GENERAL
What role does Guardian Careers play in online advertising?
Publishers seek to generate advertising revenue from their websites and mailings lists but often lack in time or size to deal directly with multiple large sponsors. On the flipside, advertisers want traffic to generate sales and leads for their websites without the commitment of dealing with hundreds of individual publishers. Guardian Careers acts as a single point of contact for advertisers and publishers, acting as a trusted source for both sides. Publishers benefit from having access to hundreds of advertising campaigns and receiving a single aggregated "always on time" commission payment from Guardian Careers. Advertisers benefit by having their CPA campaigns made available to thousands of publishers without having to recruit or maintain a single one.
What is CPA Marketing?
CPA stands for Cost Per Action. Unlike other marketing models where an advertiser pays for every surfer seeing their ad (CPM) or clicking on their ad (CPC), an advertiser under the CPA model pays only when a specific action is taken on their website. The advertiser defines this action in advance and only pays when that action is taken. The advertiser action can be as simple as filling out a form on their website or as complex as a multi-page sign-up ending with a purchase through credit card. Generally speaking, the more involved the action, the higher a publisher would expect to be paid for generating it.
ADVERTISER
What kind of advertising campaigns see the best results on Guardian Careers?
There is no specific campaign type which represents the bulk of our traffic. We generate leads and sales for clients across multiple genres including dating, financial, weight loss, education, surveys, health, mobile, etc. Generally speaking, we tend to stick with form-fill style lead generation and trial-based sale campaigns because these are the kinds of ad campaigns our publishers like best.
Who will run my ad, where will the traffic come from?
That's a little difficult to predict as Guardian Careers has 16,000 publishers in the network and they selectively choose the ads they want to run themselves. A successful ad campaign might see traffic from hundreds of publishers across multiple traffic types such as banner placements, email marketing, search engines, social media and others. An advertiser can however specify in advance whether they want to exclude certain types of traffic, like search engine or social network traffic.
Do I get contact with the publishers running my ads?
There is no direct contact between publishers and advertisers. All contact goes through the network. Publishers come to Guardian Careers specifically for the benefit of having a single contact point for multiple sponsorship opportunities.
Do you accept campaigns which pay the publisher a percentage of a sale?
Generally speaking, we do not. There are other networks better suited to such advertising.
How does tracking work?
Guardian Careers uses cookies and pixels to track actions. We provide the advertiser with a tracking pixel to place on the page where they declare an action as valid and should be paid for. This pixel, combined with the cookie generated when the surfer clicks the campaign link, generates a lead in our system.
How much volume can you do on my campaign?
We don't predict traffic volumes on potential campaigns. There are simply too many unknown factors to give a proper estimate. Much depends on the conversion of the campaign, the target countries and demographics, the decided upon CPA rate versus competitive campaigns and the final mix of publishers who decide to pick up any given campaign. Some campaigns can see hundreds of thousands of leads while others struggle to get hundreds per month.
What can we do to ensure we get quality leads?
Guardian Careers puts potential publishers through a quality assurance and fraud check before we allow them into the network. This helps reduce the occurrence fraud and bad leads, but does not eliminate it. Advertisers must also work at monitoring data and reporting problems. We pass all advertisers the IDs of the publishers generating traffic for their campaign. Advertisers should use this ID with their internal quality checks to analyze the profitability of the traffic they are receiving on an individual publisher level.
How do I find out if Guardian Careers will take me on as an advertiser?
Send us some details about the campaign you'd like to bring to Guardian Careers through the contact us page. Please include as much information as possible about your campaign including sample landing pages, CPA rates, target countries and budgetary caps. We receive many requests so please do not omit this information.
PUBLISHER APPLICATIONS
How do I become a publisher?
First step is to sign up here and validate the confirmation email we send. An affiliate manager will review your website for appropriate content. The second step is phone contact with an affiliate manager so we can understand how you intend to advertise our sponsors.
Is phone verification required to become a publisher?
Yes. If we cannot reach you by phone to have a simple discussion about your methods of advertising, you will not be approved into the network.
What's the fastest way to be approved?
You can get approved to Guardian Careers on the same day you sign up. Send us a message and an agent will respond with the information to get your started.
Does Guardian Careers accept international publishers?
