Performa Network Admins - Are You SURE Older Forgotten 'Custom Rates' Aren't Hemorrhaging Money?

Is it just me?  ...or are upstream campaign sources raising and lowering campaign lead rates more often on us lately?

Anyways, one particular lead rate decrease got me thinking hard.  The lead rate was cut by about half.  I merrily went to my publisher rate lowered it, notified my publishers,and then took a nap.  I used to consider 'custom rates' 'set it and forget it'

Days later I got curious about custom rates I had entered manually and was shocked to discover on that one campaign that my bumped rate was 20 cents higher than what the source of the campaign was giving me for each lead !?!

I've been in the network business for years now and all this time I hadn't even considered the possibility of something like that happening !?@     I had thought all along that I had all my bases covered and I had it all down pat by now - but this threw me a curve-ball ;-)

Manual Rate Bumps are static - they don't ever change for anything unless you go in and change them.

That's why I've become a firm believer in using the global campaign 'Rate Increase' for those publishers you wish to 'bump' for one reason of another.  Yes, it effectively bumps ALL your campaigns (except the ones you already have manually bumped) but the grace in using this is that it will adjust up and down when you change the publisher rate on the campaigns and it will NEVER issue a rate over and above what you are getting from your source.

When you routinely use the manual rate bump method then when you make rate changes to a campaign then 1) you have to make sure to check any Custom Rates, 2) calculate and change them when needed, 3) notify the publisher (manually) - all of which never even dawned on me all this time ;-)   Hmmm... I'm left  wondering how many times in the past had I been giving my money away like this without being conscious of it? (lol)

I wrote this post for the benefit of others (like me) who it hasn't yet dawned upon (I wish I had seen a post like this back when I opened my network)

Benefits to Using 'Rate Increase' versus individual manual 'Custom Rates':

• Affects all campaigns that have an 'advertiser rate' set but is based upon the 'publisher rate' (some may consider using rate increase a drawback because it does affect ALL campaigns)
  
• Rates automatically increase and decrease based upon the publisher rate (one setting to change)
  
• Rest assured that the increased rates will NEVER pay over what the advertiser is paying you per lead (a biggie)
  
• Publisher get's the added benefit of his/her rates increasing in a more predictable way when the publisher rate is changed higher. Also, no additional individual rate change notification is needed only the publisher should check the rate any time the publisher rate is reported to have changed.
  
• Network admin isn't subjected to increased workload of manually looking up the target publisher's web site numbers, calculating the increase, entering the increase, and notifying each target publisher manually.