I was doing really great with a program of mine, I logged in this morning noticing that my figures were stuck at the numbers I had seen the day before and, what do you know, I go to my landing page, check the links and they are disabled. Thank god it was just a night worth of PPC wasted, but still very frustrating. Even considering that I didn't get no notice or warning whatsoever. Now I'll have to look into what made them shut the links down.. Has this ever happened to you?
CJ has never disabled my links but Linkshare cut me off from an entire "channel" (one that is very important to me) and I only received attention from Linkshare when I complained on another affiliate forum. This problem went on for about 4 days (in terms of being aware of the problem -- the problem might have occurred over a couple of weeks without me realizing it). I wondered why my tracker cited traffic but nothing was happening with my Linkshare links. I found out that there was a big problem when I tested links and when I created links that would only go to localhost/error.html -- frustration is too sweet a word to describe how I felt. The "Linkshare Moderator" said that my account had been "voluntarily deactivated" -- wow! What a lie that was I called Linkshare support and left a message on their machine three times. I am in compliance with all of their rules, they did not have a valid reason to cut me off. No one from Linkshare had the courtesy to return my phone calls. I finally noticed that my links returned to normal but then a merchant e-mailed me to complain about inactivity. I e-mailed back an account of what Linkshare had done (due to their system, I have 2 accounts and they disabled my main one --unbelievable! I have been an affiliate with them since 1999) and I asked, "How can I be active if none of my links work?" CJ has never disabled my accounts or my links. I think it's a good idea to "cover oneself" by affiliating with multiple merchants across networks: I belong to CJ, LS, and SAS. It's lousy to disable any affiliate's links [if the affiliate has been in compliance with the program(s)] but it is really awful to disable an affiliate who engages in PPC marketing (unless the affiliate has done something against the TOS).
By disabled links, I mean that my aff links led to a CJ error page. I still have recieved no response about what happened. Links started working back the day after but I'd rather not continue advertising that program until I get someone telling me exactly what happened and assuring me it won't happen again. I am generally disappointed by CJ lately, anyway.. So I'd rather concentrate on my shareasale programs