CJ: It Wasn’t Broken and It Isn’t Fixed

Since there is no longer an official Commission Junction forum, this post will serve as a central collection point for issues raised by the introduction of LMI and Javascript links. This entry will change as new issues appear so be sure to refresh the page on each visit.

LMI: Things That Will Never Be Fixed

• Users that browse with Javascript disabled. A small percentage of web browsers turn off Javascript and will never see the affiliate links. Instead of a text link on a page, users with Javascript disabled will only see a blank hole. This is neither good for your user experience or conversion rate. Just how many users have Javascript turned off is up for debate and it depends on your website’s audience. There are two major services that publish browser statistics, W3Schools and TheCounter. An average of their results (serving millions of page views) would suggest 8% of your users will never see your affiliate links if you switch to Javascript.

While changing over a large affiliate site to Javascript links may seem like a lot of work, you may be rewarded with an 8% pay cut.

• Search Engine Robots do not index Javascript text. The crawlers responsible for indexing affiliate pages in the search engines only see blank space when presented with Javascript text. Be sure not to include any important words in your link text if you choose this link type because it will not show up for the search engines.

• Additional load time. Even with the fastest and most well-distributed network of servers and even if all of your users are on broadband (they aren’t), Javascript links will present an additional load time when compared to traditional HTML links. Regardless of how little data must be transferred, one additional HTTP request must be made for each Javascript link that appears on the page. If your normal page has 1 HTML file, 1 CSS file, and 4 images, that is a total of 6 HTTP requests for each page loaded. If you have that same page and put 10 Javascript links or banners on it, each browser must make 16 HTTP requests to load one page. Whether or not the CJ Javascript servers could handle a mass deployment has yet to be seen as no external beta-testing was performed before release.

• Javascript form links are incompatible with ASP.net. Because most ASP.net pages are forms themselves, and you cannot include one form within another, the Javascript links are, by design, incompatible.

• Javascript form links are incompatible with AJAX. Writing a Javascript link to innerHTML seems impossible. Post solutions below if they exist.

• Affiliates can no longer use in-house click tracking software. When using web-standard HTML links, affiliates are able to route clicks through internal scripts to monitor their own site performance. By necessitating a Javascript form post, interrupting the click to track it internally is no longer possible and affiliates will be unable to generate useful internal statistics.

Update: Scott Jangro has posted a method here where he breaks apart the Javascript form in order to do a redirect. We’ll have to hear from CJ on whether this is an acceptable procedure.

LMI: Things That Should Be Fixed

• Javascript links insert a carriage return. The text or banner should be on the same line as the Javascript link but in Firefox, it is not.

• Lack of text link Title tags. Mouseover any Javascript text link and you are greeted with “null”.

• Lack of image banner Alt tags. Mouseover any Javascript image banner and you are greeted with “null”.

• Lack of status bar Mouseover text. Mouseover any Javascript link and your browser will show Javascript text in the window.status bar.

• Links are difficult to insert into blogs. I’m a full-time web developer and I couldn’t figure it out after 10 minutes. Am I slow or are the instructions vague? Many types of content management systems strip out or change tags like <script>.

• Links may be impossible to insert into forum posts. You cannot post Javascript links using a vBulletin forum / CMS. Many affiliates use these types of forum-front page setups to power coupon or deal sites. They are unable to post links using their system and CJ’s Javascript.

Sources for this article include: Scott Jangro.

See also: The Affiliate’s Petition to Block The Mandatory Roll-out of LMI

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