Well I lasted 7 days and at about half 9 this morning I received a call from Nick at TradeDoubler to question my activity. How it was handled wasn’t a typical case as you’d imagine (with the whole public blog detailing what I was doing) but Nick did tell me how they would handle a case like this which I did find re-assuring.
Firstly I’ll cover the details, ins and outs of my activity. I set up a Google adwords campaign bidding on the term “boots” and using an active TradeDoubler account that was already accepted for the Boots programme so I had active links. The campaign ran through about 6,000 clicks and over 100,000 impression so its not like I was flicking it on and off, it was showing all the time! Used about $200 of my money which im happy to write off but if we look in TradeDoubler the sum of commission that would have been due to me is just over £480. Given that the dollar is currently worth about 50p I would have spent £100 to make nearly £500.
Okay on with the phone call from Nick (incase anyone doesn’t know he’s Head of the Publisher team at TradeDoubler UK and an all round top guy). Firstly he thought that I’d recently been having a bit of a go at TradeDoubler with the Hoseasons posting and this recent spurt of PPC rule breaking id just like to say I have no problems with TD as a network at all and do use them as an affiliate, its also the first network I ever came across I think the main reason I did the PPC activity on one of their merchants is purely because they have so many it was easier to find a brand to use.
We then moved onto the PPC activity where he explained that id clearly broken the rules and that id obviously not be paid for these. Fair play. Next he explained that usually in this sort of circumstance they would then sum up the value of the affiliate to the network. So for example if they had £10,000 worth of pending commission and £9,000 of that was made from breaking rules across 1, 2 or 10 merchants then the affiliate would generally be removed from the network unpaid.
I see that as a great move, and based on my value to TradeDoubler at this moment in time id half expect them to kick me off! (Please don’t I cant be bothered to register a new account). So all that’s now been cleared up, quick response from TradeDoubler and the phone call rather than email worked well in my opinion, 1 week to find and stop me.
I did get home however to find an email from the Boots.com account manager at TD to say that he had been looking over the top performers and noticed that my site had jumped to number one and wondered how I was driving traffic as it did not seem clear, and if there’s anything he can do to help me drive more traffic I should just let him know
What next, ill do some more investigating im sure theres some fraud or a scandal just waiting to be uncovered!