We accept publishers from most countries. Currently we do not accept publishers from India or China due to the high incidence of fraud.
Will I be approved if I don't have a website?
Maybe. How will you advertise our sponsors? Call the affiliate manager assigned to your application and have that discussion.
When are publishers paid?
Publishers are initially paid on a monthly net 15 basis. For example, publishers generating revenue in January will receive their payments on February 15th. Once a publisher has received their first payment from us, they are automatically placed on a weekly payment schedule if they are receiving their payments electronically. We require a minimum balance of $100 before we issue a payment. If you don't reach this level, your earnings will roll over to the subsequent pay period until you reach the minimum $100.
What about weekly payments?
Publishers who have earned at least one payment from us and who are paid electronically are automatically moved to weekly payments.
How are publishers paid?
We pay publishers by check, PayPal, Pre-paid MasterCard by Payoneer or Electronic Funds Transfer. The options available are dependent on a publisher's home country. Our system tracks all earnings in US Dollars, however most international publishers paid by check have the benefit of receiving their payment in their national currency and drafted from a local bank. For example, Canadian publishers have their earning converted to Canadian dollars and paid via check drafted from a Canadian bank. It is the same with Australians in Aussie dollars, Brits in Pounds and a host of other counties and currencies. We do this so international publishers don't suffer the fees and delays often implemented by their banks when depositing American checks. The list of countries we support is too large to include here so please contact your affiliate manager if you have any questions about how you'll be paid.
What is incentive traffic and is it allowed?
Incentive traffic is when a publisher offers a surfer a reward of some kind (virtual or real) to sign up to an advertiser through their publisher link. A potential publisher must understand that while Guardian Careers does allow some forms of incentive traffic, publishers using incentive traffic will be limited to advertising only the few ad campaigns which accept it. Most campaigns do not accept incentive traffic. We're very selective on the kinds of incentive traffic we accept and very strict on incentive publisher adherence to only advertising the campaigns which allow it. Generally speaking, potential publishers who purchase or license common GPT (Get Paid To) incentive scripts, will not be accepted into the network due the higher level of problematic leads they seem to generate.
Does Guardian Careers accept content unlock traffic?
Yes, we generally accept this kind of traffic but only on campaigns which accept incentive traffic. You are required to own or have rights to distribute the content which is being unlocked. It should be not be pornographic in nature and is subject to the same terms and conditions a publisher's website is subject to.
ACTIVE PUBLISHERS
What's EPC?
EPC stands for Earnings Per Click and is displayed on all network campaigns. It's a computed average income publishers are earnings on a given campaign calculated on a per-click basis. This number isn't a guarantee of how much a publisher will earn by advertising a campaign but is simply a tool for publishers to gauge their potential interest in advertising a campaign and measuring their conversion compared to the average across the network.
Does Guardian Careers have a publisher referral program?
Yes. Publishers can refer other publishers and receive a 5% bounty on their earnings for the first 12 months of their activity with the network. The potential referred publisher must be new to Guardian Careers and not be another advertising network.
I want to run a campaign which says 'incentive', but I don't have an incentive website. Can I still advertise it?
A campaign indicating it accepts incentives will also accept non-incentive traffic, so you would be fine to advertise it. We're simply trying to display which campaigns are OK for incentive publishers to advertise. If there are two version of a campaign, a non-incentive publisher would be best to advertise the version which doesn't specify incentive traffic allowed. Generally speaking, campaigns which accept incentive traffic pay less. Contact your affiliate manager if you are unsure.
Why do I see some clicks/leads in my stats on campaigns I've never advertised?
This is relatively common and happens under two conditions. When a publisher is advertising a campaign which has expired, we redirect their remnant traffic to a similar campaign. Also, if a publisher is advertising a campaign which accepts only traffic from certain countries but some foreign traffic is trying to access the campaign landing page, we redirect the foreign clicks to a campaign allowing traffic from that country. This enables the publisher to at least have a chance of earning something from those filtered-out clicks. In both cases, these redirected clicks show up in publishers stats under the campaign they were redirected to.
Are leads/sales tracked in real time or delayed?
