Ruslan Kogan is the founder and CEO of Kogan.com.
- Game App Affiliate
- United Games Affiliate Scam Alert
- United Games Affiliate Scam Complaints
- Mobile Game Affiliate Programs
- United Games Scam
Every Affiliate has the ability to share the United Games app with others, inviting them to download the app and join in the fun. When they download the app from your invitation, that player will forever be linked to that Affiliate. Get gift cards by playing games – By playing games, you earn Units that you can exchange for gift cards valued from $0.50 to $50.00. Play games you’d play anyway – The app has a wide variety of games that you’ve likely heard of or even played before.
UPDATE: See the response, “Sorry, affiliate marketing actually isn’t a (big ugly) scam.”
After CES 2013 in Vegas, I stayed on after the show finished for a few days. An “Affiliate Summit” converged in Las Vegas. I was shocked to see the number of shysters involved in this growing trend. And I don’t use that term lightly.
A while ago, one of the marketing consultants at my company, Kogan, came to me and advised that we should get involved with affiliate networks to expand our digital marketing reach. I asked him, “Where do these affiliates get their traffic from? How will they drive traffic to Kogan.com?” He couldn’t really answer the questions, but I agreed to run a small trial. Based on our results, that marketing consultant is no longer with us.
![Affiliate Affiliate](https://s.uvlist.net/l/y2013/09/116135.jpg)
To get started with affiliate marketing, we signed up with one of the world’s biggest affiliate networks and agreed to pay a 10 percent commission for their sites that drive sales and conversion to Kogan.
![Calls Calls](https://www.thesportreview.com/wp-content/uploads/solskjaer-1200-2.jpg)
I was shocked when I saw that in the first week, affiliates drove about $200,000 of sales to the Kogan website. We were then able to generate a list of sites that drove the sales to Kogan. I had not heard of a single website on the list. “Where are these guys getting their traffic from?” I asked the marketing consultant again. “I don’t know. They must have people going to their site to look for deals,” he told me.
I decided to apply simple commercial market fundamentals to the situation. Essentially an “affiliate” is a digital salesperson working for your company, driving sales and getting commission. If you offer a salesperson a 10 percent commission to sell your product, assume they will sell $200,000 of product a week for you. What if you raised their commission to 20 percent? You’d assume they would work harder because they get more reward wouldn’t you? And if you lowered their commission to just 5 percent, they wouldn’t work as hard as they did before.
So I asked the Marketing Consultant to lower the commission we pay to the affiliate network to 5 percent. I wasn’t surprised a week later when he told me that we still did $200,000 of sales through them in a week. I then asked him to lower the commission to 1 percent. Once again, the affiliates delivered $200,000 per week in sales. Whatever these affiliate sites were doing to drive sales to Kogan.com, it didn’t change as our commission to them was lowered by 90 percent. This defied general economics principles, so I started to get very skeptical.
I then got the marketing consultant to lower the commission we pay to half the sites on the network to zero percent. Amazingly, they still kept driving sales. Something wasn’t right. Upon further investigation, I noticed that many of the sites that were driving sales were ranking highly for Google search terms like “Kogan Voucher” and “Kogan Discount Code”. The funny thing was that we rarely have any publicly available discount codes active on our site. These guys were all advertising codes that don’t even exist and capturing some of our brand traffic.
At this stage, we decided to remain active on the affiliate network because it was costing us two fifths of sweet nothing, and the effort to properly investigate it would be worth more than we were paying in commission.
Game App Affiliate
The final revelation occurred when I was playing around with our Google Analytics account and analysing various trends (as I do at least 10 times a day). When I looked at our affiliate network in our Traffic Sources section, everything seemed legit. They drove a lot of visitors who spent a lot of time on our website and checked out many pages. Visitors from this traffic source also had a very high conversion rate. All seemed normal.
This figure shows the general stats from all visitors who came from the affiliate network. In general, these numbers look fine compared to other traffic sources:
United Games Affiliate Scam Alert
That is, until I created a segment of people who had transacted on our website, and then looked at the stats for the people who came from the affiliate network:
Gtbets sportsbook review.
Gtbets sportsbook review.
The above figure shows the traffic coming from the affiliate network after a segment is created which only shows “Visits with Transactions”. The “% New Visits” is alarming.
