One of the biggest issues I have with affiliate marketing especially in the CPA/CPL space is the constant expiration of offers. These offers expire whenever they want because the network decided to remove the advertiser due to multiple reasons. Some networks will even keep an advertiser on hold, depending on the situation and just pause the offer.
In the past I complained about this because it is a nuisance, you do not get notification of dead offers from some networks. You may get an email but how long before you actually see the email? It may be too late and profits are lost.
In the last 24 hours (as of this post date), it has happened to me. A dead affiliate link started to redirect to an offer wall. The worst part about this is the redirect happened late last night and without an email notification. Some networks leave the link to its own dead page, while others leave it to an offer wall.
An offer wall is just a collection of active affiliate offers on one page in attempt to save your click from the dead link. The question is does it really help the affiliate? These offers are random offers with the same category or just random offers.
Below is a screen shot of the last 24 hours, actually about 8 hours since I started this campaign last night. I received 1,429 clicks to an offer wall. So I click on the offer wall link to see what offers showed up >> Campaign Does Not Exist. In attempt to save my click, no offer wall even shows up!
First column is Impressions and the second is Clicks.
One of the other worst things I see here my traffic started going to Australian offers, when my target market is US. So this can be 2 things, because some networks recognizes IP locations and redirect the traffic base on the traffics geo location. So either the ad network I am advertising on has poor traffic quality or an issue with redirects on the network end.
Around 4400 clicks were sent to Australian offers for some odd reason. So I am not sure what happened here, I am going to be talking to my rep about this. Talk about going to an old network I use to run with and experiencing poor results.
So what does this tell me? Tells me that an offer can go down within 8 hours or redirect for some reason. This isn't the first time dead affiliate links went to where ever they wanted.
Expect an update later today.
