Sprinks New Control Panel

Better?

[wolfy]

It seems to me or now it's more functional and easy to use? They really needed to change something, Sprinks in my opinion was not competitive with OV an ES.

[skiguide]

yes, they just relaunched the new interface & introduced something called ContentSprinks, which allows you to better match up your listings with where (you want them to) appear on About.com sites, it's no longer tied to keyword searches there. Also, you have the ability to opt-in/opt-out of having your sprinks presented on About.com newsletter lists tied to those about.com sites or content categories.
Of course, you still have the keywords/search option too.

They did a significant amount of beta testing to make this happen, so i really hope that it works better for most advertisers. and they also lowered the minium account amount to start at $50.

[bnhall]

(copy of a note I sent to sprinks customer care this afternoon)

Hello, I'm afraid I am writing again to complain about abuse of my account by your <hidden>.com affiliate.

Since my previous complaint, click fraud from <hidden>.com has continued and as you can see from the attached log segment it has even gotten worse recently.

The log shows 172 clicks for my highest-bid search terms, none of which resulted in more than 1 page view from our site. This fraud, on keyword bids which ranged from 0.17 to 0.46, has consisted 37% of my sprinks clicks, cost me approximately $40-$90 in the last 3 weeks, and has cost me several hours of time in identifying, tracking down, and capturing this data.

Please refund me all charges via <hidden>.com since my last complaint, and please put measures in place to stop this obvious abuse.

This abuse is costing sprinks its reputation and my ROI as a sprinks advertiser.

[wolfy]

<This abuse is costing sprinks its reputation and my ROI as a sprinks advertiser>

You're right, that was one of the reason because I consider Sprinks really far from Overture and ES, I remember I was given back money from fraudolent clicks,of course not a cheque but some dollars on my account.

<they just relaunched the new interface & introduced something called ContentSprinks >

I think that is the best thing they've introduced because finally you can really target on specific section of About.com instead of advertising on every pages of it.

[bnhall]

I received the following in response from sprinks customer care. If you want to know the affiliate site just sticky me.

Hello <me>,

Looking at our records, we last credited your Sprinks account for this
on September 6, 2002. I have looked into all of your click from Sept 6
through yesterday, Oct 17, 2002. The total clicks from <hidden> come to
$59.40. I have returned this amount to your account.

[WebStart]

Well, I had been wondering why my Sprinks charges all of a sudden went so sky high this past month. Now I have a possible answer. But this is a continuing problem in the PPC world. And none of them, including OV and FW seem to have a way to prevent the fraud.