The results were damning proof that affiliate networks are little more than a scam. Of all the traffic our affiliate network sent to us that had made a transaction, only 1.68 percent hadn’t been to our site before. Black jack odds table. This is more than 95 percent lower than our site average. Basically, of anyone coming to our site through an affiliate network, there was a 98 percent chance they had been to our site before.
If you were hiring a salesperson and paying them commission, you’d expect them to bring new customers into your business wouldn’t you? In this case, it’s the equivalent of paying a salesperson a commission to go out there and sell to people in your store that are already lined up in the checkout queue ready to make a transaction.
United Games Affiliate Scam Complaints
So here is what was happening: Little caesars me.
1. Someone comes to Kogan.com and finds a product they want to buy.
2. They add the product to cart and start to checkout.
3. At checkout, they notice a “Discount Code” field.
4. They open a new tab and Google search for “Kogan Discount Code.”
5. They click around the various affiliates who claim to have a “Kogan Discount Code.”
6. When they visit the affiliates, they drop a cookie and tag the user as coming from that site.
7. They fail to find a discount code that works and come back to Kogan and finish their checkout.
8. Because the affiliate tagged the user, their reporting system claims that they referred the sale.
2. They add the product to cart and start to checkout.
3. At checkout, they notice a “Discount Code” field.
4. They open a new tab and Google search for “Kogan Discount Code.”
5. They click around the various affiliates who claim to have a “Kogan Discount Code.”
6. When they visit the affiliates, they drop a cookie and tag the user as coming from that site.
7. They fail to find a discount code that works and come back to Kogan and finish their checkout.
8. Because the affiliate tagged the user, their reporting system claims that they referred the sale.
Mobile Game Affiliate Programs
So basically, the affiliates are claiming commission on a sale that was going to happen anyway, and they did not provide any value to anyone at all. This is why I referred to them in my opening sentence as “shysters.” They all know exactly what’s going on and they’re happy to keep taking your money whilst posing as your partner.
I know there are probably some legitimate affiliates out there. For instance, someone who runs a fashion blog may talk about a certain trend, say black pants. If they showed their readers how black pants could be worn, and then at the bottom of the blog they linked to a few retailers who sell a large range of black pants, that would be a legitimate affiliate. This is based on the assumption that their blog gets a lot of natural readership and organic traffic. This would be a situation where prior to reading the blog, the visitor did not necessarily already want black pants.
Unfortunately, the shysters are ruining business for the rest of those legitimate use cases.
Be very careful when you sign up to affiliate networks. Do all your analysis. Profile the traffic, and then make an educated decision for yourself. Even though we were managing to get $200,000 a week of sales for all but nothing, this is not a sustainable business model.
Epic Games whose other name is Epic, a company situated inside USA's Cary, North Carolina for developing video games, has issued an alert about a phishing attack currently targeting it, reported pcgamer.com dated August 14, 2015. Epic's studio while writing on the forums of Unreal Engine said that the company was under a phishing assault; therefore people were urged not to follow any web-links embedded on e-mails asserting as being sent from it, till further notification followed. Like always, people mustn't provide their sensitive data, in particular, login details. In case of any query about the current issue, people may post them on the company website and the company would answer them. Meanwhile, an identical missive was put up on Epic's A/C with Twitter. Incidentally, it's merely a month from Epic's announcement about a hack occurring into its forums that the attack has taken place, while data comprising e-mail id, birth date and username and password of customers given at registration time might've got accessed. The company cautioned then that although there wasn't any finance-related detail on the illegitimately intruded forum, customers must remain vigil for dubious electronic mails that could also be phishing messages. An individual representing Epic stated that the studio continued to examine the situation, however, remained short of commenting further. According to him, the forum consisting of the phishing assault's first notification would get updated with additional data whenever it became obtainable. Pcgamer.com reported this. Worryingly, it's because of successful hacking attacks by their perpetrators that phishing remains one favorable scam online fraudsters employ for scamming their victims. Disturbingly, Epic Games getting victimized with hackers' attacks isn't something new, point out security researchers. During June 2011, following hackers' successful admission into the whole data of the company's forum, Epic Games was forced to change its passwords for that forum. Moreover, apart from Epic Games, other online game firms, which got victimized with hackers' attacks, are 'Minecraft' and 'Steam Gaming' gaming websites. Again during 2011, 'Nintendo Europe' declared that it was probing one phishing assault that targeted its clients followed with tentatively deactivating portions of its online site so as to maintain caution. » SPAMfighter News - 8/24/2015 |
United Games Scam
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