I’ve been sat on this post for about 4 months now, and its about time it came out.
Firstly ill cover my own ass and say that what I am about to write is how I see this, its purely my opinion and others are welcome to give theirs comments on this are more than welcome and will not be censored. This is a very serious matter and I personally think needs a lot of attention, I will take no comments as the industry turning its back on a problem.
On with my post! Affiliate managers, such as myself are exposed to a lot of ‘secrets’ in the form of sites that convert, keyword lists, what people are doing and how people are making money. This information could be misused, and there is a massive amount of trust between affiliate and affiliate manager that it wont be misused.
So what would happen if an affiliate manager decided to abuse this trust? Basically they could quite easily build their bank balance at the expense of the company they work for and their affiliates. So can temptation become too much, things I’ve seen and been told about make me believe that temptation can indeed become too much.
Recently spotted bidding on the ‘hoseasons’ brand term was an adwords ad, whys this strange? Firstly it’s a trademarked term so only company authorised adwords accounts can show their ad on this term and secondly it appears to redirect through a tracking script – screenshot below.
Now lets just take a closer look at that privacy report which shows the path the browser has taken to reach the Hoseasons site.
Whats that there? Its going through a TradeDoubler redirect link, so its an affiliate! Now as I have access to TradeDoubler’s merchant interface I can use this affiliate ID to take a look at the details as it so happens they are also signed up to the Alpharooms.com programme. See below
Okay so its registered to AD2Z marketing, that rings a bell! Yes they’re one of our Affiliate Window affiliates, lets go have a look at that account.
Marcel Ellis, that rings a bell or two. Yes it’s the Hoseasons affiliate manager. I bet that’s a nice little side line, but notice from the privacy report the links go through some click tracking software, after speaking with another of our affiliates who pointed this out to me in the first place (im naming no names!) he also has experience of the tracking software used and knew the path to the traffic logs.
Basically what we have here is a list of all the redirects used. Its too long to fit in to be honest so that’s just to give an idea, and its only showing bits of data. From this small sample merchants in here include:
Portland Direct, Go Travel, Lloyds, Tesco, Prudential, Riu Hotels, Mosaic Holidays, Hoseasons, Alpharooms, James Villas, Crystal Ski, Hotel Opia, Find Rooms – and more! * I don’t have screenshots of these but can only presume as they show I the log file.
And with any free off the shelf software there are holes. Holes which can be exploited, within an hour or so im in the account snooping round the redirects and traffic logs – see below.
Now I have caught this account bidding on the Alpha brand before, and I have called him on it, he took the ad down and we moved on. However it seems the account has just been coming on and off at random intervals collecting what I can only presume a nice commission from each merchant – and just look at that Hoseasons traffic!
Marcel in his personal blog has many times championed the fact that Hoseasons don’t bid on their own brand as it could steal sales from affiliates, hes rather do that himself it seems. I’ve also been talking with the affiliate who showed me the path to the traffic logs about this as he’s been very pro active in promoting Hoseasons and Alpharooms so I know that he puts a lot of time into making sales. His thoughts were basically that he’s been humiliated, trying to build a relationship with the merchant just to find out that the person he’s building the relationship is purely trying to build his own bank account.
So what happens now? How much has he made from being able to bid on the Hoseasons brand term exclusively? What’s Hoseasons take on this? How do affiliates feel about this?
Personally if this is all true – its fraud. On a massive scale we’re talking in excess of 160,000 clicks to Hoseasons who advertise an average EPC of £1.
Also, I might be wrong, and hope that I am.
