Kevin Muldoon

Last week I wrote about how annoyed I was that Azoogle wanted me to sign up for a third time as my account had been locked (due to inactivity). As I explained in my post last week, it seemed that they wanted me to do that because they couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of reactivating my account themselves.

I’m not sure if they saw my post here (I doubt it) or if the person in the helpdesk spoke to their manager about my account but I was very surprised and pleased to receive an email from an Azoogle Affiliate Manager today apologising for the support I have received so far.

The affiliate manager explained that since I opened my account (in 2006) they have changed a lot of their sign up requirements so they made the decision to make older affiliates who weren’t active sign up again. I can kind of understand this process as it undoubtedly saves them a lot of time though I do think that they should reactivate an account right away if an affiliate requests it.

That being said, I need to give some kudos to them for contacting me and reactivating my account. I value customer support a lot so I am pleased that my initial view of their support team seems to be wide of the mark; and hopefully I can make some good money through them.

Someone from their affiliate team also spoke to me on msn for 30 minutes explaining what they do, how they support affiliates and advice on what offers to target etc. I might test out some of their offers and build some mini sites around them. Could be a few months until traffic comes in and I can see what is converting well; then I can optimise the site.

Anyway, glad I can try Azoogle out now as most of the top affiliates use them

I’ve been doing a bit of research into PPC marketing recently. I have promoted affiliate products for close to 10 years now but I have mostly did this through websites rather than just landing pages and PPC marketing.

So I tried to sign up to Azoogle Ads 2 weeks ago to see what offers were there I could promote. After completing the whole sign in form I was told that I had already signed up and my account was locked. I contacted them and more than 10 days later was told that it was locked because I hadn’t been active with them and I would have to resubmit again.

Since I had already went through the whole registration process only to be told I couldn’t sign up with the email address (which I use for all my affiliate accounts) I asked if they could just activate the account I already had. Another day or so later I was told:

As it has been a fairly long time since you have used your account we do need you to reapply.
Please use another email address than one that would link you to your old account and we can change it later.

This is complete bullshit in my opinion. Their support team just can’t be bothered unlocking my account so they want me to go through the whole registration process again, sign up with a different email address and then contact them to ask them to change my email address. Do I really want to go through all that only to be told that they can’t do it and I would just have to use the new account. Their support team didn’t even have the balls to reply with a name, they just ended each email with ‘Thank you, AZOOGLE HELP’.

I had heard good things about Azoogle but this experience has soured my opinion of them. If that’s the way they treat new affiliates they can stick their network as far as I’m concerned. I really have no time for companies who can’t be bothered to help their clients. I have no idea what their general support is like but this kind of thing is usually a good indication of the support you can expect so I’m going to save myself some hassle and work with an affiliate company who wants to work with me.

UPDATE:

Azoogle send apology and reactivate my account

A few days later after I wrote this post an affiliate manager from Azoogle contacted me and apologised for the poor support I received. They also reactivated my account. Follow the link above to read more