In most cases, leads and sales are tracked in real time, but there can be up to a 5 minute delay for our server to refresh publisher statistics. There are some advertising campaigns where a sale/lead is only declared days after the surfer signed up. In such circumstances, this will be disclosed in the ad campaign description.
Can I sign up to campaigns myself or get my friends to sign up?
No, it's against the terms and conditions which govern a publisher account for a publisher to generate his own leads or get his friends to sign up for him.
Why is it I'm not seeing any leads/sale generated on a campaign when I know leads/sales must have been generated?
There are a number of reasons why this could happen. These include, but are not limited to surfers visiting a campaign page through another publisher link, surfers entering invalid data, surfers not fully completing the signup, surfer data not matching campaign demographic requirements, and surfers having cookies disabled on their computer. Generally speaking, most cases of untracked test or friend-generated leads are explained by a publisher simply unfamiliar with all the details an advertiser requires to validate a lead as real.
Can I use Google/Facebook/Youtube/Craigslist/etc as a traffic source?
Publishers can purchase approved ad placements from third party traffic sources. Each campaign on Guardian Careers has specific rules as to whether a given traffic source is allowed or not. For example, it's not uncommon for some advertisers to request they not receive social network traffic, to which publishers must comply. Publishers are responsible for the nature and quality of the advertising they bring into the network from third parties. Publishers must ensure they are following the terms of service and advertising guidelines of the websites from where they are acquiring traffic.
Why do my paid clicks stats from Adwords/MSN/Facebook/etc not match the number of clicks showing in Guardian Careers?
Click tracking between two sources never match 100%. Some of the clicks a publisher purchases from a third party might get IP filtered because they are from a country the campaign doesn't accept. Even if you're buying specific country-targeted traffic to send to a campaign accepting traffic from that same country, rarely does the logic behind two IP filters match 100%. It could also be that the surfer abandons the browser before a click is tracked on both sides. A small discrepancy in click stats is expected and normal.
What's the difference between scrubbing and shaving?
Scrubbing is when an advertiser doesn't pay for invalid or duplicate leads. For example, while a publisher might have generated 100 raw sign ups to a campaign, 10 were already in the advertiser's database and 10 more contained bad data. So out of those 100 sign ups, 80 were valid leads and 20 were scrubbed. Shaving is when an advertiser doesn't pay for leads which would otherwise be valid but is attempting to increase their profit on a campaign. Guardian Careers does not accept advertiser lead shaving.
Does Guardian Careers shave or scrub leads?
No, we do not. Guardian Careers is completely dependent on an advertiser identifying when a lead/sale is valid.
PUBLISHER TERMINATION AND PROBLEMS
I'm not using my publisher account. Can I sell or transfer it?
No, you may not. It is grounds for account termination or worse. The only people interested in acquiring dormant publisher accounts do so with the intent of defrauding advertisers. If a publisher sells their account, they're likely assisting someone in committing a crime and are subject to potential litigation. Guardian Careers fully supports advertisers and law enforcement agencies in their attempts to prosecute for fraud. If you don't want your publisher account anymore, simply tell your affiliate manager and we'll close it for you.
Can I do a joint venture (JV) where I allow someone else access to my account for a share of the profits they generate?
No, this is directly against Guardian Careers's publisher terms and conditions. Just like selling your publisher account, the bulk of those interested in joint ventures do so with intent of defrauding advertisers. A publisher is solely responsible for the leads generated on a campaign. Should the second party in the joint venture generate fraudulent leads/sales, it's the publisher who risks account termination and litigation, not the second party.
My publisher account was terminated but I want to plead my case. What should I do?
In most cases, by the time you've received the termination email, it's too late. Our compliance department monitors traffic/leads constantly and action is swift when a problem is found. Publishers are generally told when a minor problem is found and given the opportunity to make corrections. Major problems usually result in immediate account termination. If you want to plead your case, send a reply to the compliance email you received. Your best bet is to admit wrongdoing, accept the reversal of your leads/sales and ask permission to try again. In the rare circumstance that a publisher is wrongly terminated from the network, they should reply to the compliance email and politely describe the problem and why they feel they are innocent.
My account was terminated but only a portion of my leads were fraudulently generated. Will I get paid?
Partial fraud doesn't equate to partial payment. No payment will be issued to a terminated account.
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