Networks, send a damn email when offers/tracking goes down

Demon

Demon

Banned
Jun 15, 2007
1,143
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London, UK
www.aminology.com
Why is it that we affiliates almost always discover outages/tracking issues related to a network itself or an individual offer before the network tells us (thats even if they eventually do)? Is it so hard for a network to send out a mass email the very minute there are issues with tracking, or to set up uptime monitoring in case an offer goes offline, so we can instantly be informed by email?

It was only last week when I was lucky enough to discover that one offer I was promoting had been down for roughly 1 hour. I hadn't heard a word from the particular network about this, and I actually had to contact them to let them know the offer was down before they realised and took action to get it back online. What's even more frustrating is that although I was personally contacted when it was back up, there was no email sent out to signify the offer had gone down and no email for when it came back up. It is not the responsibility of the affiliate to be checking these things, and it beggars belief how some of these networks expect us to build a relationship with them and send a high volume of expensive traffic when they aren't even prepared to be lightning quick with these things.
 


Well Affiliate Networks does have over thousands of campaigns. Its difficult for them to monitor every single campaigns and at the same time, ensures that they are PERFECTLY fine. BUT I do think its a good way to make money off their Affiliates. The ones who doesnt know will prob never know unless they are tracking themselves ;)
 
I hate when this happens, and agree some monitoring system should be in place.

But the real issue here is: what happens once an Advertiser goes down, whether it's 5 mins or 50 mins.

I feel a fair solution is to take what the pubs current EPC was before the downtime, and give them a credit based on how many clicks came through to the network side during the downtime.

e.g. if your epc is $3.00 currently, the Advertiser's page is down 30 mins, you generate 500 clicks during this time to the Advertiser's down page, you should receive a credit of $1500.

Hah! Wishful thinking, eh? Is it really so off the wall to ask this? Why should the pub take the entire loss?

Ultimately the solution could rest with:

1. The Networks, upon clicking their link, if the site is down, issuing a redirect to a similar offer during this time period;

2. The PPC Engine, if sensing the site is down, temporarily pausing a campaign.

I'd opt for #2 above as the ultimate, kick-ass solution, but this doesnt cover all forms of Advertising like Organic Search, Email, etc. So I think #1 is the only way this can work across the board.
 
Roundabout said:
e.g. if your epc is $3.00 currently, the Advertiser's page is down 30 mins, you generate 500 clicks during this time to the Advertiser's down page, you should receive a credit of $1500.

Hah! Wishful thinking, eh? Is it really so off the wall to ask this? Why should the pub take the entire loss?
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A large aff network has voluntarily done this for me several times when the advertiser was having server issues. It is rare, however.
 
Jackeyy said:
Well Affiliate Networks does have over thousands of campaigns. Its difficult for them to monitor every single campaigns and at the same time, ensures that they are PERFECTLY fine. BUT I do think its a good way to make money off their Affiliates. The ones who doesnt know will prob never know unless they are tracking themselves ;)
Click to expand...

STFU noobcake.
 
Jackeyy said:
Well Affiliate Networks does have over thousands of campaigns. Its difficult for them to monitor every single campaigns and at the same time, ensures that they are PERFECTLY fine. BUT I do think its a good way to make money off their Affiliates. The ones who doesnt know will prob never know unless they are tracking themselves ;)
Click to expand...

Do you even understand the function of a network?
They act as middle men so you do not have to find advertisers and collect payment yourself.
It is in their best interest to notify you when the shit hits the fan. You don't make money, they don't make money.
I have no idea where you get the notion that if an offer goes down, or tracking for that matter, they still make money off their affiliates.
What are you? New?
 
Scattered said:
Do you even understand the function of a network?
They act as middle men so you do not have to find advertisers and collect payment yourself.
It is in their best interest to notify you when the shit hits the fan. You don't make money, they don't make money.
I have no idea where you get the notion that if an offer goes down, or tracking for that matter, they still make money off their affiliates.
What are you? New?
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lol you definitely lose.
 
