Even when this business was in its prime, adult Webmasters always wondered when the bottom would drop out. They also wondered if the companies they were doing business with were behaving honestly. Let’s face it, we’re a paranoid lot.Even when this business was in its prime, adult Webmasters always wondered when the bottom would drop out. They also wondered if the companies they were doing business with were behaving honestly. Let’s face it, we’re a paranoid lot. Adult Webmasters who rely on affiliate programs for their livelihood, and even those Webmasters just making a little beer money, have always been skeptical of their business partners. Are they shaving off sales and paying out less than they should? Are their stats accurate? How can you trust your sponsor?
Webmasters have always watched their traffic stats carefully. If a Webmaster doesn’t want to wait until his or her affiliate checks start to grow smaller before reacting to a problem, traffic stats are the single best warning system Webmasters have in their toolbox. If we lose that search engine listing, hits drop immediately and we know to expect fewer future sales until we somehow replace the lost traffic. Referrer stats can show us who is sending fewer hits so that we can work to get that traffic back. Yet what happens when after months of normalcy your sponsor suddenly reports dramatically fewer sales but your traffic stats aren’t registering a change and your Web site is essentially the same?
When adult Webmasters notice a kind of phantom sales loss despite steady traffic numbers, the first thought to enter their minds is usually sponsor mischief. Hey man, my conversion ratios were 1:400 for the last three months straight and now they’re 1:4000 but nothing is different on my end so the sponsor must be cheating me! While it certainly is possible that your sponsor is shaving sales, chances are high that any significant drop in your conversion ratios has nothing to do with intentional bad behavior on the part of your sponsor.
Consider this: If you were running an affiliate program with thousands of sales each month and wanted to cheat your affiliates without driving them to other affiliate programs and losing their traffic entirely, would you do something drastic like turning their 1:400 conversions into 1:4000 conversions? What would be the point? Do that and you stand an excellent chance of losing your most active affiliates – the loss in traffic would more than offset any gains from cheating. No, if an affiliate program suddenly decided to cheat it would do it subtly in a way that wouldn’t frighten off its contributors. If your conversion ratios suddenly drop big time, the problem probably lies elsewhere… although that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still lie with your sponsor. We’ll get to that in a moment.
The first thing you need to do when you see a big drop in conversions but no change in traffic is to surf your own site and look for problems. If your site is using scripts of any kind to deliver content then it is possible that a change on your server caused one or more of your scripts to malfunction. It’s also possible that you accidentally deleted some pages or images, or possibly copied over images you didn’t mean to replace when you last updated your site. Maybe your site was hacked. Surf from page to page and try every link. Make sure all images are in place, and all scripts are working as they should be working.
Next check that all links from your site to your sponsor’s sites are properly formatted. Is there any chance that your unique affiliate code got stripped out of some links last time you updated your Web page? If you aren’t sending your affiliate code properly then your sponsor won’t know who to credit for any sales that you created. If you update your site frequently then there certainly is a good chance that one or more of your sponsor links got corrupted. Remember, often you can’t just cut and paste link examples from your sponsor’s Web site – you’ll need to alter these link examples to include your own unique affiliate code. Sometimes the link examples on a sponsor’s Web site will include an example code; if you don’t swap out this example code for your own code then you’re shit out of luck. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then you had better get with your sponsor and request that they review your site’s links for proper formatting.
If you’re using an Access Verification System (AVS) rather than a traditional affiliate program, and you record a big drop in sales, try signing up yourself for an account through your Web site. After you sign up, visit your Webmaster account and check stats. Did the new sale show up properly? If not you need to ask your AVS rep what happened. There could be a technical problem or a formatting problem. If they can’t answer your questions in a satisfactory manner then try a different AVS for a while and compare results.
By the way, if you are ever concerned about shaving then the best way to set your mind at ease is to sign up for an account on your sponsor’s Web site by clicking on their links from your own Web site and following them all the way to the sign-up page. If after paying for an account on your sponsor’s Web site the new sale doesn’t show up, email your sponsor immediately. It’s a good idea to proceed lightly, however, as the problem might be on your side and you wouldn’t want to start hurling accusations before you have all the answers.
When you have eliminated all of the potential problems from your end, the next step is to work with your sponsor in an attempt to assess whether or not the problem might be on their end. Other than shaving, it is possible that the software that is running your sponsor’s affiliate program has a glitch. These problems can be quite honest enough and difficult to detect, but they can still have a big impact on your bottom line. If there is a widespread problem then your sponsor should be able to verify that you’re not the only one who is having a problem.
Also keep in mind that there is usually a third player in all of this business – the billing company. Most sponsors have agreements with third party billing companies to process online credit card orders, and billing companies also have occasional technical problems. Different billing companies also might achieve different results with your traffic since they all use scrubbing algorithms to weed out as many potential chargebacks as possible. Did your sponsor recently change billing companies? If so, perhaps there is a technical issue with the new billing company… or maybe the new company just isn’t as effective for your unique traffic as the old one was.
There is also another possibility, and one you probably don’t want to hear: It’s possible that your sales drop is just an anomaly that can’t be easily explained or corrected and which is nobody’s fault per se. Perhaps the traffic you are getting from search engines merely looks the same but in fact is coming in from different search results than it was just a few days ago. Maybe your barely legal teen site lost a key ranking for “naked teens” on Google, but picked up traffic from “teen Web sites” or some other non-adult search (hopefully that’s not the case!). Maybe the economy isn’t what it once was. Maybe a change in seasons means less money spent on porn. Or maybe you are experiencing a quirk of statistics. Ever lost ten hands at blackjack in a row? It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. It might be that if you wait your problem out a few weeks it will correct itself.
The point here is that there are a lot of possible reasons why sales numbers might drop while traffic numbers remain steady. While you should never have blind faith in a sponsor and always demand that they perform, you also should try to refrain from jumping to conclusions. If you detect a problem with sales conversions then don’t ignore it more than a few days or a week tops. Look for possible answers, and keep an open mind. The solution might surprise you.
Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of YNOT News. He has been involved with the online adult entertainment business since 1997, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the Internet Freedom Association (i-freedom.org); He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine.
