3 Mobile Affiliates - Worst Performing Mobile Merchant?

[simon2006]

Tweet

Hi I echo Ben's comment.

I've been working with Summit Media over the past 4 years whilst I was working at Affiliate Window. I continue to work with them now as my role as running Savoo.co.uk (on the affiliate side).

I would 1000% recommend them to any client and the fact that they are helping the community whilst running a business makes them entirely unique.

May Summit continue to prosper.

Simon Bird
General Manager
Savoo.co.uk

[Bagless]

Has anyone noticed the speed improvements in approvals on Direct - does this change your mind on app model?

Adam

I've been dipping my toe into the affiliate world for a while but haven't really focused on it enough to know all the technical terms, so please excuse my ignorance.

By Direct, I assume you mean direct affiliation with 3 Mobile rather than through one of the networks? What are the benefits and what is the process for applying to join Direct? ...and does it matter?

I am currently exclusively pushing the iPhone and have 31 sales on 3 Mobile through Buy.at, going back to 1st August 2010. 4 have approved, 2 are held (whatever that means) and the other 25 remain pending. Buy.at's stats say I have a rejection rate of 21% but I can't for the life of me work out how to find which ones have been rejected

The way I tend to view it is that users looking for an iPhone on 3 won't head off anywhere else and as long as they are not taking traffic from elsewhere (such as links to other networks through AF for example), then any that approve are a bonus. The improved commission is also a mitigating factor.

That may be short-sighted but, as I said, this is all fairly new to me.

Any tips or advice gratefully received!

Steve
Owner Simplyfreeiphone.co.uk

[darrenlc]

Steve,
The difference between using buy.at and dealing direct with 3 mobile is simple. Buy.at charge you 20% of your commision for dealing with 3 Mobile so if you have earned a commision of say £80 it will be £100 with using 3 mobile direct. I not saying they shouldn't earn a commision because it is a business and provide a service for affiliates but if you can deal with the company itself then you can take a larger portion of the pot. I find another bonus of dealing direct is that, with my sales, if I get a referred sale in most cases it takes 1 day to pass/fail de-luping and another day to find out if the sale has been confirmed/declined. There's nothing worse than thinking you have made possible sales and then finding out after 2 months that they most have been rejected so this way takes the pain out by knowing within a few days and you can then move on.
As an update I had a bit of a moan on here last month about my poor conversion rates. As a result Adam and Matt from 3 Mobile gave me some advice about keywords and I found that I was basically targeting people who may have bad credit. As a result my confirmed sales have gone up by over 400% for the last month so it may be of some use to get in touch with them but Adam will probably see your post he will more than likely get in touch with you.

Hope it helps.

Darren

Free Laptop Deals

[Bagless]

I find another bonus of dealing direct is that, with my sales, if I get a referred sale in most cases it takes 1 day to pass/fail de-luping and another day to find out if the sale has been confirmed/declined. There's nothing worse than thinking you have made possible sales and then finding out after 2 months that they most have been rejected so this way takes the pain out by knowing within a few days and you can then move on.

Yup, that certainly does help, thanks Darren.

[garyl2k]

Hi guys,

I been using 3 Mobile affiliate direct for the last 2 and half weeks, I'm very new to mobile affiliate marketing but have been in the affiliate marketing for digital products for almost 7 years. Right now my site promotes the iPhone 4 that draw in people who want the iPhone.

Now, right now I'm simply testing out which network works the best with my traffic, first week was 0 sales since the keywords I was marketing needed changing (SEO Marketing) which took a while to take effect.

Once the new traffic from the better keywords started coming in on the 2nd week I got a sale, now not massive traffic but a pending from 7 clicks ain't bad from a small banner add at the bottom of my page. Me being new and thinking "Wow this seems pretty neat £125 from a single sale..." I get passed deputing and then the next day it's declined.

Oh well, I thought I'd give things a little chance but I have recently had 2 more declines within the last day or two and now have another pending, after reading this thread I see that the 3 mobile network ain't all that it's cracked up to be which is pretty disappointing and I'm very close to jumping ship and joining another network to test them out.

Though, what is this "Depuping" and if it's passed why would it then decline? Some education on that part would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Gary

[3_Mobile]

Hi Gary,

Sounds like you've done well from an orders point of view, for a new venture - shame you haven't had one go through for your efforts. I can't give much of a view without knowing your model/website (if you'd like that please PM me your CD number) so I'll stick to answering your direct questions for the moment.

In terms of reporting in the interface, there's two avenues of rejected sales:

1) Failed Dedupe - where you are the last affiliate, but either our agency's PPC or post-click Display activity was involved with that consumer after you. (last click model)

2) Decline - the main bulk of failures, in a nut shell this is where an order has been successfully made but the resulting credit check ended in a failure (I'm sure you understand the concept that if a consumer gives us £30 and we then send them a £500 handset that we have to be pretty sure they're going to keep paying us their monthly contract fee). As such, the higher the cost of the handset, the higher the failure rate (generally - there are some exceptions).

It is slightly unfortunate that you've started right at the top in terms of handset risk (the iPhone 4), but there is a substantial pot of gold to be had (top handset by 'connection' despite all those failures)

We have average failure rates for the programme if you want to benchmark your activity but from what you've said that might only be valuable as your traffic increases.

It would also be more valuable if I gave advice specific to your site and target audience. Let me know if you want that.

