I’ve gone rouge. I have just this minute set up a PPC campaign that purposefully breaks a programmes terms and conditions – why? To see what happens. Id expect within a day or so the merchant to notice, knowing the merchant side of the network that this merchant is on the merchant will have access to my email address. Will they contact me to caution me?
I would have liked to take Paul’s (Moose’s) advice and contact the merchant first to let them know what I was doing but was unable to find contact details – maybe this is an advantage if they are leaving all account management to a network account team it’s a good chance to see if they want to grow the programme, or just profit from it.
Personally I hope that I do receive contact from the merchant first. If the merchant contacts me I will tell them that this is a bit of an experiment, adjust the ad text as they wish and ill let them know that I don’t want to be paid for any sales. My main purpose behind this is to see when the network contacts me and to see what they will say, this is a merchant that I have next sent a single click to, and never sent a sale to, but its also a brand that’s big enough that hopefully once the ad is optimised and showing as I intend will generate daily sales.
I also want to see what the network or merchant says to me as again, having experience of the merchant side when someone is found bidding on the brand term and I have flagged it with the network a common response is along the lines of “oh yeah but there a really big affiliate how about we let them get away with it this time and work with them to build their campaign”. Just to emphasise that “getting away with it this time” is often a 4 figure commission payment and a further 4 figure override payment.
So for now that’s all I have to report, its live. The ad is using the merchant display URL, uses their name in the ad copy, is one of 5 adverts showing on its particular term has a daily budget of $20 and a maximum CPC of $0.05. This really shouldn’t be hard to spot, im not using any sort of redirect to hide the keyword or referring URL, my sales will go from nothing to whatever they end up at and im posting on a public blog about what im doing!
Let the fun and games commence!
