As promised, I’m keeping my eyes peeled for rubbish landing pages, and highlighting the offenders on this blog.

Today’s example of a merchant having no thought whatsoever for their affiliates is Desperate Seller on Affiliate Window.

Desperate Seller

On first impressions, this isn’t too bad – If you ignore the PPC ads for phrases such as “Cheap Car Loan” and “Car Insurance” on the Right Hand Side. Are affiliates paid their fair share of this revenue? I doubt it. Their EPC on AWIN index is currently showing as £0.11 – These keywords can command CPC’s of £1.00+ on most Search Engines, never mind the bingo and dating keywords they also have there (Relevance, Zero. CPC’s, High.)

Anyway, what you can’t see from that screengrab is the fact that Desperate Seller launch a pop-up window through their affiliate traffic, which is almost full-screen for Cornhill Direct:

cornhill direct

Now of course this is rubbish for two reasons:

1. Again, affiliates aren’t paid for this leakage – With Car Insurance being highly relevant to the market, and companies willing to pay £30+ for leads, it’s possible that affiliates would actually lose more commission by featuring Desperate Seller on a motoring page than they will earn from the “whopping” £5 commission that Desperate Seller pay.

2. Even if you still felt like promoting Desperate Seller despite all the leakage above, you wouldn’t be able to do any PPC for them whatsoever, as pretty much every PPCSE forbids the use of pop-ups on landing pages. So they’ve wiped out the biggest potential market for affiliates to send traffic to their PPC ads and Car Insurance and Loan lead generating Used Cars site. Clever, very clever.

The crap landing page police are still out in force, so I’ll keep you updated with the latest suspect merchants.

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