Hi, Anyone else believe that they're being ripped off by CJ or Hobbytron.com? I've got the same traffic and CTR as this time last year. I was making $300 per month then, yet now I'm down to $2.00 for this month. Not bad for an 800 page site with 2200 inlinks, huh? I'm sure that someone isn't playing by the rules. I'm packing up the CJ sites and moving to siteowner administered affiliate programs. I just don't trust CJ anymore. Here's some of my new pages: Aussie Blues Marijuana Seeds, Californian Skunk Marijuana Seeds, Afghan Marijuana Seeds.
1. I'd trust CJ more than a siteowner administered program. Contact CJ about the issue, and ask them to do test transactions or to verify that nothing odd is going on. 2. WTF does Marijuana seeds have to do with CJ?
There are cases of merchants cheating the publishers out of commissions by abusing tracking, reversals, etc. However after awhile (and after complaints) CJ will take action. These types of things are not in CJ's best interest since the majority of it's income is generated by a percentage of the sales/commissions from the advertiser. If those numbers are inaccurate then it is completely in the best interest of CJ to take action. Though drops like that could mean you need to change up your marketing, put new ad copy up or links, and perhaps do some revamping to your site.
Hi Johu, Yes, it's all a matter of trust. I'm not good with that one, but I'll take your advice and ask CJ if they can help. Very sorry about the links. They should have been in my tag line. I was just feeling a bit disheartened and lazy, but I'll sort that one out before I post like that again. Respect.
don't bother contacting CJ, they just refer you to the affiliate in question (happens every time with me). Then you'll contact the affiliate and they'll ignore your emails.
If CJ gets multiple complaints, they will perform tests to make sure all code is working. After all, if the tracking pixels don't show up, CJ doesn't get their 30% cut of your commissions... What advertiser are you talking about?
Well I would test it myself? If you place an order for a specific item, or somehow distinguish your order can you not see if it comes up as received? Obviously this will only work depending on the merchant etc. but its then some proof to show cj if you find a problem?
CJ isn't screwing anybody. Occasionally, pixel or tracking problems appear with certain merchants, but nobody is intentionally being screwed. All companies involved are under legally binding agreements to pay commissions earned. A publicly traded company like ValueClick has nothing to gain by screwing people, and neither do merchants. Remember - if affiliates see tracking issues, they won't send sales to the merchant anymore. Everybody loses.
Well, I had a word to the guys at CJ about my problems. They seem to think that all my links are working okay, and they promised me that they regularly check on merchants just to make sure. They also had one other suggestion to make, which was that the source of my traffic might be an issue. I'm tending to agree with that explanation. Most of my aff site traffic comes from image search results for some reason. I'm now getting hardly any text search referrals. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone that may have had a similar issue, and to hear if or how they solved it. I'm open to any suggestions as to how I can get additional, more targeted text search traffic. Link building seems to have failed for me, and I'm not so sure I'm not under some sort of Google aff penalty!
Try BlueHatSeo, seo theroy (I am not affiliated with either - just damn good reading ) Last xmas I managed to get the main picture in google under "presents" to be the one hosted on mine - added 2000 people a day to my wordpress review blog that was gettin 40...doesnt count as a real hit imo. peace...