How Wargaming Saves Affiliate Marketing Budget with Bluepear By Spotting Rogue Affiliates
~ 4 minutes to read
Bluepear is starting a series of stories where we'll share how our company helps our clients to save money on affiliate marketing, spot rogue affiliates, and improve ad campaign results.
The first story is dedicated to Wargaming, an award-winning online game developer and publisher headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. Delivering legendary games since 1998, Wargaming has grown to become one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO gaming industry with 5,500+ employees in multiple offices around the world. Over 200 million players enjoy Wargaming's titles, including the top-of-the-line projects World of Tanks, World of Warships, World of Tanks Console, and World of Warships Legends, across all major gaming platforms.
“We reached out to Wargaming by ourselves, our CEO just messaged them on Linkedin, saying that he will make an offer they cannot not refuse,”says Roman Rudakov, sales-manager at BluePear.
Little did our CEO know that Wargaming has already been working with their competitors, one of the market leaders.Therefore, In order to secure a deal we had to come up with an irresistible offer. And that's exactly what our team at BluePear did.Now let us tell you how we managed to add one of the world's leading online gaming companies to our portfolio.
The Problem
At the time of writing, BluePear has caught 10 dishonest affiliates and 536 affiliates advertisements targeting branded keywords of Wargaming and its products in Google and Bing Ads. The main issue is that Wargaming's affiliated partners have been reselling the brand's organic traffic. Wargaming has its own Google Ad campaigns and an affiliate program. There are many partners among those who buy and place their ads for the same keywords/search queries as the brand itself. The Wargaming affiliate program has its own terms and conditions, one of which, for example, is not to purchase their keywords and not to use the brand term in the ad copies and URLs so as not to compete with Wargaming in the Google auction. Wargaming does not pay commissions for this kind of traffic.
But there are many who would not comply with this rule, and their motivation is clear - for them it is easy money. After all, a person who knows what World of Tanks is, having seen the very first link in Google where the brand is mentioned, will most likely click on it and end up making a purchase. But after all, while Wargaming had put in a lot of effort, time and money to become a household name so that people would start looking them up online, some affiliates may just piggy-back off the brand's popularity without any contribution to the company's success.
Finding all dishonest partners is very difficult, because one would have to manually check on hundreds of them everyday. And that was just one type of violations committed by affiliates. Therefore, Wargaming has carefully considered Bluepear's proposals.
The Solution
Bluepear is not a person, but an Brand Violations Monitoring tool, therefore it monitors all dishonest partners 24 hours a day.Bluepear takes all branded keywords and monitors all paid search ads displayed for the said keywords providing users with detailed data. The data includes but is not limited to Ad copies, search engine result page and landing page screenshots, which allow clients to see how affiliates actually promote their brands online. Furthermore, the screenshots also serve as proof of the affiliate's non-compliance when disputing traffic. In addition, BluePear toolkit managed to offer more functionality than that of the competitors.
— It was important for them to see not only by keyword-related data, but also the content displayed on the landing pages. We gave them the most detailed paid search ad analytics in a convenient form (screenshots). The combination of these features that give BluePear a competitive edge allowed us to start working such an influential and world-renowned brand - says Roman.
Demo
The collaboration began with a two-week demo of the product, during which Bluepear found a whole bunch of dishonest partners breaking the rules. For example, the system uncovered another popular method of deception - geo-targeting: this is when a person not from the targeted region clicks on an ad and sees a fake landing page. So did dozens of partners. But the Bluepear system figured everyone out thanks to residential proxies.
“Another advantageous feature for business: Bluepear saves the complete chain of redirect links,”says Roman. This allows our clients to see every single link a user is going through when clicking on the affiliate's ad. Thanks to these links which contain individual trackers, our clients can find all the additional information about affiliates that are already in their system, in order to prove their case in an argument with a cheating affiliate. It is very convenient.
Launch
The collaboration began with the update of new keywords provided by the Wargaming team. At the same time, Bluepear always tries to be proactive and help its client to compile a list of new keywords specifically for the client. The key focus here is to conduct keyword analysis and identify the keywords that are most likely being used by affiliates and competitors.
“It is very important for us to find the right keywords, because the performance of our product and further successful cooperation depends on it,”says Roman.
Result
The instant the keyword set-up was complete, the software began live monitoring and help Wargaming find dishonest partners, stop paying unearned commissions and save money on affiliate marketing.
— Another feature is a technical account manager who makes sure that our clients get the best out of the system by preparing regular reports and highlighting the most important cases. This allows the client to be constantly aware of what's happening to their brand in Paid Search and respond instantly.
As a result of several months of work with Bluepear, Wargaming has identified dozens of dishonest partners, saved their money now and reinforced their affiliate compliance strategy.
— We cannot give the exact figures due to an NDA, but during our cooperation, Wargaming has managed to save several thousand dollars a month on cutting payments to dishonest affiliates.
