Airline Affiliate

Hi, I'm Martin, a family father and a mortal human being who has struggled with affiliate marketing, media scams, greedy media buying agencies and problems in the advertising industry like you never thought imaginable.

Also founder and Media Fraud Agent at TraceAd Analytics helping businesses to succeed in the chaos of online marketing with simple, and intuitive solutions to manage affiliate marketing.

My problems with Affiliate Marketing

First, I will share with you, how the affiliate industry literally changed my life, how costly it was for me and my family. And how expensive it was for advertisers and businesses dealing with affiliate marketing on a daily basis. This is how you can minimize your losses and gain more success with your affiliate marketing activities, almost overnight. This is how you can double and even triple your sales results from the same amount of money you are investing in online sales and marketing today.

How my everyday problems with Media Buying Agencies gave me the final push to help you.

In 2004, after many years of seeing advertisers and businesses being strategically fooled and manipulated by sales people selling fake ad space, but worse, even being manipulated by their own Media Buying Agencies. I felt that changes needed to be applied to the industry. The most shocking part of this was the experience of how Media Buying Agencies, the guys many businesses and probably also you, pay lots of money to do proper investments in advertising and to advise you about the media chaos, actually have hidden agendas of just spending your money rather than advising you properly.

Their role is to be objective! Whoever thought that they were the bad guys?! No one did, but sadly enough they are, and pretty often you'll find better, more profitable and free media guidance among the salespeople in the field, than with your Media Buying Agency. But it is a risky bet to rely on salespeople, too. You are on your own in the wild-wild west of advertising.

Back to the Media Buying Agencies, buying campaigns for their clients paying a whopping 200-400% above list pricing from media, just to spend their clients' money faster to reach the clients' budget quotas quicker. By doing so, the Media Buying Agencies could get back to their clients and ask for more money to spend on advertising, and thereby increase their clients' ad spendings in order to increase their own agency commissions and fees. Media Buying Agencies typically get paid 3-10% of the money spent on media, through the Media Buying Agency.

I realized, that there were so many hidden agendas, which I wanted to change. Issues I wanted to reveal, or at least give my customers the needed tools, insight and knowledge about so they by themselves could see what they bought, what actually happened behind the scenes and how they got screwed by their Media Buying Agencies.

Many of my customers actually asked me if I would handle their media buying and their media management as a replacement of their current Media Buying Agencies before I quit my day job, they already knew how their Media Buying Agency worked and wasted their money. I said yes, quit my day job, and took the risk of pursuing my vision of busting the bad guys in the advertising industry.

The worst thing is, they still operate the same way, even today, and we are almost entering the year of 2021. Issues with Media Buying Agencies strategically fooling their clients, was the main reason why I started my own small Ad Agency in 2004, which quickly got transformed into a third-party tracking tool, in order to help advertisers, business owners and people like you with honest and objective guidance in buying, choosing and measuring their online marketing investments properly. This includes any activity with all your media partners, and not least your Media Buying Agency.

Today TraceAd is a free tool with simple and objective 3rd party tracking solutions available for you.
The industry is packed with “tracking tools” and vendors claiming to give you objective “third party” insights, but mostly all these “vendors” and “third parties” have other interests. Such as Google Analytics who earns quite a few bucks on Google Adwords, Affiliate Networks offering tracking tools but earns commission from each sale in their own network, and Media Buying Agencies who own their own media networks and “tracking tools” designed to help them, and not designed to help you. But designed to disguise real facts and to show you what is most suitable for the agencies, in order to get their poor work to look good.

Hey! and not surprisingly, I have even caught a clients Media Buying Agency in cutting and pasting numbers around to manipulate screenshots of their reports in an attempt to hide the real facts and actual results.

More dangerously, Media Buying Agencies now becomes Media Owners and Media Network creators selling ad space to their customers, creating new technologies to compete with other media networks and great technologies. They are now becoming competitors to those guys, you pay them lots of money to advice you about.

They advise you to spend money where they have the highest profit, and not where you have the best and most profitable outcome. 

They already entered the media scene by owning media where they have greater profits from redirecting your investments through their own media channels, rather than through media competitors where they don’t have profits or interests.
Either in the form of indicating that their own offerings is better or by undercutting market prices in their tries to disguise their ownership, interests and lack of proper consultancy.

My million dollar office mansion

So, I already had my first few clients when I quitted my day job as a media salesman for the biggest newspaper company in Denmark, and there was no time to find an office, neither was there no money to pay the extra rent for a fancy office.

