What is an Approval Guarantor in COD Offers

Approval guarantor/guarantee — an agreement between the webmaster and the affiliate network that the percentage of confirmed requests in a particular advertising campaign will not fall below a certain value. Used in e-commerce and nutra verticals with COD (Cash-on-Delivery) payment model.

Approve is the stage of the sales funnel in the COD model. After the abandoned application, fixed by a pixel on the “Thank you” page, a call center operator calls a potential buyer. For the order to be considered confirmed, an additional Opt-in is required in the form of the client's consent by phone.

Approval also displays the percentage of confirmed applications and is measured as follows:

Why You Need an Approval Guarantor in COD Offers

A webmaster's earnings when working with COD offers depend on the number of leads and the percentage of their approval. You can generate as many high-quality traffic as you like, but the processing of applications is largely on the side of the advertiser's or affiliate network's call-center employees. This is something that the webmaster almost never has control over.

Call centers develop adaptive scripts and it would seem that employees should apprise customers to the maximum. However, there are a number of factors that, on the contrary, can reduce the number of confirmations and increase the number of trash.

The advertiser pays only for confirmed applications, and his income depends on the average bill. Therefore, it is more profitable for the advertiser to “put pressure” on the client when calling and increase the price of sending and the receipt. Aggressive upsell allows the advertiser to earn more and pay less for applications (thrash and rejects are not paid to the webmaster). That's why literally ALL advertisers at a distance get a little "impudent". The approval guarantee exists, among other things, as a protection mechanism against the impudence of the advertiser.

Use of a guarantor

In order for cooperation between the webmaster and the advertiser to be mutually beneficial, there is a practice of the Approval Guarantee. The parties agree on a fixed amount of confirmed leads: the percentage of approval on the traffic flow will not fall below a certain bar. Most often, the guarantor is fixed within 30-40%.

Regardless of the actual ratio of approvals to total requests, the required ratio should not fall below 40%, provided that the webmaster does not make any changes on his side. The advertiser adapts the call center scripts so that the guarantor is executed.

There is another kind of guarantor, which follows logically from the previous one. If the media buyer continues to generate quality traffic for a long time, the payment model can be changed from COD to CPL (Cost-Per-Lead). This minimizes the risks for the arbitrage specialist, because now he doesn’t have to worry about the approval percentage at all. The offer flow does not change, but the payout is revised (usually the current payout is multiplied by AR and this value is fixed as CPL). The webmaster is no longer worried that the approval may change dramatically due to the fault of the advertiser and continues to maintain the volume. In turn, the advertiser knows that the webmaster will not stop generating requests.

How to get a guarantor

The Approval Guarantor is a compromise that is achieved in the process of cooperation, as a measure of mutually beneficial partnership.

The affiliate network analyzes the current flow of applications from the webmaster and draws a conclusion about the appropriateness of the guarantor. If the traffic gives fewer requests than the average for the offer, then installing a guarantor will be a loss of money. And vice versa: if there are a lot of applications, then the affiliate will not want to lose such traffic in case of problems with the approval. You must become a valuable asset for the affiliate, which she does not want to give away.

Some partner networks indicate the possibility of a guarantor in their announcements and advertisements. But the very fact of its hypothetical existence does not guarantee that this option will be implemented for a particular webmaster. It is necessary to ask and even insist if your performance is stable - no one will give you a guarantor just like that.

Affiliate networks may have clear requirements for obtaining an Approval Guarantor. They may relate to the source of traffic, the amount of traffic determined by the target audience, the number of applications, or the period during which it is necessary to generate the nth number of applications for some time.

Editorial comment AffJournal

When working with in-store or nutra COD offers, you need to know how to minimize risk and potentially increase revenue. The advertiser will never offer you a guarantor himself, and he will never stop trying to increase the average check in any way. 

Today, when working with COD offers, “private” relationships between affiliate programs and webmasters prevail. The public stakes and conditions that beginners start with almost always result in negative math. It is critically important for a webmaster to fight for better conditions.