CashAddOn – What’s Wrong with Incentive Publisher Browser Plugins

by Scott Jangro on 01 October 2007

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cashaddon.jpgThere’s a new incentive shopping browser plugin on the scene, called CashAddOn.

CashAddOn is a Cash Back shopping portal. Their model is that they have a FireFox plugin that, when installed, gives you indication in the browser status bar if you’re receiving cash-back commissions on a purchase from the current website. A small blue minus sign turns into a green plus sign. It’s the same old browser plugin incentive model. This one’s a Firefox plugin without a major site behind it, so it’s reach is limited, at least for now.

Also, like most incentive shopping sites, the technology behind this is leveraging relationships with merchants through the major U.S. affiliate networks, Performics, Linkshare, and Commission Junction. The only program that I found outside of those three is Amazon, though I didn’t browse through all 600+ merchants.

The plugin was added to the Firefox plugins resource site in August 2007, so it’s quite new.

The developer of this program doesn’t seem to have done his homework on “How to play nice as an incentive affiliate with a browser plugin.” It’s a bit surprising to see a tool like this appear without any apparent awareness to the issues that surround it.

More on that later. But first, maybe it’s time for a refresher on shopping plug-ins.

What’s Wrong with Incentive/Shopping Plug-in Software?

The affiliate marketing industry has been spinning over the issue of these incentive publishers and software plugins for about 5 years now. The issues are many:

1. Overwriting Clicks – plugins that work indiscriminately and send a tracking click whenever they notice that the browser has landed on a merchant site will overwrite a click that came from another affiliate. This has been the most significant of the issues. The affiliate networks who allow incentive affiliates in their systems have taken varying degrees of toleranace on this issue. Commission Junction has taken probably the strongest and have kicked at least one large affiliate out of the network for automatically overwriting affiliate clicks (ShopAtHome Select).

Most of the mainstream and visible incentive sites have their software designed to detect an affiliate click and will remain dormant if there’s another affiliate in the clickstream. This is the minimum they must do to remain in most affiliate networks. They must identify affiliate clicks and not act, including recognizing the afsrc=1 parameter which are used to flag masked affiliate links, e.g. local tracking redirect links that ultimately go to an affiliate link.

2. Overwriting Return-day cookies – Even when plugin software programs are written to detect other affiliate clicks, they cannot detect other affiliate cookies. Therefore, they will activate and overwrite a currently active affiliate cookie that was set on a click in a previous session (like last week). This remains a bone of contention in the affiliate marketing space.

3. Leeching PPC – Incentive plugins will jump in and take commission even when the merchant (or sometimes an affiliate) has paid for traffic via Paid Search. Paid search ads that go directly to the merchant site may not be recognizable to the plugin software which may end up grabbing the commissions. It ads to the problem when the affiliate pays for another to grab the commissions. And even when there’s not another PPC affiliate in the mix, the merchant pays twice for traffic they’re paying for.

Word is that some of the larger incentive sites are even fixing their plugins so they will not activate on Paid traffic. Clearly they’re feeling some pressure in this area as well.

4. Jumping on type-in traffic – Incentive affiliates use technology to get the sale no matter what, even when the consumer goes directly to the merchant site. What did the incentive site do in this case to deserve a commission? That’s the retention model. the argument is that the user is incented by their cash back and more likely to make a purchase.

CashAddOn’s Behavior

It’s like 2002 all over agin. This browser plugin jumps on every opportunity to get a cookie-setting click, regardless of whether there was another affiliate in the mix.

Some testing that I did over the weekend, watching headers, shows that this plugin does in fact overwrite other affiliate clicks.

Here are a few examples…

Shutterfly on Linkshare

This click from an affiliate site to Shutterfly:

http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=8hUAsWnSyVU&offerid=91218.10000014&subid=0&type=4

Got a subsequent automatic click tracked through here:

http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=pewANFyptSw&offerid=124259&type=3&subid=0&u1=xxxxxx

xxxxxx is my CashAddOn id going into Linkshare’s SubID tracking field (u1).

Dr Jays on Performics

This click from an affiliate site to Dr. Jays:

http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/tplclick?lid=41000000015065810&pubid=21000000000037536

resulted in a subsequent click again:

http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/click?lid=41000000018165041

Interesting, no cashaddon subID ID in the performics click. Are they paying their users on these?

Hobbytron on Commission Junction

This click:

http://www.kqzyfj.com/click-2057689-9325056

got overwritten by this

http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-2486960-10406507?SID=xxxxxx

I tested several others, most of which exhibited overwrites. Sometimes they didn’t overwrite, even though they did change over to a green commission indicator in the status bar. Either it’s buggy or they’re setting their own cookies and not generating extraneous clicks.

In any case, I’ve seen enough indiscriminate overwriting that I don’t feel the need to do any further testing.

This is Against the Network’s Terms and Code of Conducts. How Can These Guys Be Doing This?

Make no mistake, these guys are small time. This plugin likely has only a small number of users so far and has produced even fewer sales. Certainly not enough to appear on the radar of any of the networks. I’d guess that once the Networks’ quality teams catch wind and take a look at this there will be some quiet changes.

For further reading on this, there’s a discussion going on at ABestWeb. Even the ABW thread is a tame one compared to other similar issues.

But it has been fun to reminisce about the good ol’ days.

