A while ago when I got into affiliate marketing, I was using MaxBounty. I set up a landing page for one of their offers and spend about $50 getting traffic to it. I sent hundreds of visitors there and got 0 leads. This was for an e-mail submit. Then I tried it myself with a proxy and sure enough, it wasn't counting leads. Since then I've been testing offers with a proxy myself. But some this just isn't possible. Is there another way to test whether an offer actually counts leads? I'm worried about spending a heap of money for traffic and having the leads not register. Looking forward to your help
If you signed up thru a proxy and it didnt count you then you have one of 2 problems: 1) The affiliate network in question are thieves or dont count all of the leads (unlikely) 2) You signed up from a proxy thats non US (or whatever country the offer accepts) Besides, email/zip submits suck, try promoting actual products that pay more. Trust me, in the long run you could make even more money.
A few points from MaxBounty... 1 - Many proxy IPs are known to merchants and they understandably filter out leads from them. 2 - Most of the time when a pub tells us "they tested over and over" without seeing a lead, it's usually because they fouled something up in their testing. Some not uncommon testing errors are not clearing cache, using junk data (name = asdfasf), using the same data over and over (most merchants will only accept an email address once), entering the wrong info in the form (you kept saying NO to an important field or maybe selected an inappropriate age), not completing the form entirely, or coming from a foreign IP address that isn't accepted by the merchant. Pubs generally don't know how a merchant defines a lead as valid, all the details involved, so it's best they don't try. 3 - Campaigns are tested by the network before they go live to ensure they track properly, so pubs don't really need to test it. Yes, errors do occasionally happen, but they are infrequent - I'd hazard much less than 1%. If you really feel you need to protect yourself from that slim chance of a tracking error, keep this in mind - pubs trying to test a campaign and doing it incorrectly is FAR more common than real tracking errors. As well, more often than not, if there is a real tracking error, the merchant usually offers compensation once it's found out. That said, if a pub adamantly wants to test a campaign, the correct method is to send it a small amount of real traffic. You'll then test the tracking, and far more importantly, will be able to tell if the campaign converts well enough for you to increase traffic. Our policy is that pubs should not generate their own leads. We'll turn a blind eye to testing the occasional small value lead, but there's always some who take it too far. We sadly have people trying to get away with testing EVERY campaign (and we have 300 or so offers) ramping up their affiliate earnings solely with bad leads, then crying when their account gets suspended.
yes you want to check your traffic is just US, as many merchants dont want international traffic. Also, a lot of networks scrub your leads ... something you just have to get used to. give it a few days at least