I began working from home in our conservatory, next to the living room in a small 65m2 house from 1920 we’ve rented from an old lady, which were the only place I could close the door and work without disturbances. I pulled one of our white garden tables into the house, one of those tables with spaces between the bars, where all my pens constantly fell through. Then I had a place to work in the corner of our house. There was no money yet to buy stylish office furniture, so no desks or office chairs, only our old tables and chairs from the garden with green moss spots.

It was in the middle of November 2004 and it was very cold without heating in my new “million-dollar office”.
I began my workdays with a big warm winter jacket, my cell phone, my laptop, a hot cup of coffee and my constantly disappearing pens that fell all the way down under the floor. The floor had cracks down to the soil where green grass and weed often crept up and my pens disappeared. I found all my pens again years later when our old house was torn down and we built a new house, since both my business and our little family grew.

Today I have two daughters, my youngest Olivia which is 13 years old and Filippa which is 14 years old. Besides the great feeling of helping a lot of businesses and people like you every day, these two kids really fulfil my days with happy moments. :-) 

Precious family time I would never neglect again, which I did earlier due to constant overtime at the office, just to deal with CHAOS and affiliate problems for my customers.

I don't want, that you have to neglect your family as I did.

It's not worth it. Neither family-, financially- nor business related.

The Dark Side of Affiliate Marketing.

Back then, at the beginning of my new career when I worked "out there" in the cold, taking in projects from any breathing business available, I began working for a European Airline Company with aggressively focusing on Affiliate Marketing. They had huge problems with managing all their Affiliate Networks. The Airline had many daily scam attempts and they had huge losses arising from lack of De-Duplication Management. They paid duplicate commissions for the same sale to several affiliate networks, basically on each sale.

Learn More About De-Duplication. Click here.

A chaos project which I gladly took, I needed to get projects and customers to grow my small agency, I had to get a money flow in my little new business.

Any type of client or project was welcome at that time. I didn’t have any ideas about how many crazy scam attempts they had and how many late nights I agreed to work for them by taking in this airline company as a client, and all their never ending problems with Affiliate Networks every single day.

How you can earn money and boost your own sales based on other peoples losses and tough experiences.

Later on, I realized, that all the tough work from that Airline Company and their crazy Affiliate Program Management, all their time-consuming tasks nobody wanted to deal with, actually where one of the most important projects, most valuable lessons and experiences in my career, due to the high volume of affiliate sales, duplicate commissions payments, the money involved and the never ending problems with site owners trying to scam that Arline Company’s tracking tools, statistics and Web Analytics systems in an attempt to earn more commission. All the Affiliate Networks succeeded with their scams for a long time, until we cracked it and TraceAd was a reality.

I could never have gained so much knowledge and insider secrets about the industry as I did then, (I thought). You will never believe how many types of scams I have experienced and seen since then. The industry should have a monthly award festival celebrating the most creative scammers. Trust me. 

All this craziness was organized into the structure and the tracking tools needed to validate all that chaos was build. Hundreds of manual administration and media management tasks is stuffed into the simple intuitive tools and services we deliver today. The resources, secrets and information I’ll give you in through the tolls and reports we share, will help you to succeed, too. 

Thanks to the missing tools I missed back then, professional affiliate marketers and Media Buying Agencies still struggle with and can’t manage today, you are now able to use our guidance and tools so you can outsmart any online business, Pro Affiliate Marketer and professional Media Buying Agency almost overnight. And you will be light years ahead of almost all other advertisers and agencies playing around with affiliate marketing, publishers and affiliate partners.

All the scenarios and problems from hundreds of clients and thousands of scams other affiliate marketers have experienced, are now available information that will help you succeed with your affiliate marketing. This is created in order for you to earn more money in exchange of losing your money on media scams and all the daily tricks you’ll be exposed to through Media Buying Agencies and publishers behind Affiliate Networks, even all the new media technologies emerging every year.

Triple Espresso nights is not the way to succeed.

I couldn’t have been without these experiences, even though I back then, literally were fed up wasting my time and energy on endless problems. I was buried in idiotic work, day in and day out. Not to forget about all the many nights living on triple espresso’s all night long. I love espresso, and I love my family, the sad thing is, I neglected the most important asset of my life, my family.

My family paid the price, and Nespresso loved my money. This is why Espresso nights is not the way to succeed, unless you want losses, problems and scams to control your life. 

That’s why you’ll need to systemize and organize your affiliate marketing in one way or the other. And we've got you covered for free.

Get a Real Life!!

I had working-hours reaching 4am several days a week just to satisfy a single customer, a single Airline Company married with affiliate marketing, affiliate networks and their affiliate problems. It's one of those projects (and customers) that any consultant would do everything to avoid ... But I didn’t.

