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Can I use custom affiliate / tracking / redirect link?

BHAVESH KUMAR
Updated

Overview:

Risk Disclaimer:

  • You may work with custom affiliate / tracking / redirect links at your OWN RISK.
  • There is NO REFUND if you are working with custom links irrespective of any situation or even if your affiliate link (or affiliate campaign) is rejected.
  • It is a well-known fact that affiliate links are very dynamic in nature and it's hard to find the exact reason for their poor performance.
  • We are quite afraid in running any affiliate / re-brokered offers, it's just a lot of manual work for us, lot of monitoring/checking required, it's just not worth it.
  • We may require min. $50 for budget for CPC campaign and min $100* budget for CPI campaign to make it worth while for us to put efforts on your affiliate/re-brokered campaigns.
  • If campaign fails to perform well regularly or CR dropped, we may require decent higher min. budget such as $500 or maybe $1000 to continue the campaign.
  • In case of traffic loss, you may have to resend postbacks for lost conversions or pay penalty for the traffic lost and/or handling fee for the efforts wasted.
  • We expect that every affiliate marketer should understand that we maintain high-quality network by implementing strict policy towards custom/affiliate links since poorly converting affiliate links can potentially waste our traffic inventory and harm our end-user's experience as well.

Can I use Custom Link / Tracking?

  • We have several premium publishers / partners and hence we are required to maintain high quality by suppressing campaigns likely to perform poorly.
  • Affiliate Link Tester : Make sure to test your affiliate link with our inhouse tool and share results with support team. => https://affops.io/tester 
  • Custom Redirect URL : You may use custom affiliate / tracking / redirect links as "Redirect URL", however the link should redirect and take user to the App / Play Store. While creating campaigns at CPIDroid platform, you just need to enter your custom link in "Redirect URL" field and fill rest of the form as normal as usual. 
  • Custom Tracking Link : Please create affiliate campaigns from new dashboard at  https://app.cpidroid.com/campaign/add?dashboard=advertiser 
  • We will test run it on limited traffic to monitor and check the performance, depending upon the economics of the campaign, we can push it accordingly.

How is the Review Process?

  • Campaign with custom links may undergo review process because they are very dynamic in nature and hence we need to review if it is converting or not. An affiliate link which does NOT convert properly or converts poorly is potentially harmful to our platform because they harm our user experience.
  • Some time system may reject some affiliate links likely to perform poor based on some automated algorithm, for example, if affiliate link is undergoing too many redirects then its likely to convert poorly thus we can NOT accept such links.
  • Affiliate links are very dynamic in nature and hence it's difficult to tell what the exact reason is for the errors you saw. Due to very dynamic nature of affiliate links, we can't help you with this but you may need to run a test campaign.

What Custom Links are Ideal?

Generally, the more direct you are to the advertiser, the higher the chances that we can drive traffic for an offer. Since almost all affiliate URLs are by nature non-direct (as there are multiple redirects and thus multiple parties involved), we can't run those campaigns. Payout and conversion rate are simply too low and we might have the chance to run some of these offers in the future, but I wouldn't be too optimistic.

You can follow following thumb rule to select best affiliate links:-

  • It should redirect to App / Play Store.
  • It should NOT undergo too many redirects.
  • Ensure there is NO capping or Link is NOT paused.
  • It actually leads to the correct destination always.
  • It should take users to the same app every time.
  • It should should NOT be broken before completion of the campaign.

Getting Errors?

  • In case you are getting errors while creating campaigns with affiliate link. We have redirect checks in place that test whether a redirect link actually leads to the correct destination. This might not be the case e.g. every time an offer hits its daily cap or the offer is paused. Most affiliate networks don't allow any further redirect in this case.
  • We would like to avoid situations in which users don't get redirected to the final destination though as this is a bad user experience. Generally, the affiliate offers are a very dynamic thing and it's difficult to tell what the exact reason is for the errors you saw.
  • Alternative : You may try CPC campaigns instead, we display them as and along with CPI campaigns due to which it's likely to perform similar to CPI campaigns if your custom link redirects to the app properly.

Monitor Campaign Performance Regularly:

⭐ We have developed a brand new Affiliate Link Monitor tool which can periodically auto-test your tracking link and automatically pause/start the campaign based on redirection test results. (Kindly reach out to support to get early access to the tool.)

If you are already running campaigns with affiliate link, we would suggest pay a bit attention to the conversion rate you sees with these campaigns on your end. We strongly recommend to pause the campaign if you don't see any conversion after sometime.

  • A redirect URL must redirect and finally lands to the Google Play Store. Tracking will be performed by CPIDroid. We cannot guarantee that our tracking matches stats gathered via a redirect URL.
  • Please make sure to run a test campaign first so as to ensure that you get desired results as per your expectations.
  • We will NOT be responsible if stats do NOT match at your end. We may suspend your campaign if link stops converting before completion of the campaign.

Auction / Competition:

We usually get many campaigns from multiple sources and hence might be already running popular offers from several sources, in such cases:

  • You might not get traffic or traffic would be limited if you bid low and not competitive enough.
  • Since it's like an auction, everyone wants to out bid each other to win portion of the traffic. The winning bid might go up anytime.

Disclaimer for Affiliate/Re-Brokered Offers: 

Offers that stem from different affiliate channels and get redirected through different networks. We get these from multiple sources at differing payouts. You'll thus experience the following situations:

  1. We don't approve campaigns at all.
  2. We approve campaigns at a later point in time.
  3. We stop campaigns, if we see they don't work (low conversion rate) or in case we get them at higher payouts.

All in all we'll need to see how performance of these affiliate offers is. There are a lot of factors that require constant monitoring of these campaigns, we thus need a solid bid and budget per campaign to make it worthwhile.

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