Searchfeed.com Not Recommended

Problems as an affiliate

[bestfetch]

I tried to respond to a couple other searchfeed forums but they were closed.

I had big problems using searchfeed on my search engine. I was averaging over 1,000 searches a day, yet I only received credit for 106 clicks for over a 1 month period for revenue of 2.99. When I inquired (this was a prolonged effort) I was told that one of my affiliates had a lot more traffic than the others and thus they filtered all my traffic because of their suspicion. Yeah, a good affiliate was considered a bad thing. When I pressed for their reason for filtering this traffic I got the response "I really can't disclose anymore regarding this type of traffic." There was some foreign traffic and some open proxy traffic but they could not provide any details and said they could not prove that it was fraudulant in any way. They would not tell me exactly what had been filtered and they had No evidence that any traffic at all was bad. Why they could not just filter the affiliate in question they could not tell me.
Another issue, perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that they never told me they had begun filtering most of my traffic and I promoted this site and at the month's end wound up with 2.99 for over 1,000 searches a day. Much less than I had been receiving before I got the affiliate in question. I notified smartsearch who promotes them in their scripts and as usual they were no help at all.
I cannot say as an advertisor whether searchfeed is any good or not. When a company works in an unethical manner as this I would not trust them in any way. I used findwhat for a while and was happy with their returns, although I stopped using them because it caused my site to load very slowly. That may have been because of the smartsearch scripts. I would say findwhat is definately better than searchfeed and I am sure there are other good ones as well.

[john316]

>There was some foreign traffic and some open proxy traffic

And they are supposed to reveal how they determine click fraud..oh yeah, let me tell ya how to do that.

They do have some tight filters, but that's probably a good thing for the advertisers.

[bestfetch]

To john316. You should try to read my entire post. They didn't even tell me there was a problem. They shouldn't have to provide any evidence? They even said they did not have any evidence. Only suspicion. It is a good thing for consumers that most businesses cannot rip you off and use the excuse that they can't reveal why they ripped you off. Get real.

[woop01]

It is a good thing for consumers that most businesses cannot rip you off and use the excuse that they can't reveal why they ripped you off.

You aren't the customer, they are. They are paying you for a service and if they decide to take their business elsewhere, that is their right as a customer.

[bestfetch]

If someone promises to pay you for something you give them, and you give it to them you should be entitled to receive what was promised. In this case, they continued to take what I was giving them and did not tell me that they did not intend to pay. The only reason they get away with it is because this is unchartered territory. Kind of like spam email. They will do it until laws come about or enough people blow the whistle on this behavior. I am surprised that anyone would defend this kind of despicable behavior from a company. I realize that it is easy to give one paragraphed canned responses. Some people want to look clever. Whether I am the consumer, merchant or employer really isn't the issue. I am posting this to try to help some people who have asked about searchfeed.com. I am sure nobody would like someone taking from them and not giving them what they promised and not even telling them they did not intend to pay. In most avenues of life that is called stealing. Perhaps if I had the money for a high priced lawyer to take them to court I would win. For what probably amounted to a couple hundred bucks I cannot afford to do that. I know that there are people out there who wouldn't defend the indefensible. To the others, your one paragraph responses show a lack of knowledge. I think forums should be used for a healthy debate and to inform, not to defend unethical behavior.

[woop01]

As an advertiser who has gone through about a dozen PPC engines that completely rip us off with total trash traffic, I must say I have no problem with them getting rid of people they suspect of being fraudulent, regardless of their reasoning.

[IanKelley]

I agree that PPCSEs need to be as strict as possible. There's no room for argument about traffic quality. However, there is one point that seems to have been missed...

This person was not contacted. Instead they were permitted to keep sending traffic. This is clearly unethical.

From the number he posted SearchFeed did not credit almost all of the clicks originating from his site. A company like SearchFeed cannot survive without some pretty in-depth automated quality monitoring. Their system almost definitely notified a person when it saw an affiliate with such a huge percentage of bad traffic. At this point they should have contacted the affiliate and suspended the account, not allow them to continue sending traffic that they will never be paid for.

Bestfetch is not the only person who has been treated unfairly by SearchFeed. I have heard complaints from a number of clients... Although I should add that I haven't made any attempts to substantiate them ;-)

[chrisuk]

Obviously the precise details of this case are not known to us. In general terms, as much as it is great to see PPC's policing bad affiliates because many advertisers have seen their money evaporate through low quality clicks the affiliates themselves especially if they are of quality are entitled to professional treatment.

My view is that if you are a PPC operator and you knowingly let an affiliate carry on providing traffic while you have no intention of paying them then you are as fraudulent in nature as those guilty of providing the suspect traffic if found to be doing so. If you have reservations about a partner then initiating good communication skills must be the order of the day so the nature of the problem is understood by all involved. If you decide to terminate a partner then so be it but you have a duty to inform them.

Sites that don't pay their partners are just as bad as affiliates who try and beat the system and in some cases their is no fraud anyway, it maybe that just how the traffic is being provided needs greater clarification, again good communication on both sides would ease this kind of problem.