The Truth of Email/Zip Submits
Email and Zip submits have a nasty reputation within the industry, and rightfully so. The way they work is you click on an offer and place your email address or zip code to recieve your FREE product. Of course the product is never free and you have to fill out an ungodly number of pages to have the CHANCE to recieve that offer. In most cases you end up spending more money than theat particular product is worth! Futhermore the information you place in the fields is passed around from one marketing agency to another. You can expect a healthy number of spam emails in the future.
An example of an Email Submit is located here.
While these email submits can be very misleading, the truth of the matter is they proved very profitable from a marketers stand point. When email/zip submits first came out, all the user had to do was click fill out the first page (the email address or their zip code) and the marketer got paid anywhere from $1 - $2 a lead. Not a bad deal!. Eventually the market became much more saturated with these offers and the advertisers requested that 2-3 pages of information be filled out before you’d get paid.
I promoted these email submits up until about a year ago. While many people bashed them, I was able to make a serious amount of bank hawking the newest FREE (fill in the blank). In fact the way I went about winning that Lamo ( for a few days) and the Vegas trip was about 60-70% email/zip submits. Looking back it proably wasn’t the greatest offer in value to my users. I also ran into a bit of legal trouble through some of the offers I promoted as well. I heard stories within the industry about the advertiser receving hundreds of thousands of leads only to give away one free ipod, for example.
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Bot Clicks
A problem I am getting more and more of is “bot clicking”. Bot clicking is when a robot goes in and clicks on your link to make it look like an actual user clicked on your campaign. The purpose of bot clickers is for an outside source to monitor your traffic after you’ve been labeled as SPAM by a few users on the network. This has been going on for a few years now and explains why the statistics on my CTR and the CTR on the ad campaign don’t match up. Major ISPs actually have active bot networks out there that make these “hidden” clicks on your offers.
How to fix?
The best way is to keep an active monitor of the IPs that are clicking on your campaign. Bot networks operate in Ip ranges. I have ranges of known “bot clickers” that I block through my CMS. If your CMS doesn’t have the ability to block certain Ip ranges registering as clicks you need to block manually. They can be a pain in the ass to deal with if not taken cared of.
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The Myth of CPC
I wanted to talk a little bit about the myth of CPC (Cost Per Click) as related to email marketing. The theory is that you can make more money on CPC, if traffic is solid, than you would getting paid on a per lead or CPA (Cost Per Action) basis. In my experience this isn’t true.
I’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for quite some time now and have seen first hand the problems of CPC. For example, Offer A on XYZ network is paying out 20 cents a unique click on a mortgage loan application (CPC). Offer B on the same network is paying out $20 a lead on the mortage loan application (CPA). (These numbers do not reflect an actual campaign, just an easy to follow example!). So,
Offer A: .20 a unique click
Offer B: $20 a lead
Which one to choose? These days I always go with the CPA, $20 a lead. In most cases, the CPC might actually earn more but in reality you will always lose. The reason is because the advertiser and/or affiliate network is ALWAYS looking at conversion numbers. If your traffic isn’t converting to their liking they will reduce your CPC amount to reflect what THEY think should be an ideal payout. Furthermore, if your traffic is great and they are happy, you probably could have made more mailing the CPA offer in the first place. You have to remember that on the advertiser side they are always fighting different forms of fraud, click fraud representing a huge portion of their prevention efforts. Suffice to say, it hurts the legit marketer mailing CPC when the issues are beyond their control.
In conclusion always go with CPA. I reserve the right to change my mind, however. If anyone can show me tangible proof that in the longrun CPC outperforms CPA, by all means fire away! I will update this post with evidence, only the tried and true facts though. Until then, Happy Marketing!
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Inbox Truth | No Comments »