Two advertisers have confirmed it via email. Lead reporting through Commission Junction has been negatively affected by recent changes.

From LowerMyBills.com:

On Friday our analysts discovered a discrepancy between the leads generated for our Home Equity product and the leads being tracked in CJ.

From Savings.com:

As many of you already know, CJ has been experiencing technical problems post their deployment yesterday. CJ has assured us that they are working to fix the problem as quickly as possible. We understand that many of you cannot see any transaction data within your Savings.com program; unfortunately, this problem is completely out of our hands. Please note, we have been assured by CJ that they will be able to properly credit each of you shortly.

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that there is no mention of this in the Commission Junction Account Manager. Anyone? It seems there is no news or information for CJ to report other than how to use Javascript links.

Today at Revenews, Beth Kirsch outlines Commission Junction’s Link Management Initiative specifically for Affiliate Managers. She is head of the affiliate program for LowerMyBills.com, a highly successful CJ merchant, and has so far reserved judgment on the switch to Javascript as the network’s default link format. In today’s post she asks the critical question of who benefits from LMI, if not the merchants or affiliates?

By not answering the question, the answer is obvious. If you are an affiliate and you don’t like the mandatory infliction of Javascript on your websites, please send Beth’s post to all of the appropriate affiliate program managers.

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. (more…)

Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their trouble-laden CPC network, Adsense. The new Google advertising program, called the Content Referral Network, will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead form. This differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click on the ad. Despite their best efforts, this fraud opportunity methodology lead to thousands of webmasters trying to game the system.

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

(more…)

Beth Kirsch is the Director of Marketing for a powerhouse CJ advertiser, Lowermybills.com. Today on Revenews, she reveals the dirt on CJ’s Link Management Initiative and how it creates one of the largest user-behaviour monitoring systems on the internet. Once laid out, it is easy to see why ValueClick would want the traffic data of 68% of the people on the internet.

Mind-boggling isn’t it? As CJ affiliates and ValueClick publishers, we manage to reach the long tail of over two thirds of all internet traffiic. What company wouldn’t want to have that influx of data? By switching us all to javascript, they get it for free. Bargain of the century, I’d say– all it costs is a few noisy troublemaking affiliates that don’t want to put in a few hours of work to change link types.

Read the details and sign Scott Jangro’s petition to block the mandatory use of Javascript links.

Three separate times during the first CJU podcast describing the upcoming network changes, the hosts said that they realize how much work it will be for search publishers to comply with the new Link Management Initiative. Here is my response: It isn’t that we’re lazy, we honestly think this is a bad idea.

Sure, you’re giving publishers plenty of time to make the switch, but it isn’t about the time required. With my database-driven sites and product feeds, I can make the change faster than most; I won’t have to search-and-replace anything. The fact is that I will choose NOT to make this switch. It will be easier for me and better for my sites and the user experience if I look to other merchants and other networks that will still provide links in the proper format of the web (1.0 and 2.0) — and that is HTML. I listened to the entire podcast waiting to hear one benefit to me or my users… these are the best reasons they gave as to why they are making the switch and the benefits I, as an affiliate, might gain from it:

(more…)

While not as talked about as the big players, niche comparison engines create a significant amount of price-driven traffic and sales. Sites like www.findcontactlenses.com and www.healthpricer.com offer a more focused shopping experience than the large malls but they do not have the same ability to negotiate independent affiliate relationships as the major sites. Often these smaller companies rely on affiliate networks to provide them with datafeeds and to track their sales.

The 800-lb. Gorilla of the affiliate network arena, Commission Junction, sent out an email to all of it’s affiliates on Wednesday evening, and the policy updates outlined therein may have a chilling impact on smaller comparison engines that rely on the network to monetize their traffic. In the email, CJ alerted affiliates that in the upcoming year, all websites displaying the network’s links will have to do so using javascript to call the link remotely from CJ’s servers. What does this mean for the vertical comparison engines? (more…)

Congratulations to Commission Junction* for reaching a massive milestone in affiliate marketing. Somewhere between 3 and 5 AM PST on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006, Commission Junction logged it’s 500,000,000th transaction. Half a billion affiliate sales is quite an amazing task; if more than half were credited to the right affiliate, we’ll consider it a gift.

If you do some quick calculations on your own transaction IDs you can see that the volume they do is rather impressive. Over the average of the month (9 million in April), it appears to be about 200 transactions per minute. I’ve seen rates as high as 1000 transactions per minute on a Monday morning. (more…)

Three easy words: type of traffic

Are your visitors browsers or buyers? With Adsense and other programs that pay you per impression or per click, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to care what your visitor does after clicking the ad. Do they buy the product or not? It doesn’t matter– you’ll get paid either way.

With affiliate programs the obvious difference is that it matters what happens after the visitor clicks on the ad. It isn’t enough to have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) you must also have sales conversions after the clicks. Does the visitor purchase the product or not? Your income depends on that purchase. So what can you to do make sure the visitor does buy from the advertising merchant? Two things:

1) Pre-sell: since you are marketing a certain product or retailer with your affiliate links, you already know what products will appear in the ads. That is a huge advantage over Adsense and other “blind” ad servers that try and pick out what works best on your site. As an affiliate marketer, you choose the products to sell. With that advantage, you can pre-sell the visitor on the products. Make it natural! Nothing is worse for conversions than obvious over-the-top sales copy. You’ll have much better results with a mild, friendly sell pushed lightly on your visitors. Become their friend and tell them that you’ve had trouble with other products in the past, but this one is excellent…. [insert affiliate link here]

2) Change your type of traffic: target buyers and not browsers. With Adsense, and ole web surfer will do– the less savvy the better. However with affiliate marketing you need traffic that is ready to buy. They should have a credit card (this makes age important) and be one step from using it. How do you get buyers? Target buying keyphrases…

buy [productname]

discount [productname]

[productname] reviews

cheap [productname]

[productname] free shipping

Combinations like that indicate that the visitor is ready to buy. Perfect for an affiliate marketer.