This is my pet peeve... but from time to time, a merchant will deactivate an entire network for fraud and, when this happens, there's a gap in the time between that occurring and the network notifying you.
 
uguxseo said:
A large aff network has voluntarily done this for me several times when the advertiser was having server issues. It is rare, however.
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But WHY is it rare? this is trivial to implement i do it every day at my real job implementing CRM systems for large companies.
 
Roundabout said:
I hate when this happens, and agree some monitoring system should be in place.

But the real issue here is: what happens once an Advertiser goes down, whether it's 5 mins or 50 mins.

I feel a fair solution is to take what the pubs current EPC was before the downtime, and give them a credit based on how many clicks came through to the network side during the downtime.

e.g. if your epc is $3.00 currently, the Advertiser's page is down 30 mins, you generate 500 clicks during this time to the Advertiser's down page, you should receive a credit of $1500.

Hah! Wishful thinking, eh? Is it really so off the wall to ask this? Why should the pub take the entire loss?
Click to expand...

It's definitely not off the wall to ask this, but do realize that most advertisers will NOT pay affiliate networks for downtime, even if it is the fault of the advertiser. If you are dealing with a ridiculously awesome affiliate network/manager, sometimes they will foot the bill to keep the publisher happy, even if they didn't get paid by the advertiser.
 
When an offer goes down, we redirect traffic to a top performing offer in that same niche followed by an email update to prevent mass losses in revenue/leads. @Roundabout, we cover our affiliates and take hits if this happens based on your performance at the time.
 
Grind - please explain how you are aware of all your Advertisers 24/7 when they should "blip" and go offline...
 
Roundabout said:
Grind - please explain how you are aware of all your Advertisers 24/7 when they should "blip" and go offline...
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We're not -- I don't believe anyone is. Even if you had a dedicated person testing that something could go wrong, but we would cover losses according to your performance of that time (estimate).
 
How about writing a script that pings a keep alive/query to all Advertisers LPs, run once a minute, and reports begin generating after 2-3 minutes of unsuccess? I have my standards.
 
self promotion at its finest
GrindHard said:
When an offer goes down, we redirect traffic to a top performing offer in that same niche followed by an email update to prevent mass losses in revenue/leads. @Roundabout, we cover our affiliates and take hits if this happens based on your performance at the time.
Click to expand...
GrindHard said:
We're not -- I don't believe anyone is. Even if you had a dedicated person testing that something could go wrong, but we would cover losses according to your performance of that time (estimate).
Click to expand...
 
Roundabout said:
How about writing a script that pings a keep alive/query to all Advertisers LPs, run once a minute, and reports begin generating after 2-3 minutes of unsuccess? I have my standards.
Click to expand...

GrindHard said:
I agree, but other issues beside hosting arise and those need to be maintained by the advertisers naturally.
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There are enterprise-grade 3rd party systems that do this. Gomez comes to mind. I think the networks should have this sort of monitoring in place. No need to reinvent the wheel here just pay a 3rd party. It would probably pay for itself after 1 outage.
 
I dont know about other networks but we monitor our links with a software program every few minutes on every offer. Its why you see so many redirects with little to no notice at times from us. We usually wait 20 minutes to redirect if its a low volume offer, high volume offers get redirected immidiately and sent back once the site comes up, which is monitored by the same program so we know the moment it comes back up.

I think any established network would already have something similar in place
 
mkrongel said:
I dont know about other networks but we monitor our links with a software program every few minutes on every offer. Its why you see so many redirects with little to no notice at times from us. We usually wait 20 minutes to redirect if its a low volume offer, high volume offers get redirected immidiately and sent back once the site comes up, which is monitored by the same program so we know the moment it comes back up.

I think any established network would already have something similar in place
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I think we are looking for more proactive notification via email. For example, last night should have been something to the effect of,

"Dear Publisher: your campaigns are still tracking. You cannot login to our site at this time but that will be resolved with an ETA of X:YY AM."

Instead, people could not login to any DT-based network and were somewhat in the dark.
 
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