New Dating Offer for Affiliates : BrowseMyPics.com

Over the past year Dating has been one of the strongest performing categories for FireCyde. It’s one of those niches where people are actively searching for the offers. While this creates high volume lead situations, competition in the space keeps margins razor thing for most.

Our involvement in the dating niche and great relationships with industry leaders have allowed us a chance to be heavily involved in the creation of a new free dating site called BrowseMyPics.com. You could say this is a dating site for affiliates, by affiliates, that focuses on a fun user experience while delivering high quality matches based on compatibility by leveraging our partners’

Months of analyzing test data, polls, and wacky experiments have yielded a lot of surprising information. High conversion rates are a natural result of giving people what they were looking for. We’re ready to accept a small number of experienced affiliates who can reliably send 50 leads/day minimum. Check out the current landing page and submit our affiliate application if you are interested and capable of meeting the volume requirement.

Facebook Ad Disapproved: Negative User Feedback

One of the few drawbacks of dealing the Facebook self-serve advertising platform is that some entire successful campaigns can be disabled if the ads receive enough negative user feedback.

The typical message advertisers see when ads are disapproved goes something like:

“This ad has been disapproved due to negative user feedback concerning the ad’s content. Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations for Facebook Ads, and help determine which ads are served to users. In general, ads that receive negative user feedback through both automated and manual reports are less likely to be shown to users, and may be removed from the site. This ad should not be run again in its current form. We appreciate your understanding.”

The new twist in this story is that I’m starting to see this disapproval message on ads that haven’t even ran yet!? Campaigns that have never been started will occasionally have a few of these “Disapproved due to user feedback” messages. These ads will in no way be related to any other ads I’ve previously created or ran.

As most FB advertisers know, there are dozens of anomalies like this every month as Facebook’s advertising platform continues to evolve. Personally I embrace the horrors.

Will Affiliate Networks Abandon DirectTrack?

Publishers are starting to hate DirectTrack. The reason has nothing to do with the quality of the software (it’s top shelf) or the design even at this point (we’re all used to it by now), it’s because a ton of networks have gone out of business lately that had been using direct track.

You probably can think of a few yourself. Those slimey networks that bought a $50.00 template for their website design and never even bothered to replace the default headers and footers to make it match their site. The people that were sure they were going to make $5 million so licensing DirectTrack seemed like a good idea.

Either DirectTrack has lacked in evolution or affiliate networks have lacked the understanding in how to implement new features. Even if the features are there somewhere, it’s hard to find them, much less use them. Any cool data DirectTrack does generate is formatted in a way that just makes it seem cheap (you don’t get the feeling you’re dealing with a $100 million/year company at least).

I don’t think networks can establish a true edge in this market if they share their core platform with dozens of close competitors. Am I the only one burned out on DirectTrack or am I just bad at choosing networks.

What’s your opinion?

Key Traits of Great Affiliate Managers

What is the difference between a lame and kick ass affiliate manager you ask? What tips do I have that may help AM’s get more volume from publishers? You’re about to find out in my quick list of key ingredients for great affiliate managers.

Knowledge of the industry
Every affiliate manager should start their job by being forced to run a few offers until they are profitable before they run out of money. This is probably the only way an affiliate manager can ever really understand this industry. Affiliate managers need to know what average conversion rates are for different industry segments, understand the basic prices publishers are paying for ads, and figure out a fair way to stand in the middle and take just enough commission off the top to make what they are doing worthwhile to both the advertiser and the publisher

Respect and understanding
Don’t try to act like an expert all the time. Treat your publishers with some respect, they are why you make money. Consider the person may have been awake 36 hours straight making you and her/himself money before you act like you are too busy dealing with other stuff to care about his account today. Smart ass statements are amplified 20x when you’re exhausted, so don’t accidentally make someone irate just because you’re not thinking before you talk.

Communication
Can I call you from 8am til 1am 7 days/week and get a call back relatively quickly? I think most of the real money in this business is made in very small windows and quite frankly having an affiliate manager that answers the phone all weekend is a necessity. Most of the volume comes during the weekend, how is it that this is the time almost every affiliate manager isn’t working? Instant messengers and mobile numbers are a given.

Execution
There aren’t many things that come “standard” in affiliate marketing. Affiliate managers that turn around quickly on the never ending stream of questions and requests will have the happiest publishers. I feel like our affiliate managers are high level members of our marketing team and I hold them to our own operating performance standards. If you are ever unhappy with your Affiliate Manager a quick call to the network can generally get you promptly reassigned.

Transparency
Affiliate managers need to be as transparent as possible with their publishers. Think of yourself as sports agent for traffic players. Publishers will feel like they are getting a fair deal if they know the numbers. If I know how much a network is making per lead it generally keeps me from shopping around. If you’re taking so much per lead that you never give your publishers straight answers on your own internal payouts you won’t be around for long. The industry is changing.

Would Facebook Users Disapprove Head-On Ads?

If you advertise on Facebook, you’re probably starting to see a few ads being disapproved because users didn’t “like” them.

Facebook is making an effort to deliver ads that users will enjoy, to enrich their online experience, and make Facebook the warmest blanket on the internet for everyone to snuggle in.

As a human being, I think this whole concept of user reviewed ads is interesting. As an advertiser and marketer, the whole thing stinks!

The highly effective and very annoying Head-On commercials that annoyed millions of people across the country would never have been possible in a user reviewed approval system. Does that make these ads and products are somehow wrong?

If people don’t like my ads because they slightly offends them or tweak their interest in some ironic way that makes them uncomfortable should they be able to disable my ad across Facebook’s entire network?

I think if Head-On had to rely on Facebook ads they’d go belly up. FB is probably ready to drop more sanctions than the UN vs Iran on anyone who gets massive amounts of ads disapproved because of “negative user feedback”, so watch your step.