No wonder they wanted to pay me to do it, and wanted to outsource their entire affiliate management. Actually, even though it was a nightmare to manage their affiliate marketing, my knowledge today would never benefit you more as it does now, since that single advertiser got us, our team, our services and my self specialized as market leaders in affiliate management, de-duplication and fraud identification when dealing with affiliate marketing. And now it’s your turn be the next specialist, but without the sacrifices and losses others have had, it’s your time to succeed with your affiliate sales too, as all our clients manage to do. 

300,000.00 ++ in monthly losses.

On a monthly basis, we identified 40-50% of all their sales registered as Duplicate Commission Payout.! (Duplicate Commission Payout is when there is a sale in the advertisers shop, and two or more affiliates claim commission for that same sale, and it’s paid out to two or more affiliates by the advertiser) Learn more about de-duplication here: link

With more than 5,000 affiliate sales manually validated each month, and often more than 2,500 registered duplicate sales, there was money enough for the Airline Company to justify my consultancy fees, including all the extra fees for working late nights and to cover my increasing Nespresso costs.

With several months of more than 2,500 identified and discarded duplicate sales, they had monthly savings reaching 315,000.00 in affiliate duplicate commission, similar amounts and losses many advertisers never identify, neither do their Media Buying Agencies, their own Web Analytics System and Analytics Nerds or their costly paid Online Guru’s.

This is another reason why you should pay extraordinary attention, when working with affiliate marketing.!

Do you want to do slave labor in lack of proper tools?

I was a commodity and a cheap slave for the client, and after having slaved tirelessly for this one customer and the endless emerging and hidden problems with affiliate marketing, we built the necessary tools needed to leverage in the affiliate market. I have tested many many tools, tested more tools and then tested even more tools and systems available, but I couldn’t find proper solutions to manage multiple affiliate networks and the problems that follow, without still doing the same manual tasks as earlier or even more work.

So after paying out a lot of money for software solutions that gave me more work and more buttons, gave no sense for me at all. I needed a simple systematic way to manage everything, I needed specialised tools!

Finally I got my freedom and life back - now it’s your turn.

After years of chaos, finally I was free of my chains, free from being a slave taken as a hostage of manual work. I was free of long nights with espresso shocks, free from having to merge numerous external systems, statistics, reports, truckloads and exploding laptops of excel sheets, pdf’s and e-mail reports into something useful that could be deciphered intuitively.

The tool TraceAd was born, TraceAd was ready to do the slavery for me, drink all my espresso shots and manage the few clients I had at that time, since I only was capable of managing very few clients before TraceAd was ready. What I didn’t take into account was, that my 20-hour workdays 7 days a week for a single client was reduced to a 20-minute task once a month. 

What to do with all this new time, all this freedom?

The answer was a no brainer.

There was a quite simple answer to this BIG question.
Help others! many more “others”, others like you, and many of them. And it’s here you get into the picture.
Then I quickly got many new customers with the same problems, based on my expertise and experience with the dark side and all the secrets of the affiliate marketing industry. Which unfortunately comes as an added bonus, and for many advertisers causes great financial losses they’ll often never know about, and still pay for.

“I” Became “We”

These experiences and all the problems related to affiliate marketing has been our core competencies in the past 11 years. With my own, and our team's deep insider knowledge, countless hours spent on identifying the most remarkable ways of cheating advertisers, and more unthinkable types of statistical manipulation, manual labor and countless long nights working with hundreds of clients and their issues with affiliates, customers being scammed by affiliates and being manipulated by affiliate networks, their media partners, Media Buying Agencies and their many useless reports with lack of real facts, numbers, metrics and useful insight you need to make the right decisions, is now organized into simple steps where you will be in charge overnight, without taking a doctor degree in anything.

“We” Became “The TraceAd Family” - It Includes You.

We are not the success, you and other customers are the success factors behind TraceAd. You’ll be a part of the force against marketing scams, and you’ll gain all the great benefits en masse each time new scams happens to other advertisers, new media fads give you disadvantages or attempt to fool you, since all the scams happening to others will be shared with you, scam attempts onto you will be shared with others and tools will be enhanced or developed to catch ‘em all. We are a TEAM, we are a Family.

With all the many new media fads and tricky media technologies emerging in online marketing, I feel obliged to share my knowledge with you, and as many advertisers as possible, so you and others can avoid the many pitfalls, neglected challenges and financial losses associated with affiliate marketing from affiliate networks, media owners and the lack of proper and objective campaign execution from Media Buying Agencies claiming to help you.

Reach out to our local sales representatives, or get a free account via our global network of publishers. It's free. Enjoy.

- Martin, founder.