  • Matthew B. Howell
    Hello,

    I am a user of the Cashaddon service, or was until recently, when I noticed that their service is temporarily disabled until 11/1. I was just reading your blog about what they have done to other affiliate marketing websites - while I don't quite understand all of the nuances of whether what Cashaddon is doing is, in fact, illegal what I do know is that I had obtained a bit of "cash back" from using the service and, as of now, I have no way of accessing that "cash back" until their service comes back up. I find it just a bit discouraging that the only way I found out about the disabling of their service was when I went to their website this morning - as of last night, their website was up and running. I hope they haven't taken my money and run off.

    -Matthew
  • Hi Dan,
    I have often wondered about those browser plug-ins. Many of the large coupon web sites are now using them. I sure hope CJ, LinkShare and Performics put a stop to it, because they can really hurt the little affiliates like me.
  • Scott,

    We have taken a bit of a hard line on this one, here's why:

    Most often when this kind of thing happens it is precisely because our client's ads/trademarks are appearing where they shouldn't (various types of apps usually). Most of these apps don't interrupt the normal flow of the consumer from affiliate site to merchant, they set their cookie in the background. This is true of CashAddOn, as well as most of the commonly cited spyware apps that pop a window over or (usually) under the main browser window. CashAddOn appears to be making the call to the server silently to the user based on my observation of the tool this morning.

    As far as trying to create multiple types of deactivation, we also need to keep the business rules on our click servers extremely strict in order to minimize the time it takes to redirect a consumer to their final destination. I believe that faster redirects yield better conversion rates (I have anecdotal evidence from recent migrations to our network, although I don't think I'll ever prove conclusively). We use third party QOS tools to measure our click servers against those of other networks; we fare very favorably at the moment and I intend to keep it that way.

    -larry
  • Dan, other than afsrc=1, could you clarify for me how cashaddon's behavior is different than the behavior of UPromise or eBates or ShopAtHome/SAHS?
  • There are definite pros and cons to both methods. And from the Networks perspective, it really is a decision that is often times grabbled with. There are so many different possible scenarios, all of which I'm sure Networks consider.

    There are other situations which might support passing the traffic through. For example, when the originating traffic source is the Merchant's own PPCSE listings or direct type-ins. Undoubtably the merchant would like to still receive the traffic and not have the consumer end up on a splash page for the Network. The reasons for an account deactivation can be so varied.

    OTOH, there are certainly advantages for it being obvious that an account showing up in questionable situations isn't an active account on a Network and tracking isn't happening.

    While I've thought about the different pros and cons, I guess I haven't thought much about possible solutions. Maybe an intermediate page with whatever messaging the Network wants that then automatically redirects directly to the merchant?
  • Scott
    Yes, thanks to you too Larry. Good for you guys for speaking up.

    Concerning these business rules on whether to click through or not on a deactivated publisher... I remember grappling with these same issues many years ago.

    There's really no one-size-fits all solution here. I can see not wanting some deactivated publishers to be able to click through and instead show a deactivatd page. That's the case for, say, a site that has bad messaging on an offer. (like "free ringtones", or promoting "no credit ok!" when it isn't)

    But in the case of a plugin that is adding their redirect in at the end, won't it look like the original publisher is the deactivated one?

    Good publisher click -> deactivated publisher generated click -> network error page

    The user doesn't know about the one in the middle. AND, even though you don't overwrite the cookie (nice) the user never gets where they were going in the first place.

    Lesser of two evils?
  • Echo Scott...thanks Dan and Larry for posting. The status of implementation of the change on deactivated accounts is something I've been wondering about. Glad to see the change is close to being implemented. I've seen it in some instances, but glad to hear it's coming for across the board. There are certainly affiliates who will continue to run links once accounts have been terminated, sometimes for months, for whatever reasons.
  • Sheryl,

    That is the account. The URL redirects because of a legacy business rule. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it was decided that links for deactivated accounts should continue to pass traffic through to the merchant's site so as not to disrupt the consumer experience.

    Because of situations like this one, we decided several months ago to reverse this decision. We're releasing a patch to our click servers in the next couple weeks that will prevent links owned by deactivated publishers (like the one from your comment) from redirecting; this is already the case for certain types of links, we're just making the change across the board now.

    I do want to point out that _we_do_not_drop_a_cookie_ for deactivated publishers, so this publisher's toolbar cannot leech commissions from another affiliate regardless of whether their toolbar forces a click.

    Larry Adams
    Product Manager
    DoubleClick Performics
  • Scott,

    Thanks for the write up on this one. Our Compliance team declined this publisher from our network after initially testing their software application, and declined them again when they tried opening up a second account days later. They then reapplied under a completely different name/contact information without disclosing their use of software (and were approved). They are now deactivated from our network and, to your point about not appearing "on the radar", they had only driven 152 clicks and generated one transaction in the past three months.

    thanks,
    Dan
  • "That was sarchasm in the extreme. It’s no fun at all."

    Come on...you know you loved those late nights scouring over sniffer logs figuring out what in the heck IPInsight was doing and how. :D

    "Not that they don’t deserve any heat, but they seem to take a disproportionate share, no?"

    Have to agree they do get talked about more anyone else and on some things that are happening other places as well. I've always attributed some of that towards them being the largest. The biggest are always going to be talked about the most. But again, I think the issues are more global and not related to any one particular Network.

    What I find frustrating is that I really do feel what you posted is much needed....after what something like 7 years?
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