I've been using CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale for over a year now and I've become drawn to CJ more and more just because of their user interface, reports, and ease of use. Sure Linkshare and Shareasale have good merchants, heck even Kolimbo and Performics have some good/big name merchants. But it seems that CJ is just better overall. More of their merchants offer deep linking, custom linking (link to any page or product), and their merchants seem to be more on top of things and have more promotions. Does it seem that way to anyone else? Linkshare doesn't seem to respond to inquiries almost at all, and Shareasale seems to not have a good back end for merchants. Overall I get a smaller conversion rate with Linkshare and Shareasale than I do with CJ. I know this is totally dependant on the merchants and how we market them, but I have a wide variety of merchants will all of our affiliate managers and CJ performs best. I really like the search feature with CJ, I can search all my affiliates for a certain banner size, or search all merchants for a certain product, or narrow it down to just my merchants. It saves a lot of time. With Shareasale you have to find the merchant who might have more than 4 banners, and then scroll through a huge page to find the size you want, if they even have it. Linkshare takes way too many clicks just to get to a product link on any merchant. Does it seem to anyone else that CJ merchants perform better than Linkshare, Shareasale, Kolimbo, Performics (very hard to deep link), ClixGalore, etc.? I'm not talking about PPC campaigns or CPA, or CPM, just product promotion. You have a website and link to products with either text links or ads and a sale is what gets you money, not just a click or impressions.
I do like CJ a lot more. But maybe I'm a little biased towards CJ because I used to work for them. Overall, I do like CJ better. I get a lot more sales through linkshare, but that's simply because of the way I have my site setup. If I wanted to do a bigger push for sales through CJ, I could. I think it's an easier interface to use for CJ as well.
Yeah, I'd like to hear from someone who thinks there is a better interface than CJ. Because I'd like to know the reasons why. Maybe I just haven't found the right links/sections on shareasale or linkshare. I tried getting deep linking (individual product links) enabled for a merchant on Linkshare, but they said with the way Linkshare was setup, they couldn't do it. They also said they were working on it, but I haven't heard back from them in months. Which affiliate manager service is easiest for merchants? Anyone know?
Do you trust affiliate managed programs? I cannot believe I have 140 targetted clickthroughs 26,570 impressions and zero commission from an affiliate program.
How targeted are we talking? I get about 1400 Highly targeted clicks(sales pages with good info on what they are clicking) on about 7000 uniques a month and am just now breaking the 1k/month with CJ. I can also say i have a few celebrity sites with CJ, and over the past 4 months have has over 4 million page views, 500 clicks and not one conversion. The people there just are not buyers. So now i go with CPM. To answer the original question in this post. CJs manager is the best, it has way more options than any other system out there. Deep linking is often as easy as choosing the product and they link to the right page. I hate cj's extended locked system. I have things from april still in extended... not sure if i will ever get them paid out.
I prefer ShareASale followed by Linkshare followed by CJ. CJ closes accounts when you have 6 months inactivity.
Totally agree... I am only with CJ and Linkshare although I've registered with few other sites that I just don't know how to start with them! CJ's management is much better ... plus... I am making more with them ... so..
I think linkshare is a king, i am using all 3 CJ, LS, SaS as an advertiser i am not satisfy with shareasale results alot of traffic but zero conversion, cj and linkshare almost same conversion ratio but I don’t like reporting of cj its so complex plus we cant apply PPC rules for affiliates on cj its to bad.