20k visits but revenue so low can’t buy a Starbucks!

Since the start of the major decline in parking page revenue over the past 4 years or so there have been several examples of poor performance from some major players. However, the current performance of a relatively obscure provider with a big company behind them is almost impossible to believe the stats could be true!

For example, look at the stats in the screenshot below, keeping in mind the incredibly bad stats are coming from several high quality websites, with more than 70% direct navigation (typeins), from mostly US traffic. The traffic was from ads placed on several high value websites, including a few health and wellness sites with very valuable well targeted domains, plus a popular social media site which gets substantial typein traffic.

With substantial and nicely targeted quality traffic of almost 20,000 visitors over the past 6-days the ads on those websites did not even earn enough money to buy a single cup of Starbucks coffee. Isn’t that amazing! Needless to say, of course the ads have now all been removed.

Phone Calls can be an Affiliate Program Negative

For some odd reason the potential phone call which in all likelihood can end-up losing your affiliate referral revenue has rarely been talked about in the past. Not sure why since it’s believed to be a big negative.

I believe a good percentage of potential buyers will pick up the phone and call the sellers toll-free number for more information and when they do that your chance of getting credit for the sale becomes very low. That is especially true with higher priced products and services, where the prospective buyer is much more inclined to call before spending significant money.

He or she may be wondering if it’s a legitimate business and curious to see if a live person answers the phone. Your potential buyer may also be thinking they can get a better deal by calling, and there are other reasons they are likely to pick up the phone instead of using the online contact form or order form (which contains a cookie and tracking ID), such as a desire to authenticate the company, product or service, including frequently wanting to ask questions about the product or offer before ordering it.

When potential buyers call the sellers number, orders are often taken right away over the phone. Or a little later the buyer may be sent an email with an ordering link (not related to you as the publisher), so credit to you as the referral source can easily be lost, thus preventing you from getting credit for the sale.

As a side note, some years ago we believed we had far more referrals than our reports indicated. Therefore, we called seller ourselves and asked how they handled phone calls as far as credit to us as the referral source is concerned. We were told “don’t worry, we always ask how they got our number – so you get credited for the sale.”

Not surprisingly, that turned-out to be false since the next day we called the 800 number on the sellers website and said we wanted to place an order. We actually placed the phone order and at no time during the entire process did anyone ask how we got the number, so receiving credit was impossible.

In fact, the phone call issue is a major reason we have always been somewhat negative about joining affiliate programs. Unless someone can figure out a way to get around this negative issue we will stay negative on affiliate programs (at least regarding higher priced products). I see no good way to avoid this issue beyond getting your own assigned phone number but seriously doubt the product/service provider will agree to assign a special phone number to a new affiliate to better track the referrals.

Product Authentication

Are Yahoo Traffic Quality Scores Nonsensical?

Yahoo! is a major advertising feed provider for a few well known domain name parking firms. Domains which are not active websites are usually parked so the domain-name owner gets an opportunity to earn revenue from pay-per-click ads which appear on the pages which are parked.

One of the larger and best domain parking firms is Parked.com, who reports by way of a graphical line chart viewable on the clients dashboard page showing their web-page visitor traffic quality scoring.

Even since the Yahoo feed traffic scores were openly disclosed we have always thought the scores made little sense and seemed nonsensical since the scores fluctuate a lot even though the parked domains and their visitor traffic stays basically the same.

In the past (again with about the same quality traffic) our score has ranged from a very low 1 and all the way up to a consistent 9 or 10, with 10 being the highest possible score, and has held as a 9 or 10 for  long time periods. Here is our most recent quality score report according to Yahoo! which covers the last nine quality score iterations:

2.5 – 3.0 – 0 – 0 – 6.0 – 1.0 – 1.0 – 5.5 – 7.0

In our opinion, it appears to be virtually impossible for such wild fluctuations to take place. In fact, the visitor quality scores almost appear like random numbers, keeping in mind the parked domains and their combined traffic are basically the same for the entire reporting period. What do you think?

About Teenage Children’s Issues, including Acne

Over the July 4th weekend we have been working on one of our growing group of children’s and kids websites, including our teenage childrens site. Added some dynamic new features, including Amazon affiliate program products (see the Amazon product graphic below), plus new images and links plus more work on the website content.

The teenage children site covers misc teen issues including teenage acne, teen health, smoking and depression. Acne is one of the most common problems in teenagers affecting almost 20-million teens in the USA. Having acne can be extremely depressing for teens and cause their self-worth and self-esteem to become poor.

Acne is a skin disorder involving glands and hair follicles. Acne results from the clogging of glands leading to the formation of pimples and cysts. The condition usually begins with the onset of puberty in kids as young as the pre-teen years. As teens reach puberty the androgens also known as sex hormones are produced in high numbers leading to glands becoming over-active, which results in sebum being produced in high proportions and acne rosacea setting in.

