ShoppingAds isn’t so profitable for non-US or Canadian based publishers !

Everyone knows that CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns are more profitable than CPA (cost-per-action) campaigns. Why is that ? Simple. Because it’s less likely that a person who clicks on a certain product related ad to purchase it. However if someone actually does purchase the product you can gain for example approximatly a 10 clicks equivalent revenue. I’m not saying that CPC campaigns are much better than CPA campaigns because that’s not entirely true.

Now lets head to ShoppingAds and their “how it works” page. I must say that they really did a great job explaining the differences between the two types of publishers. Unfortunately they left something behind. Maybe it was deliberately or maybe they considered it too obviously to be mentioned. In this business nothing is “too obviously” and every aspect must be very clear for both parts !

As you can read on their page, after a few months (sometimes even a single day), depending on your traffic sources you might receive an invitation to join the Premium Publisher service (for free). After one month of using their ad service and consulting my report generated by Google Analytics which shows that US and Canadian traffic togheter represents more than 60% of my total traffic, i decide to send them an e-mail regarding the conversion to the Premium account.

It seems that the traffic source isn’t the only thing that stands between the Standard and the Premium accounts as this was the reply i received:

Hello,

I’m sorry, unfortunately we traditionally do not convert non-US or Canadian
based publishers.

Thanks for your inquiry.

So let me get this straight: it doesn’t matter that your site/blog receives substantially more US and Canadian visitors than from other countries, now you have to worry about you being a non-US or Canadian publisher. Say that’s fine with me (though it isn’t) but why didn’t they said so in the first place ? I found this out after a month (because i asked not because they were concerned about sharing this info with me) and i wonder: “What about others who wait… and wait… and wait the invitation to the premium account ?”. Someone should tell them that if they are not from US or Canada there’s not even a chance of getting their standard accounts converted to premium no matter where their traffic comes from !

One thing i can’t get: why does it has any relevance from where you are if you get most of your traffic from US and/or Canada ?

I hope the staff from ShoppingAds will self-notify themselves and correct this issue (or maybe they prefer to let it as it is).