CJ Sales Tracking

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know the timeframe from the time a click happens to the time it turns to a sale? I have a Highly targeted website with a CTR above 20% and have sent over 100 clicks to a few select affiliates that I am promoting. These clicks all come from search results looking for the product in question. Now I have been racking up the clicks for about 1 month but none are turning to sales. I know the visiters are targeted and want the product so why are they not converting.

As a test I have a friend who works as a inbound call center sales rep for one of my affiliates. My friend reffers people to these types of affiliate websites all day and I asked him to send a user to my site and have him sign up. He did this for me by bringing the user to my site and having them click the affiliate link and sign up on the CJ page. My friend then signed up the user for the product completing the sale. This happend 2 weeks ago and I have yet to see the sale show on my CJ page. This to me seams real crappy as I know with absolute certainty that I have had at least one sale.

Anyone have any tips or advice about tracking CJ stuff as to me it seams to not track the sales properly.

Thanks for any advice
TGO

 

It really does depend. Some advertisers go through a 'bulk update' which means you won't see any results until that update is performed, which could be once a day / week, bi-monthly, whatever it happens to be.

 

Check if The Advertiser has batch process, normally they don't has:

Batch Process Transactions: No

(check at description)

But it should not get so longer. Normally if it do not use batch process it can take 3-5 hours to have the sale registered.

its easy to 100 clicks do not convert in any sale.

And regarding your test is impossible to be sure that an indication of your friend did a sale using your site.

 

Thanks guys,

I just checked the Batch Process Transactions and they are set to "no" so I guess they just havent reported the sales.

My site is broadbandrates.info and is quite targeted, users are usualy searching for a provider when they land on my page. Should not 129 targeted clicks result in at least 1 sale?

Just wondering how some other players in this market can pay $5.00+ a click on adwords with not so nice of a site. Anyways I shall chug on. Hope to see a sale come out of this.

 

is very easy to have 129 clicks and no sale - Verizon and Qwest has a good EPC history in CJ if their script was wrong their EPC would not be one of the best in CJ network.

Very true, The way that your site is now is looks very nice targeted - you explain very well the purpose of the links before send it to the broadband advertises.

Maybe you just do not had luck enough until now - maybe you need to reevaluated the advertises after 1000 clicks only - sometimes the emotional waiting destruct a nice business.

I am a AdWords pure user and yes sometimes we pay $5,00 per click and yes it worth!

But worth to pay for the search clicks - and maybe is a good idea to try drive some very target traffic users to your site.

 

Well the problem with that click tracking could have been a cookie issue - 3rd party cookies blocked on the users machine - or an ad blocking, anti-spyare software or firewall issue that blocked the cookies from tracking.

Occasionally merchants don't track. The tracking pixel got removed by accident during an upgrade or something.

Most CJ sales track within 24 hours even when they get really backed up - unless like others have said it's a batch merchant.

 

The tracking pixel is not a issue for sale tracking - it is only used to track impressions and calculate the CTR - At least of my advertises.

I can tell that due I use Adwords Search network to direct traffic to the the advertiser site and Is impossible to use the tracking pixel code there so I discard it.

The result is that I get every day is something like (from CJ stats):

0 impressions
N/A CTR
60 clicks
2 Sales

from 7 different advertises.

 

The tracking pixel HAS to be on the merchants check out page in the cart for CPA based programs. That's the only way for the merchant to pass the cost of the sale that was made. So if that tracking pixel is removed or corrupt the sale won't track.

 

Thanks guys,

I had no idea about a tracking pixel, is this in the code that they provide? I edit that code slightly adding a title, alt and CSS Class to the image link. All impressions are counted as far as I can tell.

Just yesterday a page on the site got DIGG'd bringing 4k users to a sales page creating well over 3k clicks to the affiliate. Still no sale. I dont expect much from the digg as its not as targeted as the regular SE traffic.

Anyway I will report on the next few weeks let you know if anything comes of this. I honestly thought i had a good affiliate website that encuraged the use of the services and could make me some cash for promoting them. I am new to this affiliate game and have only played around with PPC with google.

Edit - Ok just checked through some of the other text links. I found text links do have a small pixel image that is used to track impressions. All my pages have 1 banner image, and 1 text link. This text link is just edited to have text and not a image, its just taken from the image banner code but changed to text. Would this cause problems? If so it may be the reason I am not getting sales. The image for the link is displayed as a banner on every page there is a text link but the image link is not always clicked. Clicks do track, I have over 3k from digg. Does that tracking code not work without a distinct image associated with that link.

 

What I was referring to is a tracking pixel MERCHANTS need to put on their checkout page. You said the test click did not track and said you thought CJ was not tracking so I said it could have been a problem on the merchant side or a cookie tracking problem.

As far as the code you gave control over and place on your site - most programs including CJ (I think) say if you alter the code at all the tracking may not work. I know some affiliates do change the code but they are technical enough to know what to change - I'm not real sure about that part.

 

Sorry, I understood that was about the pixel code for the publisher side.

 

I am a little agravated with CJ for this reason as well. I have a PS3 site that I am using one of CJ's banners "free ps3" that pays a dollar or so per lead.

On the CJ details page it says all that is needed for the lead to pay is an email address. Well I had a friend enter his email in from half way across the US to see if it would work (and spare the lecture, I'm not trying to steal a dollar from the company, just wanted to see if it worked to know whether to send traffic their way). Well it didn't work, and this person entered their email. I know they did because they told me what the second page looked like.

Anybody have any ideas why it wouldn't pay? By the way, it was atleast a week ago this happened.

 

I hate to keep saying cookie monster ate it - but that could have been it in this case too. If he had 3rd party cookies blocked or some app blocking cookies maybe it would not track? Or could they be a batch upload merchant? Or the merchant could have a tracking problem or CJ could have had a glitch. Its impossible to say.

One affiliate forum I know of has a special place for affiliates to post their test purchase reports. That way if a couple affs post a merchant is not tracking then maybe you question that merchant.

 

Fair enough...

Another thing... Why does it seem that the impressions listed in my stats are much lower then the stats from my own tracking?