A CPI rejection is when an advertiser refuses to count your installs as payable. Why? Read on.
This post is by Alexey Pisarevsky, CEO of the Mobio agency and the MobioNetwork affiliate network. The quality of CPI traffic and refused payouts are more relevant than ever. Advertisers are in complete eclectic disarray when it comes to judging traffic quality. They seem to know that quality must be monitored, and monitored in slightly more detail than cutting everything with CR above 15%. On the other hand, measurement methods and direct communication of data to publishers are not especially developed. The post explains the subject and will be useful to people who work with installs, or plan to. It is not an advertisement and was not paid for; it is here because of the quality of the material.
Lately, rejection by the advertiser has become fairly common in CPI.
Times used to be better. Advertisers bought installs by the ton and paid for almost any traffic. In 2014, for example, many people made serious money on Tap4fun offers such as Galaxy Legend, Spartan Wars, and King’s Empire, which bought almost anything.
Today the situation is different: advertisers have learned not to pay for traffic. Why does this happen? How can it be avoided? Should an affiliate network reimburse a publisher’s expenses when the advertiser rejects the traffic?
Let us start with the fact that all advertisers buying CPI traffic in Russia fall into two groups: Russian and Chinese. It sounds crude, but that is how it is. By feel, no less than 50% of all Russian traffic is now bought by Chinese advertisers, perhaps even more. AliExpress, UC Browser, Hola Launcher, DU Speed Booster, Apus Launcher: all of that comes to us from China.
Oddly enough, Russian and Chinese advertisers behave completely differently.
Russian Advertisers
Things are fairly reasonable with them. They used to buy everything because they could not really measure anything and did not understand where the traffic came from. Now they have started introducing rules for which traffic is paid and which is not.
Why might part of the traffic go unpaid? The most common reasons for rejection are:
- installs outside the GEO target, for example Ukraine on a strictly Russia-only offer;
- installs on the wrong devices, for example an iPad on a strictly iPhone offer;
- traffic above the cap;
- misleading banners;
- use of forbidden sources, such as incentivized traffic;
- blatant fraud: bots and other tracker manipulation;
- offers with a strict KPI, for example a registration conversion rate of at least 10%.
Generally, a reasonable advertiser does the following:
- agrees from the start on every rule for traffic that will not be paid;
- sets caps for each partner;
- the affiliate network relays all those rules in the offer description;
- all traffic within the cap that does not break the rules must then be paid.
Different situations happen. For example, the affiliate network may miss a rule and forget to put a condition in the offer, such as iPad traffic being unpaid. The advertiser will not pay for that traffic, but the network will have to pay from its own pocket: failing to relay the rule to the publisher is its fault.
Sometimes the traffic appears to break no rules but is of very low quality. The advertiser refuses payment and says it was incentivized. How do they prove that it really was? Each case is different, but if there is no evidence, the traffic should be paid. The advertiser can provide a tracker screenshot with actual figures. For example, normal traffic has an 80-90% registration conversion rate, while this source has 10%. Such figures can be sufficient grounds for rejection even if the offer listed no strict KPI.
Usually, if the advertiser is reasonable, the affiliate network is normal, and you really did not break the rules, there is practically no rejection risk.
Examples of reasonable Russian advertisers that have bought a lot of traffic for a long time, have developed and suffered their way to clear rules, and never reject without a reason include Aviasales, Delivery Club, BlaBlaCar, and Lamoda. Delivery Club, for example, has several pages of offer rules, and it is easy to break them simply through inattention. But everything not forbidden is allowed and is paid strictly according to the rules.
Chinese Advertisers
Things are different here. It is hard to say whether mentality, different promotion priorities, or simply the enormous amount of money spent on traffic buying is to blame. The fact is that working with Chinese advertisers can easily produce unpleasant situations like these:
- part of the traffic is simply unpaid with the explanation, “It was fraud; we cannot disclose details”;
- traffic is held for three months, then you are told retention was too low and it will not be paid;
- the advertiser judges quality by Retention Rate and cannot measure it by Affiliate_ID, so it rejects the network’s traffic from every partner;
- some advertisers simply have a shaving machine that produces rejections according to an algorithm with little connection to traffic quality;
- the advertiser uses its own tracking system instead of recognized systems such as AppsFlyer, MAT, and Adjust, and therefore cannot provide proper statistics exports.
Incidentally, Retention Rate is a special kind of pain. Lately every Chinese advertiser has become obsessed with it and treats it as a panacea. In reality, it has many problems. Trackers such as AppsFlyer, MAT, and Adjust cannot fully calculate it by SUB_ID, and configuring a postback for a return on Day 2 requires a very long dance with a tambourine. In our experience, only a couple of advertisers managed to pass the metric to us correctly. The result is that a publisher pours traffic almost blind and learns from the manager only afterward that it was bad. If they are lucky, they learn quickly.
Clearly, the market will mature over time and these situations will stop, but right now they happen everywhere. What should an affiliate network do?
There are several options:
- Many networks beat their chests and say they always pay partners even when the advertiser unfairly rejects traffic. That is hard to believe, because it would mean they operate at a loss.
- They can lower partner payouts to price in the risk, but then nobody will run the offer.
- They can mindlessly mirror every rejection to partners and shift the risk to them. By feel, most networks, including foreign ones, simply pass every rejection to partners. Everyone still sends traffic because the budgets are enormous.
- Some networks claim they never get rejected because they work properly. It sounds nice, but every network has hit an unfounded rejection from a Chinese advertiser at least once.
As an affiliate network, we settled on these rules:
- We agree as much as possible with every advertiser up front: the conditions under which traffic can go unpaid, the rules, and so on. We put all of it strictly into the contract. It helps, but not always. Rules are still often changed retroactively.
- We transfer every rule strictly into the offer description and warn partners what may not be paid. If we forgot to write down a rule, we pay everything.
- We resist unfounded advertiser rejections for as long as possible and enter long negotiations. This is the most effective method. Eventually we either get adequate evidence that the traffic was bad, or get paid, which is even nicer.
- We try to teach advertisers to set proper caps and KPIs. We even made complete guides in Russian and English on configuring a tracker and judging traffic quality. Whenever possible, we ask them to use in-app events rather than retention.
- We have two women on staff who speak Chinese. Funny as it may be, this encourages more honest payments from Chinese advertisers.
All of this minimizes unexpected rejections for honest publishers. Overall, of course, the field is still very young, and some time will pass before it becomes civilized and grows its own laws and rules.