William Hill Drop CPA Affiliate Commissions for Grand National Day!
8 Comments April 3, 2009 / Posted in Affiliate MarketingA long time ago The Grand National was a good earner for affiliates. There were free bet offers galore and that often meant lucrative earnings on the biggest day of the racing season. The bookies soon discovered that offering free bets for The Grand National wasn’t all that good for them, and so the annual “please change your banners for a couple of days, then put your old banners back” emerged.
A bit of a pain, but if you were promoting The National then at least you could still earn with the bookies! Until now!
William Hill have come up with a plan on par with “we’re not paying commissions for the Nintendo Wii as it’s a popular product at Christmas”. Taking a lead from the racing term “and they’re off”, William Hill in their wisdom and judgement have decided not to pay CPA for The Grand National.
For Grand National Day CPA affiliate commission drops from £10 to 0!
So, if you’re a CPA affiliate driving new punters to William Hill on April 4th you won’t be paid. Even if they’re brand new customers! Even if they’re brand new customers who perhaps want to bet on the future of Southampton FC! Even if they’re brand new customers who want to bet on Lewis Hamilton ever getting another F1 point!
Essentially they’re saying “we love you affiliates for 364 days of the year, but on National Day we’d rather not pay you for any promotion so we’ll have that one for us”. It’s a very very very bad precedent! What next? We’re not paying for Cheltenham? For The FA Cup? For the final of Dancing on Ice?
Full marks to i-Level and DGM for trying to guide William Hill, but they have been given a really sticky wicket on this one. If you have a merchant with it’s head up it’s backside then what can you do? It’s not a fair decision for affiliates, the agency or the network!
The email from DGM them says “What we ask from all affiliates who are on a CPA basis is to kindly remove our banners from Friday 24:00 till Saturday 17:00. We also will not be offering any free bets during this time”.
My feeling is that come 5pm on Saturday there won’t be much call to be returning those banners. Especially when it’s so much easier to leave banners for the likes of Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and Coral in their place.
Shocking! Hopefully the guys at WH will regret this as hopefully affiliates will stop promoting them full stop.
most ppl will loose the bets anyway, they cant possibly loose that much money with the free bets. I hate william hill bookmakers anyway, the shops are so clean, tidy and you feel as if you shouldnt be in there.
Yup, this sort of thing is happening every year now.
Yet pick up a copy of The Sun tomorrow and what will you see? Bookies who have paid an extortionate amount of money to place their ads, offering free bets.
One rule for one…
I can only see this as a terrible way to treat affiliates, they will need to change their attitude in the future especially since affiliates are now allowed to advertise on Google. When I saw this I thought this was commonplace amongst gambling companies. Obviously not! If I was marketing in this field I would be taking down their banners for a lot longer just as a form of protest!
I had 92 William Hill sign-ups on National Day. Substantial amount of commission lost there
Terrible behaviour from a merchant in my opinion. I had 315 signups on the 4th and was wondering why they only had a value of 10p
[...] a big mistake, why loose thousands of customers? who are probaly going to loose anyway. Read more william hill drop affiliate CPA commission on grand national [...]
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