Msg#: 3308125 posted 6:07 am on Apr 11, 2007 (gmt 0)
I've been advertising a famous hosting campany using PPC for a few weeks through CJ Suddenly - half of my march sales were removed from my comissions for a reason of "fraud and deleted orders". All the traffic seems OK, keywords are various and nothing seems wrong. My question is : 1. Does such a thing happened to someone (a lot of deleted / fraud orders in hosting)? 2. What can I do in order to prevent such a thing?
First, it isn't CJ's fault. The merchant is responsible for identifying bad leads and reversing them. The question in my mind is how honest is the merchant? We may never know the answer to that question, but there are clues to how well the merchant normally performs in the CJ network. So many stats are available to you. How long has the merchant been in the CJ network? If they have been there 3 months or longer, it is helpful to compare their network 7-day EPC to the 3-month EPC. If these two numbers are very different, it could reflect the fact that they have a tendency to do a lot of commission reversals (lowering the final EPC to the 3-month average).
For example, if a merchant consistently has a 7-day EPC of $120, but their 3-month EPC is $25, then I would be suspicious. This is my feeling after working in CJ for 6 years. But, make sure there aren't short-term trends in the 7-day EPC before drawing other conclusions. Changes, such as landing-page improvements, do occur in the shortterm and the EPC increase may not yet be accounted for in the 3-month averages. So the best thing to look at when comparing 7-day and 3-month EPC are the trend graphs that CJ provides for you on the homepage of your account.
A few years ago, CJ had a "reversal rate" statistic for each merchant. It showed the fraction of leads/sales that were reversed in the whole network. I found to be one of the most stats they offered, but CJ stopped providing it. They claimed it was useless (I have no idea why they thought that).
Now it is a trial-and-error thing. Just compare 7-day to 3-month EPC histograms, and select merchants who show the most consistency between the two.
This is normal for web hosting companies. I am not surprised you didn't get them all reversed. There are few (if any) web hosting companies affiliate programs that actually PAY. They find many loopholes or odd reasons for reversals so they don't have to pay you a dime. You will find that eventually you will drop all of them. Do a search and you will see how others have had problems.
Some well known hosting companies on CJ promise a payout equivalent of 10-12 months of their projected revenue from a customer. Then they provide free domain to customer along with the hosting package and a 15 or 30 day trial with money back assured. All this cost them about 14 months of revenue. They have to pay the bills for servers, staff and bandwidth etc. for these 14 months.
With all this in mind one can easily imagine that a hosting company that is honestly accounting for affiliate payouts will find it almost impossible to break-even. Therefore we see a lot of "cost control" in the form of reversed sales on CJ.