PokerStars Partners Stats Down?

[Giorgio]

Holy $#@%! That's even worse than I have, and I run a "free poker" related site! Man, ur not giving your players an incentive not to make a deposit at Stars, do ya? Serious though, Stars is the absolute joke of our industry. They are just playing with us.

[Ridge]

Yeah no incentive, and IMO that SU to Deposit Ratio is pretty good I thought. I just don't get the lag in Conversions. I really do not like Revshare and I do not have a FT CPA account, I guess I could use PAW and push these players there. I dunno what to do but I still have Start Featured and I need to figure something out fast.

I would feel a lot better if I started seeing a lot of qualified players this month, but so far I have 2 and with deducts form revshare I have less than 2 CPA's lol - Ugh what a mess

[pipeline]

The lag in point calculation is obviously causing this but either way it will take a few months to "maybe" get back to earning the same before the change. I don't really see 3 months down the road players qualifying at the same rate. No matter what the next 3-4 months of most of our revenues is gone if sticking to cpa.

[kef272]

I just don't want to send players to Stars hoping they'll qualify in the next few months. I'm sending players on CPA to get paid soon (within a month or 2).

The idea of sending CPA depositors and then getting paid in 4 months or so for those signups sucks. I'd do rev share if I wanted that.

On a side note - I did see on PAW that Full Tilt just reduced their CPA requirements last month to a $10 deposit and 100 FPPs. Plus that CPA starts at $125 and goes up after 5 CPAs. Granted they must deposit within 60 days.

[zzpot]

Good news:

"PokerStarsPartners.com is currently unavailable"

- either this site will be shut down for good or
- they will clean up their mess.

[Kris]

I feel for you Carly, you're a champ and it must suck having to deal with this mess.

But the Stars affiliate program is a bit of a joke these days. Late payments, inaccurate stats, 1990s tracking methods, no mac tracking and a below market offer that is calculated in a very affiliate un-friendly manner. It's getting very difficult to justify sending Stars any traffic, even if they are an awesome poker room, perhaps the best.

What affiliates need to do if you're not happy is stop complaining and just not advertise them. It's the only power you have. And it's probably the only thing that will make Stars management listen. Or switch them to fixed cost only if they want to appear on your sites and deal with media buyers instead of the affiliate team.

Their management currently think they're the affiliate program of the year! It's not Carly's fault either - imagine if you were the affiliate manager, wouldn't you be pushing for a great offer to promote to get your numbers up? Or dev time to improve the systems? It would be her higher ups that don't respect the affiliates.

It happens a lot with brands that get too big for their boots - clueless management types start looking at affiliates as an expense they can trim instead of a constant, affordable stream of traffic with guaranteed & measurable acquisition costs. I bet they still happily pay effective CPAs in the hundreds for print & media campaigns, because it's impossible to measure the results accurately and can write the surplus spend off as 'branding'. But when they can measure, they always seem to decide they are paying too much and branding doesn't count for anything across 1000s of affiliate websites.

Just take them down. I think I'm going to.

[corpfan1]

I have to agree with Kris.

Their program has become a total joke.

If I were you Carly, I would get out of there FAST - as soon, it will become a stain on your reputation.

Over the next few months, I am going to have the time and the effort to make major changes to all my sites and of this moment, Stars will not be part of that plan, I can assure you.

My goal this year is to work with rooms that are "improving" and heading in some real positive directions, even though they may not be the best room or program out there.

So, if you are a program who is making a POSITIVE change, please post here on PAL - I will be pushing you hard this year.

[Spry]

The lag in point calculation is obviously causing this but either way it will take a few months to "maybe" get back to earning the same before the change. I don't really see 3 months down the road players qualifying at the same rate. No matter what the next 3-4 months of most of our revenues is gone if sticking to cpa.

Speaking of sticking to cpa...

In january we were 'auto switched' to mgr on our bigger trackers and that resulted in over 50 rmp's assigned to the MGR account. For this effort we actually owe Pokerstars five cents.

Anyone who's been on MGR for a while care to share how the hell it is calculated and what kind of fee's we get hit with?

And secondly how do you just switch an affiliate to MGR without even sending a note that the change was happening. I don't get it.

[Josh]

I just checked my stats and noticed 3 more CPA's were removed from last month. Obviously removing over half of my converted players wasn't enough. I'm sure my number will dwindle down to 24 so they can save even more money.

[Pking]

I just checked my stats and noticed 3 more CPA's were removed from last month. Obviously removing over half of my converted players wasn't enough. I'm sure my number will dwindle down to 24 so they can save even more money.

I just noticed the same thing..