If the hair follicles are partially blocked it results in blackheads and when the follicles are totally blocked they become whiteheads. Untreated, they eventually burst causing the oil, bacteria and skin cells to spill all over the skin resulting in irritation and formation of acne pimples. Acne can be very near the skin surface or deep in the skin, depending on the nature of the teenagers skin and oil produced.

There are several known causes why Acne Rosacea starts in teenage children. In addition to rising hormone levels due to puberty it can also be blamed on factors such as intake of drugs which contain lithium, barbiturates and corticosteroids. Acne can also be caused due to excess grease and oil in the scalp, due to cooking oil and use of some cosmetics. Acne rosacea problems sometimes can be inherited too so in taht case diet and health are not a major factor.

If you can contribute a reviews or comments about teenagers and our teenage children web site it will be most welcome and appreciated. You can visit it by going to Teenage Children now, or clicking-on the picture below:

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is Shutting Down

Just received email from Yahoo announcing they are shutting down Yahoo Publisher Network by the end of April 2010.

Not really too surprising since it never did very well for many publishers compared to Google Adsense and never got out of Beta after several years in beta.

Some of their policies were also odd such as when they both emailed and called making us stop using the YPN Ad Targeting Tool where I was able to accurately target YPN ads to the right category based on both the domain name and site content.

The representative we spoke to said YPN did not like the way I was using it (but gave no real explanation after asking her for the reason many times) even though I was usng the ad targeting tool exactly as intended with 100% genuine ad targeting.

Funny thing is I always suspected YPN actually did not truly want completely accurate ad targeting since YPN allegedly had limited ad inventory in several important or niche categories. However, the ad targeting tool forced those ads where there may have been low inventory. Now I am thinking my guess about that was actually correct. LOL.

How GoDaddy Captured a 50% Market Share

I just read about how GoDaddy recently achieved a 50% domain market share, which internet people are saying is an amazing accomplishment. I am far from being surprised about that.

My reasons to expect their great success are (A) GoDaddy.com has a strong combination of excellent marketing skills, (B) very large ad budget, including substantial money for high price Super Bowl ads, (C) very diverse and extensive offering of additional products and services for sale, (D) including various web hosting products/services, and something you may not think much about but important to small domain buyers and small business owners is their overall (E) good 24X7 support with short on-hold wait times, often no hold time, all combined with a (F) powerful upselling program.

I am sure GoDaddy will soon go well beyond capturing a 50% market share, with the next big level being my prediction GD will eventually capture a 75% market share and dominate the space. hmmmm…..does GoDaddy have stock we can invest in?

It Sure Seems Difficult to Get Affiliate Referrals

Here is a transcript of a recent live chat session with a well known domain name firm who offers developed sites either free or for a monthly fee and has what sounds like a lucrative affiliate program. For the benefit of those who don’t know, an affiliate program is where you get commission based on the income of the person you referred. The affiliate income you receive comes from the company and not out of the revenue of the referrals account (according to the terms of all ther affiliate program agreements I have seen).

Support: Hi, how may I help you today?

Me: Hi, regarding your affiliate referral program. I have HEAVILY marketed it with probably 100’s of forum posts and our affiliate link being on each post in the signature area, plus marketed it in my Blog too which gets good and relevant traffic but no affiliates are reported by you under me from all that time, work and energy I put into it.

Me: Are you sure your 90-day Cookie which identifies those who clicked the link for the next 3-months is really working?

Support: Yes, as far as I know. I can double check yours. Ok, please hold. Ok, I see your referral link is working fine. But I noticed that not all of your websites have the “develop your domains” affiliate link placeholder on the site.

Me: Right, because it detracts from the web site in my opinion.

Support: And you are using the correct referral link which is this number (example 12356789)?

Me: Yes, that number is accurate.

Me: No one could have possibly marketed your affiliate program more than myself recently what with 100s of forum board posts and many other posts including website blog articles but not even 1 sale from all that time, work and energy! My one and only affiliate was from personal level marketing I did with a close friend.

Me: What a complete waste of my time this has been. I will not be offering the affiliate code in blogs and forums anymore since it is an exercise in futility ASSUMING the COOKIE really is working for 90-days.

Support: Well, it could take some time for you to see the results

Me: Why?

Support: It would be difficult to predict any kind of average time

Me: If someone wants to sign up for an account why would they delay?

Support: Well, all new sign ups do need to go through an approval process

Me: But that takes a few days and I have been marketing your affiliate program for a much longer time (about 2-months) so that it makes no sense (to not even get one referral with all that effort).

As a side note I can say I did not market this affiliate program for only monetary purposes as I sincerely felt these sites were excellent and had great potential and in fact still feel that way today. That is a reason I marketed the affiliate program as much as I did since I felt other domain investors could also use this web site development service well. However, with that said, any revenues from the affilliate program would have been most welcome, especially in view of substantial declines in my other income sources.

The hard to believe poor results affiliate code was immediately removed in my signature lines at the 3 forums and I stopped the marketing of their service (at least from the affiliate aspect) since this entire affair and this support chat made little sense to me. Unfortunately, I suspect non-crediting (for whatever reason) of affiliate referrals may be more common than you would expect.