Here's a word to the wise, or at the very least, to those who are considering using azoogle with their affiliate marketing: 1) I have had nothing but poor tracking of clicks and leads from them since day one. I even use redirects, direct to offers, I track my own stats, and on average, at BEST, they show 80% of those clicks. Currently they are showing on average, less than 30%! That means, for those of you who are new to the game, that they are shaving leads. Correct urls, correct tracking, incorrect stats from Azoogle. 2) To prove the point further: I recently had a client email me (from a sale from a TV to PC offer). He contacted me off of one of our landing page contact emails. Funny thing is, ive never had one sale show up on azoogle for that offer. Strange. So I ask my AM..hey, whats up? She says yeah I show on my end you have a sale. Thats weird, cause on my end on your offers report, I show squat. Did she have it changed? No. And the client contacted me because he never even got the product he purchased. No less than 7 emails to azoogle with him cc'd in each, and to this day (two weeks later) they have not resolved the issue. So, If you dont mind dumping a bunch of cash in ppc etc towards azoogle and have them take away sales and shave leads, go ahead- use them. At this point Im using neverblue and a few other networks. ps- No hidden agenda here. Im not pub'ing neverblue, or any other. Im just sick of getting screwed and dont want to see anyone else get the same treatment. DP has a great pool of helpful people, and I try to do my share to help others as well. Brian
Ya even i have read similar info about them on some affiliate forums,they do not track all the leads.
Usually 20% of the leads are shaved off as I have experienced, not just in Azoogle, but ALL the networks. In CJ i see some 5-10% being shaved off. So far as I know CJ is best. It rocks.
To those who may or may not know, AzoogleAds is a company that has been audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the last 5 out of 8 years of our operations. We are probably one of the only, if not in fact the only network that gets audited by such a high profile firm. "Shaving" is both unethical and illegal, and we would have never passed an audit if that is something that was common-place, since our payouts would never match up to what we billed the advertiser. While I won't dispute that there are sometimes reporting discrepancies between what an advertiser reports and what any network reports, those discrepancies work both in favor and sometimes against the publisher. There are plenty of times that we have paid out for more leads than we got paid for, and there are plenty of times that we have paid out for leads/sales that we NEVER got paid for by the advertiser. Over the last 8 years, many advertisers have gone out of business, and our publishers still got paid their commissions even though the advertiser never paid us (something that would never happen with Commission Junction or some other networks). Thats all. Thank you.
Thank you for your sincere reply. I agree that the discrepancies may not be always your fault. There may be n number of reasons like some users not having cookies enabled, or some advertisers not being perfect.
Now I may not know most people in this thread personally but it seems to me that 90% of the people who complain about Azoogleads (or any network) shaving leads is simply due to a statistically insignificant number of leads / traffic. I run a lot of volume with azoogleads and conversions are always steady because I do my part in ensuring I understand what the statistically significant sample of data is. Traffic for monday is going to be different from Saturday. With any network there is going to be "pixel misfires" but it's not uncommon for AzoogleAds to fix the issue for you...
So far my experience with Azoogle has been good -- great AM, good offers and stats are updating withing seconds. On top of that, I'm not running much traffic through them yet and they still are very attentive and helpful
I've actually heard good things about Azoogle. Leads in general are where the controversy lies... merchants don't want to pay for them, and publishers want to be paid for every single one.
As I understand, the more leads/sales they track, the more money they make. Why would they drop your leads/sales? Keep in mind that your cookies can be overwritten/deleted/blocked.
Well...in theory they could charge the advertiser for a lead, but not give the publisher the revenue for it. I don't really believe Azoogle does that, but ANY CPA network could shave leads and it would be very difficult for the publisher to find out.
I prefer using NeverBlueAds. IMO azoogle has poor tracking. NeverBlueAds has higher paying offers than Azoogle and I got an affiliate manager that actually responds to my questions!