After reading Rosalind Gardner’s post on how she is pleased with MIVA pay per click advertising, and how they are offering $25 in free bonus credits to US advertisers (and £30 free to UK advertisers) plus the fact that they offer an affiliate program through CJ (see banner ad to left), I thought I’d give them a try. Now I count the ways on why I wish I wouldn’t have wasted my time…
1. I never got my $20 in commission for signing up through my CJ affiliate link. Even if they don’t pay on self-referrals, I should have seen a transaction and reversal in my account. I saw nothing.
2. You have to deposit $25 to receive your $25 bonus, so I did. I never got my bonus. *Update, after two emails, I did finally get the bonus added, but I don’t think I should have had to ask. And it obviously didn’t matter anyway (read on….).
3. So I created three separate ad campaigns with three different landing pages and added three to four keyword phrases to bid on. As soon as my campaigns were approved, the traffic started, and my money was gone within hours, and I had absolutely NO conversions – not ONE from the traffic.
Looking at my stats, the referred traffic came from http://redirect.clickshield.net/jump2/?affiliate=XXX&term=YYY with the term being just the first keyword of my keyword phrase (ie “Free”) which is too broad to be revelant. Then I see that the visitors (if they were even real people) stayed for 0 (yep ZERO) seconds on my sites. And did I mention I didn’t even see one conversion?! All I asked for was an email address.
I again emailed Miva expressing my disappointment only to get a generic form letter response from Murali several days later. Needless to say, I don’t recommend Miva.com, but if you want to give them a shot, that is my non-tracking affiliate link.
It’s only going to get worse, as you’ll now receive regular phone calls from them asking why your campaigns are stopped and if there’s anything they can do to help. I tried Miva twice – both times provided junk traffic.
In my experience all you get are a bunch of forced impressions and clicks. Miva populates several adware applications.