At WAS21 I talked, among other things, with representatives of the notorious affiliate network Admitad. And I had the idea of making a case study on traffic of the affiliate marketing. On behalf of, so to speak, a novice affiliate marketer.

Like, the man went to a conference, got a mountain of motivation and decided to start making money online.

The first thing he did upon returning home was to choose a source of traffic, simple and understandable to any Internet marketer. Then wrote to tech support:

Does this sound like a novice affiliate marketer?

Alina from Admitad replied to me that they have "all white offers" and I can just look at the average conversion of the offer for the entire duration of all webmasters with different sources of traffic and the average conversion in 48 hours in the program card "CR". And on Google Ads gave a link to the instructions.

I'm a novice webmaster, which means I haven't heard of PS5 and Xbox cases, Hydpark, Yandex.Music Android, Overkings, SHOP24, BuyLux, Eldorado, Lamoda, etc., etc. The plume of negativity has lingered behind the grid since its release in the Russian Federation. I have always been perplexed by the boorish attitude of their CEO (Alexander Bachman) towards webmasters on Search. But, let's assume that you and I don't know any of this.

After digging through the directory, I applied for offers that accept context to the brand. I got a lot of approvals. I originally wanted to pour in Star Conflict [CPP] RU + CIS, but then Admitad turned me down (I don't know why). So I chose Shop-runail as an affiliate program.

Took an affiliate link, all the templates for tracking. I set up an ad campaign in Google Ads, linked it to Admitad. drove traffic money on the balance, ran it. Checked that the conversions were tracked by the affiliate tracker.

As soon as the first statistics appeared, I optimized the site. I removed the obviously un-targeted keys. In two weeks I got a picture like this:

Not seeing any adequate statistics for leads in affiliate program, wrote again to technical support Admitad:

Ilya from Admitad replied that the average processing time for actions on the program is 25 days, and reconciliation of RU-offers held up to 15 numbers (on average). Well, okay, it's not hard for me to wait.

On the 18th of July I called again. To which I got the answer, they say, you do not have in the statistics. Further communication with Captain Obvious led to the following conclusion: I have no action for 876 clicks from Google Ads.

I didn’t believe in what is happening, and I suggested technical support to check whether everything is working correctly in this offer. I was asked to make my own conversion from the link in the ad. The conversion was taken into account in the statistics, but the order was not.

Ilya from Admitad checked with the advertiser, and then transferred me to the Shop-runail manager. The new manager, Anna, regretted that my test order had not been included in their statistics and offered to do another one.

It was August 11th. Two months had passed since this whole thing started. I think that is more than enough time for a blog post.

Therefore, I wrote to the technical support and manager of the affiliate network admitad.com, Alexandra, who joined my Telegram after WAS21, said that I should sort it out myself. I am not their free tester.

Funny thing. July 21, apparently the day after I was "passed" to the manager of the advertiser, in the statistics of Admitad, one conversion for 1.542.79 rubles appeared on the offer.

And you can draw your own conclusions.