Mark Joyner

ALERT -- 6/19/03

As I wrote late last week, we have been experiencing tracking problems promoting Aesop Marketing products that we feel our visitors should know about. A few days ago, an announcement came out that Aesop web and intellectual properties were sold off by Mark Joyner to P&D Marketing in Texas.

Our affiliate tracking (in ROIbot) has been deactivated for some time now and our affiliate statistics and referrals are not being tracked. There is no clear language on the new owners support site explaining how existing Aesop affiliates can track traffic and sales up to and during this ownership transition period.

I can log into our free ROIbot account without problems, but our referral tracking url's do not credit our account. I wonder if this a simple "system issue" due to a ownership/management transition or if it's something more concerning. P&D and Aesop claim that all affiliate traffic is being tracked and that they are keeping "outages to a minimum", but I can tell you from our experience over the last few weeks, it's not happening for us in ROIbot anyway.

All the traffic we have been sending to Aesop Marketing's product pages for the last 30 days or so have NOT received proper affiliate credit in ROIbot. We've been testing our affiliate account tracking for a week straight and still our affiliate url's are not being registered or tracked when clicked.

If there is "free area" in NitroStats to check stats, that language is not clear or present in their support site. If you are an affiliate of Aesop products, be sure to test your realtime traffic stats in ROIbot. This is all very confusing and although P&D made a decent attempt at explaining the transition, certain critical questions have been left unanswered and unfortunately the support staff has not answered them either.

* * To be "fair and balanced" in this report, I should mention it's possible (but unlikely) that a competitor or hacker has deactivated our Aesop product tracking url's with some kind of cgi trick and that our problem has nothing to do with the transition of ROIbot over to P&D and Nitrostats.

ROIbot Acquired by P&D

As many marketers know by know from an announcement a few days ago, P&D marketing has acquired Aesop marketing web properties, including ROIbot. They are currently in the middle of a "transition" and this could be part or all of the reason for the problems we are having with tracking.

I've been in Information Technology for many years so I can understand and appreciate problems that always arise when transitioning technology over to new owners. No problem, just tell me what's going on rather than stonewalling with incompetent support replies. To be honest we are quite disappointed in the ROIbot (now NitroStats) support service we are receiving. It's been 48 hours with no real response let alone a resolution to our questions & problem.

Nonetheless, I have tried several times to get support from P&D, but my question/problem has not been addressed yet. I also added comments to my unassigned support ticket. Maybe they are too busy with the actual transition & gearing up for their new promotions rather than helping Aesop affiliate customers. I seem to be getting plenty of opt-in "sales" related email messages from P&D but no substantive support help.

The irony here is that P&D is actually hurting themselves by not being responsive to our problem. If they addressed our affiliate account question/problem, they would be getting leads and sales from our website!! We are spending hundreds of dollars marketing products including Aesop products, but have pulled 30 affiliate sales links because we could not get support from Aesop and now can't get support from P&D.

Who knows, maybe the whole system is crashed right now and nobody is receiving credits. Or maybe our affiliate account has been "targeted for termination" because they view us as an affiliate marketing competitor. I would think not because we had 30 sales links that were already sending traffic to their "newly acquired" product pages. We just don't know for sure what's going on at this point, but we have some very good ideas.

FYI, as previously mentioned I have submitted a "support request" through P&D's NitroStats support site. I submitted the support ticket at approximately 12:56 pm EST on June 17th and as of now it has been 48 hours WITHOUT a competent response from P&D Support and our ticket remains "unassigned". 24 hours after my ROIbot (NitroStats) affiliate support request, I received a generic email telling me I needed to get help from the support site. That's where I already filled out the support ticket because the support site itself could not help us !! UGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

We seem to be stuck in an "uncaring support" loop. NOBODY is helping us.

Here's the response we received to our support ticket (which is still unassigned):

You may receive support assistance at http://www.nitrosupport.com

You may manage your NitroMarketing newsletter subscription there
as well - here is the direct link:
http://www.nitrosupport.com/newsletter.html

Do not respond to this email, your message will not be read.

Support Ticket (entered at http://www.nitrosupport.com)

At 03:04 PM 6/17/2003 -0400, you wrote:

Hello,

I am contacting you because the answer to my ROIbot
question was not located in your ROIbot "transition"
FAQ. I also received no response from Aesop support.

I have been trying for the last 2 weeks to check traffic
stats for Aesop products. Your FAQ said that all tracking
is going on uninterrupted and that ROIbot users
can rest assured their URL's are being tracked.
I am not a customer of NS, I just want to check aesop
product stats. How do we accomplish this?

ROIbot itself was not tracking stats for some time now,
and there seems to be no clear statement about "where"
existing ROIbot affiliates can check stats. (??)

Can you please help us out here?

Unfortunately, we've had to pull all of our Aesop product
recommendations & links (About 30 sales links) until we
can verify that we are getting credits for the traffic we are
sending to your product pages.

I'm also wondering what happened to all the traffic stats
that seem to be lost for now or will they appear in your new
affiliate tracking system?

We've checked our traffic reports for the last 30 days and
have sent quite a few visitors to Aesop product pages but
have NO confirmation from ROIbot stats or your systems.

Will we see these stats in your new affiliate stats
system on June 18th? I sthat where we can check all
"back stats"?

Please advise.

Thank you,

Bob

FYI, Today June 19th we finally received response from our support ticket with AESOP, but it was not what we had hoped for. We waited 9 DAYS to be told to go the the NitroStats support site, which we have already done on our own! Why did it take 9 days to be told this?

This has been one of the most frustrating affiliate experiences we have ever endured and we are quite disappointed with the lack of competent support during the ownership/managment transition. The problem could very well be something simple to fix, but the runaround we are receiving is making matters much much worse.

I will update this page again as soon as I get a competent response from P&D support or if I don't get one at all.

If other affiliates out there have also experienced this problem, please email us immediately.

Due to these continuing problems with our Aesop (Now P&D) Marketing affiliate account, we have temporarily "suspended" their # 4 Position
in our "Top 10 Who's Who List of Marketers" until further notice.

That's too bad, because the products are good quality and it sucks we have to pull our affiliate links due to a lack of support.

If you are an existing affiliate of Aesop products I would triple-check your stats tracking If I were you.