that account added to my MCC, which technically it should have been. Who knows. From the experience of others its useless trying to argue or even ask why the ban occured. Chasing it up will likely simply get my other accounts disabled, if their days aren’t numbered already.

The CTR Factor.
The CTR is all important. There is no Quality Score with Facebook as there is with say Google, so this makes things simpler. Generally you need your CTR to stay above 0.04% for your ads to keep showing. Go below that for too long and your traffic will peter out, even as you keep raising your bids. Obviously the sharper you are finding the best responding demographic for your ads the higher your CTR will be.

The Volume Factor.
Facebook being a relatively simple PPC ads system, creating more ads will get you more traffic. You can even do this simply by duplicating the exact same ad, with the exact same target demographic – this is not against any Facebook rules and Facebook will not detect it and try to even out the traffic.

The Facebook Randomness/Momentum Factor.
When you set your initial bids there is a point below which you will not be given any impressions at all. If you find that point and bid at it or just above it you’ll be given a certain number of test impressions – say 2000 – will be a make or break time for your ad. If its CTR is high enough it will keep showing. If not, it will fade away. But a quick experiment will show that you can submit the exact same ad 10 times at once (with bidz around the ‘break-point’ that is) and find that some of the ads take off and get lots of impressions and subsequently clicks, while other will get few impressions and die. An ad must get momentum in this initial test phase and whether it gets the momentum to keep going has an element of randomness to it. Sharper targetting and higher bids will raise and can ascertain that the ad will keep getting shown, but sometimes its hard to get a high enough CTR or a wide enough target to get the momentum. And why bid higher then necessary, anyhow?

Taking the above three factors into account, here are the two targeting strategies that work best:

Bulls Eye Targetting
Here you simply find the target demographic that give you the best CTR and aim for that. You can use keywords or other options, like sex/age/marital status. Then you scale your campaign around the target in wider and wider circles. Eg, say the ideal target is teenage females who like The Jonas Brothers (this is a real example offer that currently available). Your sharpest ads will target the Jonas Brothers as a keyword, but then you widen the net to fans of bands similar to the Jonas Brothers, and to males and to older demographics, as long as you’re still getting a positive ROI.
The main problem with Bulls Eye Targetting is that often the target is simply too small. This may mean it saturates fast or even does allow you to break through the momentum factor.
The main advantage is that you can get your CTR right up and thus bring your bids right down.

Sweep Targeting
The other targeting strategy is to go wide from the start. For some campaigns the appeal is a very wide demographic or it is simply too hard or impossible to pinpoint the target with keywords and other options. What people first try to do is to pitch the same ad or same variety of ads at different ages in succession. Eg. target 25 year old females, 26 year old females, 27 year old females etc. Or to target ranges: 25-27 year old females, 28-30 year old females, 31-33 year old females, etc However the Randomness Momentum Factor greatly reduces the effectiveness of that approach. One solution is to pitch the ad to each demographic multiple times. My preferred approach is what I call the Sweep. Say I find that an offer works well with older women – and this usually just comes down to common sense. Rather then target each age, or segment the age range I would target this way, as an example:
59-60 females, 58-60 females, 57-60 females, 56-60 females, 55-60 females, 54-60 females, 53-60 females, etc. If your whole target is women between 35 and 60 you can all the way down to 35 and then back up (35-36, 35-37 etc) and if you see a sweet spot, work around that as well.

One reason this works is because it eliminates some of the randomness factor. If you target each age you’ll find some ads simple wont work or seem inconsistent, and your test data will be off. Another reason is that generally the larger your target demographic, and the more general, the lower your minimum bids will be, which will help the ads get momentum.

For best results you can play around with combining the two strategies.

I’ll break down offers into 4 types:

1. Campaigns that are not against FB’s terms but violate their ever shifting guidelines on a technicality. Two common examples are:
A. The image is deemed too unrelated to the offer.
B. Overuse of capitalization.
This type is the simplest to deal with. Resubmission usually works eventually. As you want to create the most attention grabbing ad its part of the game to push things in this regard. For example for a Credit Report offer I’ve used images with a hot girl in front of a bike/car (the angle here is to target people that need a credit score check to get a loan to buy a motorbike/car) and I had to submit these several times to get them approved. I also often capitalize the call to action in an ad (eg ‘ENTER NOW’ for a competition offer or the word ‘FREE’) and/or capitalize the first letter of each or most words. Again, sometimes these need to be submitted several times. They’ve gotten more lax on capitalization lately. Resubmit and experiment.

2. International offers. The approval team is in the US and they wont use proxies to look at geo-targetted international offers. Some ads are even approved by their staff in Ireland, so even US offers can be affected. For these just find a similar offer for the US and get the ads approved, then switch the link. Some networks, for example Neverblue, provide a non-geotargetted preview link that you can use. If you use a tracker like Prosper202 its simple to switch the link there. Otherwise you can redirect through a subdomain or better still a redirection script, which allows you to pass through your keywords that identify your ad.
Speaking of their approval team – they are not ‘interns’ as some people call them, the intern subdomain is just short for internal.

3. Offers with special rules. The most common example is dating offers. Images of girls showing too much skin will get disapproved. And you need to tick the ‘Single’ box for Relationship status and set the Interested In field (eg tick ‘Women’). FB have gotten stricter on letting these ads through, to the point of ridiculousness. Resubmit and experiment.

4. Offers that actually against FBs terms. Examples are rebill offers (eg. acai, grants, google cash, rez v etc) and ringtone/premium sms (horoscope, dating tips etc) mobile offers that dont clearly display the cost to the user. FB have gotten very strict on these offers and there is vague chance you could get your account shut down for continually trying to submit them if they manually check your account. They’ve previously sent bots through accounts to find these types of offers and retroactively disaprove your ads. This is a whole subject in itself and has been covered extensively elsewhere – check out the NickyCakes blog or Wicked Fire. You can switch links as above or use cloaking with IP detection (ie redirecting traffic from intern.facebook.com to another site). Not something I really muck around with. Doing AM full time i dont want to risk getting banned. FB are aware of the tricks people are using and have said they’re working on detecting this stuff.

I managed to just get through the gate for 3rd place with 1028 leads. I have no idea who got first place, but I believe the second place winner was a network, so I believe some bragging rights are well deserved.

Direct Agents are currently running another Bidz.com contest and its not too late for you to join in. The winner of the ‘New York, NY’ Contest will win a luxury trip to New York to go to Affiliate Summit East, which includes your return flight to New York, 3 nights stay at the Hilton and a Platinum pass to the summit. Second prize is a Gold Pass and a dinner for a two at a restaurant of your choice and 3rd place is a Gold Pass. There are also a couple of ‘honourable mention’ prizes for which you only need to get 200 leads. The contest is running til the 30th of June, so plenty of time to smash this one up!

To start things off for the beginners, a simple tip. Facebook charges you for duplicate clicks. You will see that there is a difference between the click numbers that Facebook reports and what you see reported on your affiliate network’s stats screen. Typically the difference is about 10-15%.

To account for this you need to add that 10-15% to your CPC (Cost Per Click) to maintain realistic ROI (Return On Investment) reporting. So for example when bidding 10c on facebook I would put the CPC as 11c into my Prosper202 Tracker. if bidding 20c I would put 22c.