Kind regards,

Adam

[Myfreeiphone]

I would be very interested in seeing these stats as ive been using 3 mobile since Nov last year and although dec/jan were quiet good declines have been getting higher and higher as the months pass.
May for instance, as I type:

8 sales failed DD 14 declined and not 1 confirmed sale for May so far.

This is making me seriously consider moving to a lower paying affiliate but with a better conversion rate as in the long run I'll make more money.

[selectdata81]

I may be able to help you in a big way contact me selectdata81@gmail .com

[Ballswinger]

Still nothing changed here:



Worst performing mobile phone program ever.

Turns out that 3 Mobile credit check against the value of the handset instead of the value of the contract but third party retailers credit check using their own criteria and run at an industry standard 50-55% pass rate.

When will Three learn?

[3_Mobile]

Hi Andrew,

Numero Uno) I have been telling everyone that the main factor considered in our credit check is handset cost (the risk to us) for at least 2.5 years. Makes sense really. If I'm sending you a handset worth £400 I need to be pretty sure you're going to pay me every month.

2) We would love to have manual credit checks like our reseller partners but unfortunately the size of our business dictates a certain level of automation. Needless to say, there is constant analysis and improvement of our credit strategy. If you feel pain, we do too.

3) Luckily we have a few USPs of our own, like iPhone (including the 'affiliate exclusive' iPhone 4 16GB Refurb - avg 80% pass), other affiliate exclusives, a generous average commission level and I hope we provide you with above average service and insight (the bit I can help with).

& 4) Q2 2011 - on for record amount of affiliate commission ever paid out in the 6 years we've had an affiliate programme.

I confess, if the be all and end all in business was approval rate, times would be hard, but while affiliates remain to focus on income and EPC it's a very good time to be promoting Three... especially The One Plan at up to £150 per connection (sorry, it's 7.25pm and I thought I deserved a shameless plug!)

Good evening all.

[darrenlc]

Since the launch on 3 Mobiles new website and affiliate interface I have not had a single sale get passed that has to have a credit check. I was wondering if this was a widespread issue of if it was just affecting me?

On an average month below is what I would normally get from 3 Mobile.


But this is what has been happening over the last 2 months.


At first look you may think that my sales are down a bit and I'm still making a bit of money. But most of the sales are from a new website that generates sales based on sim only and are paid on application. I have not had a single sale that needed a credit check passed for over a month and the month before very few indeed.

Usually 3 Mobile are very helpfull when you get in touch with problems. This time I was told they are having problems with the payment process on the new system. I'm not sure how long it's going to take for them to sort this out but in the meantime I feel I am losing commisions. I'm still targeting the same traffic keywords. Yes I did lose a bit of traffic due to the last Google Panda update but now I'm back with more traffic an clicks than ever before (for now).

I'm not sure how long this problem will last? In fact I'm not sure if this problem is going to be resolved but in the meantime I'm sending free traffic and potential customers at my expense. Not to mention all the time that goes into SEO.

I'm currently up to 49 rejections in a row for the last month. And as above, from the handsets and mobile broadband, out of 93 that passed deluping only 3 were confirmed. 3 Mobile tell me that they have not changed the criteria for passing the credit checks!

I'm really annoyed that when you work hard to promote products you just get kicked in the teeth for you trouble.

I don't really like to post on here about negative stuff but I feel I have been pushed too far. Like I said at the start - Is it just me or is anyone else having similar problems?

[Three_Affiliate_Team]

Hi Darren,

As previously discussed with you we have not altered any credit strategy on our devices, we have had a huge operational change in terms of our site and all the processes around it.

We are aware the problems this is causing our affiliates, particularly paid search affiliates and are working hard to rectifiy the situation, my focus is always on the affiliates and i'm putting forward the case for our channel on a daily basis.

As always Darren I'm willing to do whatever I can to help change this and I'm confident the problems will be resolved soon.

please feel free to contact me directly.

thanks,

Matt

Three

[foxtucker]

Hi Darren,

As previously discussed with you we have not altered any credit strategy on our devices, we have had a huge operational change in terms of our site and all the processes around it.

We are aware the problems this is causing our affiliates, particularly paid search affiliates and are working hard to rectifiy the situation, my focus is always on the affiliates and i'm putting forward the case for our channel on a daily basis.

As always Darren I'm willing to do whatever I can to help change this and I'm confident the problems will be resolved soon.

please feel free to contact me directly.

thanks,

Matt

Three

Darren. Don't waste another minute on THREE until they sort themselves out and start paying you what you're worth. Dump them, send your traffic/users elsewhere.

Your contact at THREE will contact you once it's sorted.

How much more of your time/work/effort/traffic are you going to waste on an affiliate program that is consistently showing it's piss-poor?

[TurkishDelight]

in my case, I tried 3 last month and out of 700-800 clicks, none has converted.. orange and vodafone converted around 5% with the same sources of clicks... I have a serious doubt that their affiliate tracking is not tracking sales!! or none of consumers tend to buy anything from them!! Now I removed 3...

I wish there would be a third party to investigate such things, because I have a feeling that sales were not tracked and this is illegal...

[kingkashif]

Same as me, I have also doubt their affiliate tracking is not tracking sales & impressions! I have,t make any single sale after they launch new affiliate platform. On the old affiliate platform every thing was fine for me. I am thinking to use buy.at

Period Imps Clicks
January 0 86
February 0 27
March 0 45
April 0 73
May 0 28