Caught in the act

I have a few sites that promote Web*cams(dot)com. Their deal is they pay you $25 for free memberships or $42 for a $4.95 trial membership. I push the free memberships, so I get $25 per join.

Every couple of days I click on the affiliate links on my web pages to make sure they are working ok. Well, tonight I clicked on one of my links and it took me to their page that sells the $4.95 trial membership instead of the free membership. I'm like WTF? So I tried some of my other links and it was the same deal. About 15 minutes later, I clicked on the same links and it was back to the free membership.

Looks to me like they are pulling some kind of switcharoo every so often on where their affiliate links land. I guess that's an easy way to shave $15 off of their payouts, unless someone has a logical explanation for this.

I've seen this many times before, not with webcams.com specifically, best thing to do is take a screenshot and show them you know whats going on in case they are doing it intentionally.

I've seen everything from page swapping to loading a page without tracking pixels so you dont get credit for the lead.

My new beef with like 8 networks is their bullshit exit traffic offer where they offer the potential lead $1 shipping instead of $6.95. They probably convert 8% of leads with that and I dont get any credit.

Their argument is that the lead was leaving anyway, and my argument is I dont give a fuck because I pay thousands of dollars to get the lead there and its worth just as much to them in revenue as any other lead I send that pays the full shipping for the trial.

Nevarc said:

My new beef with like 8 networks is their bullshit exit traffic offer where they offer the potential lead $1 shipping instead of $6.95. They probably convert 8% of leads with that and I dont get any credit.

Their argument is that the lead was leaving anyway, and my argument is I dont give a fuck because I pay thousands of dollars to get the lead there and its worth just as much to them in revenue as any other lead I send that pays the full shipping for the trial.

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Dude, that's fucked right there. Have you gotten anywhere with your side of the argument?

I wonder if they do this when the user returns for a second time. Have your visited this link more than once under the same IP and cookies?

Well my goal is to get enough affiliates on board that credit is given for these, or they stop them all together.

Half the affiliates I talk to that do big numbers had no idea this was going on and were pretty pissed so I think we can make a good case for it.

It's just dirty business, we pay thousands of dollars driving the traffic and optimizing landing pages, and these clowns are raking in thousands of customer trials with no credit given to the affiliate.

Atlas said:

I wonder if they do this when the user returns for a second time. Have your visited this link more than once under the same IP and cookies?

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Yes, I had the same cookies and IP when it was switched back. I can see what I think is going on, but I can also see this scaring off potential customers who return to the same page and find a different offer than they thought they were going to get.

Well its not surprising... Shaving leads, swapping pages, not firing the tracking pixels... all of that is going on.