Hi more4me,
Below is an explanation of this situation from the Director of Acquisition at the Jackpot Factory:
The Situation
7Search (the advertiser in this case) are a PPC engine that also has an affiliate program. You can read about the details of their affiliate program here: http://www.paypertext.com/. We advertise with 7Search as do many other casinos and other affiliates. One of the 7Search affiliates is doing some nasty marketing and sending traffic to a 7Search search results page for casino related keywords. You can see on http://www.paypertext.com/ examples of such search results pages. This 7Search affiliate is earning income whenever a visitor clicks one of the search results. Since we also do PPC advertising on 7Search our ads are sometimes displayed – depending on what search terms the affiliate is targeting (We bid on search terms – just like in overture or Google). The banner tag used on this occasion (zs) is not specific to any 7Search affiliate, but rather specific to the keyword that we bid on. So we can’t say what traffic has been bought from this guy or that guy. We can only know what traffic has come from what keyword group.
The Solution
We’ve complained numerous times directly with our 7Search rep. They claim to have blocked this particular affiliate. However, the problem isn’t going away so we are checking with them further. The details of exactly how they’ve blocked we’ll get later – we’re calling them later today. Please keep in mind that we have no connection whatsoever with this particular spammer and we can’t stop him from harassing you. Hopefully we’ll succeed in getting this guy totally kicked from 7Search and that way he’ll lose his income source and stop with his tactic. However, 7Search may only block this guy for us (and not Globally). In which case, this guy will continue to harass you, it’s just that our ads won’t show up on the results pages that he is promoting.
We are waiting to get details about what 7Search has done so far to kick this guy. In the meantime I hope this explanation of the problem has been at least informative.
Hopefully we’ll convince 7Search to give this guy the boot – 100% for all of us! Details to come later.
Thanks,
Dean
Dean Gibbons
Director of Acquisition
Hope this helps explain the situation and what we are doing to rectify it.
Please keep us updated if you continue to get spammed by this guy with our casinos.
Thanks,
Marcia