Severe issues with DGM - too much deletions and glitches

[impulsive]

Hi all,

Not sure if this is happening with others but I am seeing way too much deletions from DGM and seems like either their system has broken down or they are simply stealing commissions. It is now to the extent that I have stopped promoting DGM links anymore and have started putting more focus on Clixgalore and CommissionMonster.

Last month, almost half of the transactions just disappeared overnight and then another 25% a few weeks later with no explanation or information from DGM.

I tried contacting DGM with no response from them and this is happening after a very good relationship with them. They had issues in the past but not like wiping more than half of your commissions overnight.

As affiliates it costs us money to drive traffic to a network and takes us 2-3 month to recover our investments and trust is a very important factor. I have learnt the hard way not to promote certain dishonest merchants but now it's getting out of the hand.

Hope someone from DGM can explain the glitches they lately had and how they plan to restore trust and compensate the losses?

[newbie]

Originally Posted by impulsive

Hi all,

Not sure if this is happening with others but I am seeing way too much deletions from DGM and seems like either their system has broken down or they are simply stealing commissions. It is now to the extent that I have stopped promoting DGM links anymore and have started putting more focus on Clixgalore and CommissionMonster.

Last month, almost half of the transactions just disappeared overnight and then another 25% a few weeks later with no explanation or information from DGM.

I tried contacting DGM with no response from them and this is happening after a very good relationship with them. They had issues in the past but not like wiping more than half of your commissions overnight.

As affiliates it costs us money to drive traffic to a network and takes us 2-3 month to recover our investments and trust is a very important factor. I have learnt the hard way not to promote certain dishonest merchants but now it's getting out of the hand.

Hope someone from DGM can explain the glitches they lately had and how they plan to restore trust and compensate the losses?

Whoa! Hold on there Pardner! It is wrong to make statements like that for a number of reasons.

Networks do not "steal" commissions. It would be self-defeating. Deletions are a fact of life. Commissions are not commissions until the money is in your bank account.

DGM is an ethical network. There will be a plausible explanation.

[Dominic Sofia]

hi there impulsive

thank you for the post

dgm work on a validated sale basis, so during the month you will see sales go into your account as pending sales. Toward the end of the month advertisers are given the opportunity to validate their sales, if an individual sale is not valid (eg. the customer canceled their order, a credit card application you drove was not approved etc) then the advertiser will delete this sale.

As Newbie kindly mentioned it would be self defeating for us to steal commissions, firstly, because we only make money when your sales are validated (no one gets paid for deleted sales) and secondly because we've worked hard for the past 6+ years to build up a top tier network with thousands of trusted affiliates and advertisers and wouldn't risk jeopardising all that hard work by deleting your sales.

I'm more than happy to chat through our processes with you personally and look into the reasons for your deletions, just drop me an email dominic.sofia [at] dgm-au.com

cheers

Dom

[impulsive]

Originally Posted by Dominic Sofia

hi there impulsive

thank you for the post

Dom

Thanks for your response Dominic. I was not expecting such a prompt response. Much appreciated.

Originally Posted by Dominic Sofia

hi there impulsive

dgm work on a validated sale basis, so during the month you will see sales go into your account as pending sales. Toward the end of the month advertisers are given the opportunity to validate their sales, if an individual sale is not valid (eg. the customer canceled their order, a credit card application you drove was not approved etc) then the advertiser will delete this sale.

I completely understand that. However, having used another network (Clixgalore for example) and DGM, the rate of deletion is very high with DGM and it's not a difference of plus minus 10% - its 95% through Clixgalore to only 70-75% via DGM.

What's your overall deletion rate and whether do you benchmark it across other networks?

Originally Posted by Dominic Sofia

As Newbie kindly mentioned it would be self defeating for us to steal commissions, firstly, because we only make money when your sales are validated (no one gets paid for deleted sales) and secondly because we've worked hard for the past 6+ years to build up a top tier network with thousands of trusted affiliates and advertisers and wouldn't risk jeopardising all that hard work by deleting your sales.

I apologize for a wrong inference which I made. I wanted to refer to the advertisers who are less than honest. I have promoted more than 100 Australian advertisers/merchants and I found some outright cheats. You send them 500 visitors, 3-4 convert and they delete all of them. Some big companies like to delete a lot at times. One example is Three mobile - they hardly approve anything. 10-20% bogus transactions or canceled order makes sense but anything more than that raises concerns.

