2 thumbs up to @Starcity for asking the following question regarding his concerns with SaaS privacy:
"The main problem of SaaS service is a privacy. How can you guarantee that my successful PPV company will be private and not duplicated by any 3rd person (inside company or outside)?"
I would like to open by saying:
Our FunKeyword SaaS is an advertising management software which is designed for any type of advertiser, not only affiliates. Our passion and business model is the creation and monetization of a system that is connected and collects data from all arms of our client’s advertising funnel, from product definition > advertising platforms > sale/lead conversions > external research tools, and presents it to them for manual or automated control. FunKeyword is not an affiliate business and we do NOT promote any offers within the affiliate marketplace and do not intend to.
All these pretty words I just mentioned above or any licenses agreement are just words after all and they do not actually protect you from malpractice of rogue employees so lets get a bit more technically factual with some business analysis 101.
example: Joe wants to take a flight from London to NY because he has an important meeting in the evening. what are a few of his risk factors?
1. Aircraft defying gravity with many little technical components in play.
2. Pilot qualification and mental state.
3. Personal luggage is being handled by many airline employees
Joe decides to take that flight despite the risks involved for 3 reasons:
1. Facts - He is aware that flying is statistically and scientifically a safer form of transportation than others.
2. Brand Trust - He has a strong belief that the business model of the airline he is flying with will take precautions to employ responsible pilots and other staff or suffer losing their business.
3. Alternatives - The alternative forms of transportation are slower which will make him miss his meeting.
Every healthy business needs to understand its exposure with regard to all business decisions ("State or condition of being unprotected and open to damage”).
lets evaluate the risk factors involved in your affiliate advertising funnel with the inclusion of FunKeyword Tracking and Bid Management SaaS:
1. Traffic Source exposure -
Lets deal with each of these individually:
1. Traffic Source exposure -
Our SaaS is running thousands of script instances per account every day for each client. This means a little army of workers are doing things for you every minute of the day so you can sit back and play Captain Jean-Luc Picard on the captains bridge. If you make $1000 a month then you can make $5000 and if you make $5k then now you can make $50k without hiring full time staff. It does not make you successful, it provides you with the technical means to become more successful Guaranteed! You are not able to handle a one million keyword account manually while monitoring the performance of every single one every couple of minutes and adjust your bidding accordingly. You are not able to reduce your business exposure so dramatically without a SaaS.
While I totally understand all the concerns about the privacy of information let me conclude that your information is so exposed in the first place that a SaaS system can just help you limit and monitor that exposure while adding very little risk to your advertising business. If you want to reach that meeting in NY you better get on the flight cause the alternative is staying where you are and who wants that? Take the risk to expand your affiliate business!
To get a taste of what FunKeyword can do for you read this post and please go ahead and play with a live account:
Watch the FunKeyword reporting showcase:
Please post your questions here so they can be discussed openly,
Have a great day,
franky@funkeyword.com
"The main problem of SaaS service is a privacy. How can you guarantee that my successful PPV company will be private and not duplicated by any 3rd person (inside company or outside)?"
I would like to open by saying:
Our FunKeyword SaaS is an advertising management software which is designed for any type of advertiser, not only affiliates. Our passion and business model is the creation and monetization of a system that is connected and collects data from all arms of our client’s advertising funnel, from product definition > advertising platforms > sale/lead conversions > external research tools, and presents it to them for manual or automated control. FunKeyword is not an affiliate business and we do NOT promote any offers within the affiliate marketplace and do not intend to.
All these pretty words I just mentioned above or any licenses agreement are just words after all and they do not actually protect you from malpractice of rogue employees so lets get a bit more technically factual with some business analysis 101.
example: Joe wants to take a flight from London to NY because he has an important meeting in the evening. what are a few of his risk factors?
1. Aircraft defying gravity with many little technical components in play.
2. Pilot qualification and mental state.
3. Personal luggage is being handled by many airline employees
Joe decides to take that flight despite the risks involved for 3 reasons:
1. Facts - He is aware that flying is statistically and scientifically a safer form of transportation than others.
2. Brand Trust - He has a strong belief that the business model of the airline he is flying with will take precautions to employ responsible pilots and other staff or suffer losing their business.
3. Alternatives - The alternative forms of transportation are slower which will make him miss his meeting.
Every healthy business needs to understand its exposure with regard to all business decisions ("State or condition of being unprotected and open to damage”).
lets evaluate the risk factors involved in your affiliate advertising funnel with the inclusion of FunKeyword Tracking and Bid Management SaaS:
1. Traffic Source exposure -
- Your golden trio of information of Keyword>Affiliate_offer>Traffic_source is exposed to employees of the traffic source. They can use it to compete with you.
