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Originally Posted by signupdamnit
If you have 300 sponsors and you do low volume with each it may not be realistic or make financial sense to test them all.
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Then I would argue one probably has too many sponsors. One problem I see with affiliates in this day and age is that they have to join every program that comes online. They'd be better off identifying their demographic and then targeting very specific affiliate programs that match their optimum demographic. These days, however, it's a shotgun approach which likely contributes to low volumes per program.
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Often sponsors make it risky to do real unannounced test joins as well. Even then there are a multitude of variables involved in order to do it right.
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Oh, I am by no means advocating defrauding a sponsor. You do not even have to spend any money for the initial audit. For example, at the very least people should check their links and ensure the join forms are present, re-evaluate their traffic links, any tour leaks, make sure their cookie or affiliate id is being carried through the tour, any external pages, etc, to determine where tracking begins and ends.
A test join is not something that is done, or needed, every time. And when you do it, you *always* inform the program so that it can be removed from your account.
As Relentless said, you could easily have a script that runs via cron to auto check your links. We don't automate it ourselves. Rather, manually check all of our links, campaigns, etc. randomly, including checking tours, external pages and submit form tracking.
Frankly, I think it's just important for people to audit their own revenue sources for abnormalities. Relying on others to do it for me is just not something I will do.