Do you have any mechanism to check for these exceptionally high deletion rates from certain companies such as Three? They may only run a campaign for a few months but ruin the network reputation.

Apart from that, I do find more glitches with your network than others but you definitely have better customer service than the likes of Clixgalore.

Thanks for your time.

[Gav]

Hey Impulsive.

I'm the account manager here at Three mobile - if you'd like to send me your username in dgm then I'll look into things specifically. gavin.hudson@dgm-audotcom

With campaigns such as Three, only about 70% of orders actually translate into a sale. A large amount of this drop-off is due to the credit check process, and people failing that. Three mobile work really closely with us and we really check all the validations, they've been on the network 20 months now, and in my opinion is a really good campaign.

As Dom said above, we only get paid on sales that are validated and paid out to affiliates, so we would lose out too!

I guess we could eliminate deletions, but the upshot of this would be reducing the CPA to 70% of the original. This unfairly penalises affiliates who have good quality traffic and would not punish people who have poor quality.

If you do have glitches - please do send any details through so we can fix them, we're real people here in Oz behind all the technology, and invest a lot of contact time into our affiliates and clients.

[ecommercedesigner]

Originally Posted by Dominic Sofia

dgm work on a validated sale basis, so during the month you will see sales go into your account as pending sales. Toward the end of the month advertisers are given the opportunity to validate their sales, if an individual sale is not valid (eg. the customer canceled their order, a credit card application you drove was not approved etc) then the advertiser will delete this sale.

i think impulsive has a extremely valid concern thats been swept under the carpet.

Credit card sales are real time now days, so why isn't a "pixel" firing on the "thank you" page for the credit card order?

History has shown that "end of month" validation is code for nod nod wink wink lets "shave" the affilates. When a "pixel" is fired at the end of the sales process its keeps everyone honest as the affiliate, affiliate network & the merchant have a process that can be tested, tracked & verified.

Pixel & post url tracking has been around for 5+yrs...70-99.9% shopping cart abandonment have been normal ecommerce since the 90's...why is a little birdy singing to me "Gillette, The best a man can get"?

[Eurisko]

Originally Posted by ecommercedesigner

i think impulsive has a extremely valid concern thats been swept under the carpet.

Credit card sales are real time now days, so why isn't a "pixel" firing on the "thank you" page for the credit card order?

History has shown that "end of month" validation is code for nod nod wink wink lets "shave" the affilates. When a "pixel" is fired at the end of the sales process its keeps everyone honest as the affiliate, affiliate network & the merchant have a process that can be tested, tracked & verified.

Pixel & post url tracking has been around for 5+yrs...70-99.9% shopping cart abandonment have been normal ecommerce since the 90's...why is a little birdy singing to me "Gillette, The best a man can get"?

To shine a light here, I worked for a Bank a few years ago and used both commission monster and DGM to sell my two major credit card brands. The main reason why I would cancel 'approved' credit card sales is due to a term called 'conditional approval' (CA).

CA is where an customer application is approved pending further documentation - should the customer not provide this documentation or the documents are not up to scratch then the application is declined and the affiliate sale is reversed.

To say that credit card merchants 'shave' leads is plain and simple wrong. To put into context, the CC market is one of few markets that has its affiliate "****e" together and to think that merchants are in the game of shaving 10 - 20 leads a month to save say $1000 bucks when acquisition budgets (for me at least) are in the millions is really stretching it.

Both DGM and CM were stand up networks for my old job. Pixels firing on the the thank you page do nothing other than inflate numbers that might be reversed due to tighter lending conditions, and what would you prefer being told you'll have 30 sales only to find that you really get 10 or getting 10 sales.

To anyone who is experiencing a high level of declines(in any product) 1) check your traffic, if your traffic is junk then your leads are junk, plain and simple 2) if you're still not happy then talk to the network, most networks want to speak to you and get you driving more leads, the thing with paid for performance is exactly that, if the merchant is shaving then the network wont get paid either and finally 3) if you're still not happy then drop the merchant all together, that'll teach 'em!!