- The traffic sources you are advertising in maybe charging you for traffic that you are not receiving.
- Your golden trio of information of Keyword>Affiliate_offer>Traffic_source is exposed to your affiliate network and their employees as you are passing keyword parameters to them from your traffic sources and they know what offer you are promoting. Affiliate networks are in some cases the equivalent to affiliates who are higher up in the food chain. They are driving traffic to the same offers you are. In fact you yourself are part of the traffic they are driving for commission as affiliates.
- You have no way of knowing that all the traffic you send to the offer through your affiliate link is reaching the destination. Maybe it is being redirected once out of every 10 times to a destination you don’t get a commission for?
- Many if not all your golden trio of information of Keyword>Affiliate_offer>Traffic_source is exposed to subscribers of spy tools for a monthly fee.
- Your golden trio of information of Keyword>Affiliate_offer>Traffic_source success is held on the servers of FunKeyword and are potentially exposed to whoever has access to this information.
Lets deal with each of these individually:
1. Traffic Source exposure -
- It is not within a reputable Traffic Source's business interest as a company to compete with their customers. You will always be exposed here to potential malpractice by employee access to your data but you are not going to stop advertising because of this risk because you depend on the traffic source for having a business. You may want a SaaS like FunKeyword to monitor that the impression count you are paying for your keywords correlates with the amount of traffic that is physically being received by your FunKeyword traffic log through your router. This monitoring capability will decreases your risk factor.
- Your exposure to affiliate networks is the greatest. Many networks are big affiliates up in the food chain and they send traffic to the same offers you are. Essentially you are their traffic source and probably not the only avenue of traffic they have. This is the name of the game and one that needs to be clear to you as an affiliate. It should be your responsibility to protect your data you pass to them. You should NEVER send any identifiable parameters {KW=woodworking} to your affiliate network through your URL. They are not hiding the fact that they are promoting the same offers in many cases and by doing so you are handing them your precious trio of information. Your exposure here is eliminated by using SaaS tracking like FunKeyword. When the traffic reaches your FunKeyword traffic router from your advertising traffic source (TrafficVance, 50onRed for example), your URL parameters are removed from the URL and replaced with an encrypted tag before being redirected to your affiliate offers. From that point only you and FunKeyword know what your encrypted values represent. Your golden trio of information Keyword>Affiliate_offer>Traffic_source is now safe from your affiliate network.
- Your SaaS imports all your impression costs from advertising and all the impressions which reached your affiliate network. This lets you monitor the similarity between the traffic sent and received.
- Spy tools are a fact of life these days. They are looking at the reality and presenting it for a price to subscribers. You can’t be upset that they are exposing your golden information cause everyone is exposed. If one is shut down another will open cause it is a profitable and legal business model. In the future when Traffic Sources wise up and send the keyword parameter with a dynamic encryption which is based on an advertisers input parameter then it will be much harder for tools to re-parse keywords they parsed in the past. To take advantage of this kind of ability you will need a SaaS to offer you dynamic parameter protection. In the mean time if you are an affiliate who is advertising on PPV and has not got a spy tool service yet then get with the program and join a service like BoxOfAds yesterday!
- FunKeyword’s business model is exactly the opposite of competing with you. Its reputation of successfully shining a bright light on your quantified advertising efforts is how it becomes successful. While there is always a risk of malpractice by employees, FunKeyword restricts access to reporting data to only a few authorized employees and every access/action taken within our interface is monitored and logged by ip and user credentials for this exact reason. Saying all this, FunKeyword SaaS gives you the ability to handle as many keywords as you like across compatible traffic platforms which will cause your affiliate business to grow to places that are simply impossible to do manually.
Our SaaS is running thousands of script instances per account every day for each client. This means a little army of workers are doing things for you every minute of the day so you can sit back and play Captain Jean-Luc Picard on the captains bridge. If you make $1000 a month then you can make $5000 and if you make $5k then now you can make $50k without hiring full time staff. It does not make you successful, it provides you with the technical means to become more successful Guaranteed! You are not able to handle a one million keyword account manually while monitoring the performance of every single one every couple of minutes and adjust your bidding accordingly. You are not able to reduce your business exposure so dramatically without a SaaS.
While I totally understand all the concerns about the privacy of information let me conclude that your information is so exposed in the first place that a SaaS system can just help you limit and monitor that exposure while adding very little risk to your advertising business. If you want to reach that meeting in NY you better get on the flight cause the alternative is staying where you are and who wants that? Take the risk to expand your affiliate business!
To get a taste of what FunKeyword can do for you read this post and please go ahead and play with a live account:
Watch the FunKeyword reporting showcase:
Please post your questions here so they can be discussed openly,
Have a great day,
franky@funkeyword.com
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