Following on from my post yesterday about PPC policies that get ignored I decided to do a bit more research, dig around and see what I could find. See if it is just a few programmes and see which affiliates are doing it.
Results – scary. Going through programmes that have restrictions in place and doing searches on the restricted words basically show that about 80% of programme terms are ignored.
Do networks know? Of course they do if sales suddenly jump from 10 sales a day to 50 someone, somewhere must wonder how/why? But if the networks override has just gone up by 5 times are they really going to act on it unless the merchant says something to them? Well it certainly doesn’t look like it, and the sad thing is many of the larger brands pay networks a rather high hourly fee for account management.
From every side of the fence, to me, this just seems wrong. The network isn’t protecting the merchant, the merchant isn’t establishing strong relationships with online partners. The merchants getting done over by one rouge affiliate who is taking them for all they can, and I wish it was just one affiliate but it’s not, many affiliates across different networks on different programmes.
The industry is crying out to be recognised as more professional and to be given more respect but while things like this continue its just a joke and the reputation of hard working affiliates is being tarnished.
Action to be taken, I think the networks need to pull their finger out to be honest. They need to go through every programme with restrictions and check them. Yes its going to cost the networks a lot but if anything is ever going to change it needs to be done, good reputation over greed.
