Every forum I go on, I always see people saying this is shaving that is shaving. Well here's the TRUTH about shaving.
So here's an in-depth analysis of email submits, why they shave, and the affect and what-not.
ALL of the email submits, are owned by various companies such as "BBR(BigBrandRewards)", "MyRewards", and various others, there's roughly 10 BIG owners of email submits that spit out literally hundreds of landing pages.
Everyone says that they shave, well, their not truly shaving on the usable data. They have massive databases of real and fake data along with various techniques to detect if the data is good data or not. Now, me personally, I don't know each individual's setup as they vary from advertiser to advertiser.
They cross-reference everything from the name, to the email address, to the phone number to address, every field you have they cross-reference. 99% of the time, if the name, address, and phone number don't show up in the different "public name databases" it doesn't convert. Like the website "Ancestory.com" they go off of public databases/records. The email - they check if it's valid, they can't check the information on the email as I'd say 75% of the people on the internet don't use their real information on email addresses, also, they don't require that you put your address when you sign up to them either. All they generally require is your name, password, and zip code.
From the user entering their real information this is how it goes(but it varies from advertiser-to-advertiser).
User hits landing page
Fills out information on 1st page
Fills out information on 2nd page
during that extensive loading time, it's cross referencing all that data against it's 1) quality lead databases 2) the "public directories" that I mentioned earlier
Now, think of the time frame and the people your targeting. How long have email/zip submits been around? They have been around over 10 years(to my knowledge). I remember seeing them back when I first started IM. Would you want to pay for data that you already have?
No.
Would you want to pay for data that isn't valid?
No.
They cross-reference the data that is being submitted against all of the leads that they have ever got. Usually if at least 25% of the data matches the lead gets automatically scrubbed because in their system it's already there.
It's NOT the networks, because think, their is how many networks big and small, now, whether the networks are brokering the offer(s) from another network or if their getting them direct, BigBrandRewards has hundreds of landing pages, new and old. All the way back from when the IPod Shuffle came out, to the new IPhone 4S. Now, think of it logically with rough numbers, small numbers.
Say BBR has 100 landing pages even, spread across 100 networks, each one(network) is getting 1,000 leads collectively each day.
100 networks getting 1,000 leads per day, that's 100,000 leads per day, or 3,000,000 leads per month, or 36,000,000 leads per year. Now if they have been around for 10 years even that's 360,000,000 leads. Last time I checked(not being sarcastic) there was roughly 6,000,000,000(6 billion) people in the world, also, I believe I read somewhere that about 10-15% of the world population has the internet, so go for the middle, 13% that's 780,000,000(780 million) people in the world with internet.
Now on top of that, the leads that all the companies get such as BBR, MyRewards, etc. they all actively buy and sell data privately and openly, so they buy data(abused and not) and then that get's added on to their databases.
Now mind you, they have pretty deep pockets, but their not going to pay for useless data, if they did they wouldn't be in business for too much longer.
Also, you have to factor in the following.
The people that are "testing" the offer - that hurts everyone, every single bad lead that gets sent hurts everyone, even if the network itself removes it, it still goes into the companies(advertisers) databases and it auto-scrubs more so they break even as they have automated systems in place to detect and automatically calculate virtually everything.
The people that are trying to make a quick buck and hit them with proxy leads. They all have lists of millions if not billions of proxy ip addresses new and old, you can do a quick scrape with various tools and scrape hundreds of proxy ip's in the matter of minutes, now mind you, they don't go through and manually block each individual proxy IP, they just block the range such as - 75.111.*.* - the asterisk(*) being the wild card meaning everything from 75.111.0.0 - 75.111.255.255 is automatically filtered / blocked.
The people that try to do a "work around" and IFrame the submit, or have tool's to basically hammer the email/zip submit's to death with email databases to fill out the fields in hopes of making a quick buck. I'm not going to say such tools, but those of you that have been around 5 years or so should know what I'm talking about.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention earlier, along with the person's name and what-not, it also add's the IP address to the database, now mind you, 80% of people use routers now-a-days, and whenever you shut down your computer(that's connecting to the router) your server computer(well call it that for now) - meaning the one that has the direct connection to the internet - it(the server PC) assigns the computer connecting to it a new IP address(not a local/network IP either) a true, new IP address(or at least mine does). It's not a true unique IP address usually it's just one new number. Meaning it might change from 75.111.222.333 to 75.111.222.334. So that gets factored in there as well.
They also factor in the time on the page, the average time on the page is between 20 seconds - 120 seconds(two minutes) 20 seconds being for the quicker typer's, and 120 seconds for the older crowd that's filling them out. So if it's not in that "sweet spot" the lead MAY get scrubbed.
Last but not least, on top of that, they do need to shave SOME to break even, because the persons information that their getting, their emailing them, they don't know how often that person checks their email, or if they even check it at all, or how "computer savvy" the person is. That lead that they just paid you $1.50 for, they might never make that back, or they may, it's all a game of chance. 99% of the time, they do 1 of two things(or both).
1) They do their own private CPA offers with companies such as Netflix, BlockBuster, etc. and they mail them their offers directly for either 1) a pay per lead, or 2) a % on the sale, basically the same thing that every IM'er(that does CPA) is doing.
2) They go out and sell the data to private buyers, that then go out and re-sell it or use it for themselves. The lead they paid $1.50 for, they may sell it for 65% of what they paid for it (65% of $1.50 is $0.975). Why would they do this(the selling for 65% of what it's worth)? Because, their selling it in batches of good and okay/bad data along with the auto-scrubbed data. So let's say that out of 1,000,000 leads there was roughly (a generous) 40% of the data was already in their databases, that's 400,000 leads that where auto-scrubbed due to the quality control tools they have, that leaves 600,000 leads "on the table". Say they got sold for what I said earlier, $0.975 per lead. For those 600,000 leads, they just paid out $900,000 to the networks(collectively) that they work with. Now they have a grand total of 1,000,000 leads and they just shelled out $900,000 for 600,000 quality leads. Now if they sold those 1,000,000 leads for 65% of what they paid(for the quality leads) their STILL making out ahead, those 1,000,000 leads would be sold for $975,000($75,000 profit).
Also, they could sell it as "fresh full data" or "aged full data" or other various forms such as double opt-in(meaning the user verified their email address), email only, cell phone number only, address only, home phone number and name only, there's not a whole lot of combinations, but they will sell whatever information someone want's to purchase. So that data that they just paid you $1.50 for after it passed their "quality control" they may turn that in to $5 or more, depending on what the person(s) want, and are willing to pay. As they usually have private dealers that they sell the data to, then the private dealers go out and re-sell it to other companies and it just gets hammered and watered down(quality wise) as time goes on.
I believe I have covered most of the factors in the "email scrubbing".
If anyone has any questions let me know, I'll gladly explain anything that anyone didn't understand.
Now mind you everyone that's reading this,
this is NOT hard evidence, just general, common knowledge
of how things work with backends, email marketing information
databases, email marketing, CPA, and everything.
