Case Study: Starting a CPA Network w/ HasOffers

Not to long ago I started playing around with the idea of starting my own network. I wasn’t sure which affiliate platform to go with off the bat so got demos of linktrust, direct track, and hitpath. I had my likes and dislikes of each platform, but the biggest thing that kind of sucked was the way they priced things. You are basically looking at something like 5-10 grand in setup fees, then anywhere from 1-3 grand a month in fees. I wanted to be able to test starting a network, without dumping out 10-15 grand or whatever on setup and monthly fees just to see if it was my thing.

Around the same time that I was getting demos from all these companies, about ready to go ahead and sign a contract on the platform, a new affiliate tracking platform hit the market. The platform was called hasoffers. I signed up right away and started testing things out.  Since I have seen a lot of hype lately about hasoffers, I thought I would add in what I could to the matter since I have actually been USING the hasoffers platform for awhile now.

I wasn’t sure what to expect off the bat, or if I should even be trying out such a low cost solution. I seem to place unreliable and low cost in the same category. After doing a bit more research on the matter, I found out that the technology that hasoffers uses for affiliate tracking is supposed to be over twice as fast as all the competitors. Because it is twice as fast and far more efficient, it takes far less hardware and computer power to process everything. THIS is why the platform is free/so low cost.

Once I got my account rolling I picked up 2 domains, my networks domain and my networks’ tracking domain. A dns change and couple clicks later and everything was rolling fine with my network domain pointing right to my network hosted on hasoffers’ hardware.

Next step was setting up the basics of the script. You can change the way the script looks to customize your network, however it is pretty limited to what you can change. You can basically change the color scheme, add your own custom header, add a custom footer and insert javascript (for tracking/analytics reasons). You can also setup your terms and conditions and create any and all additional questions to have your affiliates answer when they are signing up.

Next step is to get some offers loaded into the network. For most people their options would be to start/have their own offer, broker offers, or go direct through the advertiser. For my testing phase I chose to put up a couple of my own offers I have and to broker some offers from other sources that I have built relationships with. Setting up the actual offers was simple, it consisted of creating an advertisers account for the offer/offers and then creating the offer. When you are creating the offer in the network there are many nice options such as:

• Lead caps
• Cookie lifespan
• Using custom variables
• Geo redirection (You can set which countries the offer is available to and forward countries to a different offer.)
• Target browsers (You can set which browsers the offer is available to and forward other browsers to a different offer.)

Now that I have the network setup and some offers loaded, I needed some affiliates (or myself) to push the offers. Since I buy traffic myself, I ran internal traffic to the offers and also brought on a couple of close friends who do some good volume to help me test everything out. One benefit of this platform that I found out about right off the bat was its ease of tracking. All of the affiliates were able to add there own pixels to whichever offer needed at any point. There pixel management portion of the platform works really well and is all automatic, not requiring affiliate managers to waste there time adding an removing pixels for people.

Once you do all of that, you are pretty much good to go! There is extensive reporting for the network, the advertiser, and the affiliate. The reporting seems to be fast, accurate and easy to use.

Last of all is paying your affiliates!  Hasoffers has designed their platform to help you with this task by showing account balances and payments due, along with managing invoices and other things.

So far, starting a network for me has been a really easy and fun experience.  Hasoffers has made this much easier by allowing me to test everything out using their hasoffers platform.  If you are already doing good volume, have good relationships with some advertisers or networks, and know even a few good affiliates that will drive traffic to your offers, then you might as well think about starting your own network!

One thing I would like to note… if you are thinking about trying out hasoffers, I would recommend signing up right away.  When hasoffers first came out, I signed up right away to test them out and was fortunate I did so.  When I signed up, hasoffers was free up to 1 million clicks a month.  Some time in the last couple months, they have now changed their free plan to only include up to 250,000 clicks a month.  However, because I was signed up under an old account, I was grandfathered in and was able to keep the old 1 million clicks per month limit.  Because of this, I recommend signing up as soon as possible so that if another change goes through minimizing what the free account includes you will be grandfathered in!

As of this posting, hasoffers offers the free account up to 250,000 clicks, a professional account at $99/month which is good up to 500,000 clicks, and a enterprise account at $799.month with unlimited click volume.

If you have tried or are trying hasoffers, let me know what you think about it.  If you simply have a question regarding the platform or starting a network in general, ask away, and I will try my best to answer your questions!