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Anyone else noticed this on push traffic sources?

jonte

Active Member
I've been doing push ads since notifications were first introduced by Google. It was a goldmine at the start but as we all know, it's tougher these days. Competition has increased, users are less likely to click push ads, etc. I accept all of that and adapt as all good affiliate marketers do on almost a daily basis.

I've noticed a recent worrying trend when buying push traffic which I'm almost positive others have noticed or at least had it happen to them without realising. I'm always testing new push sources, many are junk and I move on from them pretty quickly. However many are promising right off the bat. The traffic sources that belong to the latter group are what I'm going to talk about. So here's the walkthrough: I launch a campaign, let it run for a while and then check my stats. Oh wow! Only $25 spent and already a few conversions putting me at 200%+ ROI (cc submit). Very nice. Ok let's scale it up, increase budget, cut a few sources with 100+ clicks but 0% LP CTR. Ok let it run some more. Hmmm ok now it's spent $100 and gotten no new conversions. Whatever, it's normal - let it do it's thing. Wake up in the morning, $400 spent and still the only conversions are those from the first $25 spend. Ok this sucks, let me pause it and do a deep-dive to blacklist bad sources, pubs, ISPs, browsers, creatives, etc.. OK it's looking good now, I even increased my bid on the sources that gave me the original conversions. Another $100 spent, nothing, another $200 nothing. Pause it.

As a once-off anomaly it's no big deal - it's the nature of paid traffic. However there are a number of sources, about 8 or 9+ now that I've personally tested, where this exact same scenario happens. You get quick conversions at the very start of your campaign but as soon as you scale up you get nothing. I kept convincing myself it was just a coincidence but the more sources I test the more I see the same pattern of events play out. On one particular source where this happened, I actually made a new account and launched the exact same campaign with the exact same settings and whaddayaknow - in the first hour of it being live I got 4 conversions.

It seems these traffic sources are sending good traffic to new campaigns/new accounts almost as bait to get you to increase spending. As soon as you do that, the system starts giving you trash traffic - quite possibly even pop/redirect traffic masquerading as push traffic. I have no concrete proof of these tactics however I'm almost positive at this point that there is definitely something shady going on in a growing number of traffic sources that sell push traffic. I'm not going to name and shame because of the minuscule chance it is just the biggest coincidence ever. Of course there are many good push sources out there which I continue to use and I see consistent performance on the very same campaigns I test on the shady sources.

Anyone else noticed this? What are your thoughts?
 
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Appearances are deceiving sometimes. But 8 times the same model?
I could program something like that but why would I want to cheat every customer or a group of new customers? Customer acquisition cost is expensive and customer churn is the enemy --so this is illogical.

Could the ad spyware be causing the problem this fast somehow?
 
Hi @jonte ,

I was in the same situation with 3 traffic sources. Everything was fine in the beginning and then the campaigns performance started to worsen until I was barely banned by affiliate network. Fortunately, we came to the agreement and I just switched to another traffic sources.

The most funny part is that I used Adsbridge anti fraud kit , but I didn't pay much attention to it. Until the moment I got the warning from affiliate network. Now I'm more attentive to ALL columns of my statistics:)
 
Appearances are deceiving sometimes. But 8 times the same model?
I could program something like that but why would I want to cheat every customer or a group of new customers? Customer acquisition cost is expensive and customer churn is the enemy --so this is illogical.

Could the ad spyware be causing the problem this fast somehow?

That's what I kept telling myself initially. It doesn't make sense, it really doesn't. However the data doesn't lie. On one source I even kept creating the same campaign over and over and letting each one spend $50-$100 before deleting it and recreating it. The performance was infinitely better than creating one campaign and leaving it run normally. I'm not sure if they're under some obligation to offload their trash traffic or if they have crunched the numbers and decided it's worth it, I really don't know. It's completely illogical in my mind but I don't claim to know the inner workings of traffic sources. I'm just calling it how I see it based on a very clear trend which I've seen repeated so many times that to be a coincidence would be near impossible.

Spy tools don't have anything to do with it in this case considering I'm using the exact same creatives/offers/lps in all these campaigns. I know what creative saturation/blindness looks like and it's a lot more gradual than $5 CPA to $∞ CPA in 30mins-1hr and in those cases, recreating the same campaign with the same creatives won't improve things at all.

Hi @jonte ,

I was in the same situation with 3 traffic sources. Everything was fine in the beginning and then the campaigns performance started to worsen until I was barely banned by affiliate network. Fortunately, we came to the agreement and I just switched to another traffic sources.

The most funny part is that I used Adsbridge anti fraud kit , but I didn't pay much attention to it. Until the moment I got the warning from affiliate network. Now I'm more attentive to ALL columns of my statistics:)

I'm interested to see what your fraud stats look like on those campaigns. Can you PM me? It seems to be a relatively wide-spread issue. Seems like recently every 3rd traffic source I test behaves this exact way.
 
Just for the hell of it; I would volunteer to run a sample forensic of the IP's in these campaigns ... Maybe, I might see a pattern ... Make the results public as for many this is a common issue.

That would be interesting actually, let's do it. I have data from a prime example of this that I only tested 2 days ago so it's fresh. PM me mate.
 
Just for the hell of it; I would volunteer to run a sample forensic of the IP's in these campaigns ... Maybe, I might see a pattern ... Make the results public as for many this is a common issue.
 
Hi Jonte, we saw the same before we started our own traffic source. That's why we have an anti fraud filter system to detect bot traffic and show it to you as user. We try to be as transparant as possible so this won't happen to you. Add me on skype if you need more info: jaerts92
 
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