I just want to first state I don’t consider myself an expert on this subject at all but I do know a bit about it and I have mixed views on it.
When I first heard about scrubbing I thought it was horrible and immoral but I don’t feel that way anymore.
I remember jumping to conclusions about advertisers scrubbing my leads if one day my conversion rate dropped…I think a lot of people make this mistake.
Since I’ve started running and building my own lead gen offers in the last 6 months I completely see why scrubbing is necessary.
I’m not saying I agree with it completely but there are circumstances where it is OK.
For instance let’s say you start running a new email submit, you would be stupid to do more than 200 leads a day on it for the first week or so. If you do more expect your 50% conversions to go to 15% the next day. The reason for this is the advertiser needs time to evaluate if your leads will back out or not, they don’t want you killing the offer right away doing 10000 leads a day. The best thing you can do is run it under 200 leads a day for the first week then ask your AM to contact the advertiser and ask if they like your quality, if they do then feel free to pump it.
Sometimes things seem wrong until you realize the big picture. It’s not like advertisers scrub just because they are evil, we all want to make money and if your traffic doesn’t back out for the advertiser than they have no choice but to either scrub your conversions to where it does back out or simply ask you to stop running it.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Depends on the issue. If traffic isn’t backing out, then hell yes, scrub-a-dub-dub. Unfortunately, as an affiliate, you are the lowest level on the food chain though, so you are at the mercy of the scrubbers.
Also, shady ass advertisers that scrub without reason is really stupid and gives all advertisers a bad name.
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Next post should distinguish between scrubbing and shaving and how they relate
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Good to hear you have experienced this on both levels. I also agree with the above post to an extent in regards to shady advertisers. However, there are plenty of shady affiliates as well. Bottom line if the quality is good everyone wins.
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
May 13th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
You are spot on.
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Actually, as someone who is both an affiliate and an affiliate consultant for a major dating advertiser, I definitely don’t agree with the practice of scrubbing.
With the offer I work on, we specifically avoid scrubbing anyone without notice. We have set the per lead price to an amount that works out based on “average” traffic (even though it does scare off some people who expect scrubbing) and we watch the traffic carefully. If someone is up to no good (fraud, spam, flogs, etc.), we get them off the offer immediately.
If the problem is that the traffic’s not backing out, we talk to the network and see if we can use the affiliate’s SUBIDs to tell them what’s working and what isn’t…we ask what they’re doing and try to figure out a way to make the traffic back out. If we can’t do that, we might start to talk about a lower payout or a scrub percentage to make it profitable (assuming that it stays profitable for the affiliate at those levels. The problem is that some networks don’t even want to go to this much trouble unless it’s a super high volume affiliate, as it involves so many unnecessary “in between” people because the networks are so afraid that the advertisers are going to steal the affiliates and go direct (nevermind that I typically know the identity of the top affiliates on the offer anyway).
Scrubbing is just shady, and I think it’s a shame that more advertisers can’t just set a payout and give bumps or cuts based on performance.
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Scrubbing is a factor of the business. If the advertisers don’t make money, we all lose in the long run. As for me, I try and keep things under the radar by rotating across many networks. I also think the more legit you are, the better and more targeted your traffic will be. Just goes toward better quality.
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“if your traffic doesn’t back out for the advertiser than they have no choice but to either scrub your conversions to where it does back out or simply ask you to stop running it.”
They could just pay you a lower CPA and not scrub. As Stephanie above mentioned, networks dont want to go through all the trouble of evaluating lower volume pubs and back and forth with the advertiser, but they could figure out a way to make it easier.
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