Commission Junction

Is anyone using Commission Junction? I signed on as part of the eBay affiliate program recently. Anyone having luck with this? Are there particular advertisers that are better than others? Any suggestions.

Thanx.

 

They are alright, I have been having problems with LinkShare though.

CJ and Be Free are the same company now and merging the two accounts is hard to figure out.

I question all these outfits any more, LinkShare seems to be the worst of all of them.

 

I'm interested to know what problems people are having with Linkshare. I find Linkshare to be my most profitable partner, mainly because of Overstock (and their free in-house datafeed), which generates 90%+ of my income. I am irritated that they still charge for their datafeeds though, as there are other merchants I'd like to get feeds for, but haven't yet ponied up the dough to get You woul dthink Linkshare would realize free access to datafeeds would make them more money than the setup fee they charge.

I also do very well with BeFree, though with that partner, my success is more widespread and not limited to just 1 or 2 main affiliates like Linkshare. I do well with BestBuy, SmartBargains, HSN, and a few others.

Commission Junction has me confused and suspicious. Over the last year, I have been sending more and more traffic and generating less and less sales and less and less income. This time last year, I was averaging a sale a day through their network. Now I'm sending double the traffic and am averaging a sale every 5 days. I think there's something going on with parasites or spyware blockers or something wiping out CJ cookies. Who knows. Anyway, something seems to be going on and no one there can explain it.

Performics has always been in a distant fourth place, though it's been improving lately. They have some good, powerful brands there.

I signed up with ShareASale, but they don't really have any first-tier, brand recognizable merchants, so I've yet to do anything with them.

I've yet to figure out the whole CJ/BeFree merger thing. They seem to be keeping them as seperate programs. I hope they don't do away with the BeFree system. I imagine all my BeFree sales would evaporate the way my CJ sales have done if they pull BeFree into the CJ system.

Universally, I find support to be horrible across all the affiliate management companies. Hard to get contact information, hard to find a phone number, hnext to impossible to speak to a real, live person. CJ is the best, in that they will get back to you, though it takes them 2-3 days. If you are having a problem though, and want immediate help, you are going to be out of luck with ANY of them.

 

Ive been using CJ over six months now and the return is so far good. Theyre support is ok to me. 20% of my overall income come from CJ.

 

My income roughly breaks down to about:

20% AdSense
40% Linkshare (90% of that being Overstock)
10% CJ
10% Performics
20% BeFree

 

Very interesting to see everyone's income broken out by network. Although to some degree you will make more on the networks you focus on the most. Most of the programs we manage are on CJ and several are Indies.

Wow Shawn I know you are making LOTS with the one Linkshare program but you are making even more with CJ programs. Congrats!!!

FYI I made LOTS of the changes you suggested to my site and just got rid of all the stars and cut down on some copy. Is it looking better than it did before?

 

I agree, I like the backend.. It is just hard to figure out what programs are going to work on a McCoy Pottery specific information site

 

We are helping a jewelry site out and CJ declined to help as they had enough jewelry sites. So we are going with Linkshare. Refreshing to see a company be responsible enough to turn down money.

 

I think cj sucks , or least the affilates I tried

 

I've actually been very happy with them. The reporting seems a bit off at times, but for the most part it has worked out quite well.

 

Bigoak...I think the real answer might have more to do with the current state of online jewelry sales -- do they have too many programs? Maybe. Is CJ making enough off of the advertisers to warrant another advertiser? Maybe not.

Another solution to look into, if Linkshare doesn't work out, is to create a custom solution to track everything. A client of mine ended up doing this and keeps much more of the pie...great for long-term.

Cygnus

 

IQshop is right about the cookies being deleted, many PC users delete their cookies daily with freeware software like "Cookie Monster", so you lose a lot of money that way I would bet.

Plus CJ canceled my account without notification a while back yet their ads were still on our pages for months, yet no credit was coming our way.

They are stealing millions of dollars in many different ways, you can count on that.

 

I had a loan site that get maybe 5 to 10 leads a day

I use a seamless integrated style affilate

but me being the greedy crack head I am, saw that some crooks over at cj paid like twice as much as the affialte I work with

So I was like 'hell yeah' sign me up, think of all the malt liquer I culd buy with the extra money. I figured since the seamless thing seems to work

So I did a quick redesign of my site, and made it look just like landing the page

Well I quickly went from 5-10 loans a day to 1 loan a day, but HEY I get paid twice as much for that one loan. So maybe it wasn't that bad.

Its probably the advertiser, but I tried a second affilate in there and pretty much the same thing happend.

 

I think the key to sucess with CJ is having lots of affiliates and lots of sites that convert at a high ratio to the impressions the site gets. My CTR is extremely high and I convert quite well. I employ about 35 affiliates/advertisers across multiple sites. My two best sites see about 2 in 5 click throughs converting to a sale/lead which almost always equals a commission. One site in particular sees around 5 signups/sales per day.

I only go for the high pay outs, and very rarely mess with the percentage of a sale based payouts. I go for purely subscription based payouts, or sales that convert at a flat rate per sale, vs. a percentage.

Your mileage may vary I guess.

 

CJ has been good to me in the past ...

only comment I can make is that a few of their advertisers all of a sudden decide to jump ship and you need to figure out where they went and then have to hunt down their code within your pages.

I have been surprised though with income from selling posters .... go figure

 

I do best with CJ for vendors in my niche': CheaperThanDirt and GunBroker.

I threw eBay ads into most of my google_alternate_ad_url fields. That seemed to work for one month, and then it sort of petered out.

I'll probably write a script soon to randomize my google_alternate_ad_url values to a set of CJ banners.

Or possibly I shouldn't worry about CJ too much, as AdSense provides 82% of my revenue.

 

I get next to nothing from CJ.
But, I do get a few dollars from BeFree a month.
Pretty sad, huh?

 

Hi Mia, I started using CJ couple of months back. Being straightforward to tell, I have a blog where I write anything I feel, and on that blog, I hosted all those CJ ads. Now I know its all cluttered there, (but it was for testing which is beneficial and now I would keep only selected there) ...

ok so point to tell you is, CJ is working gr8 for me. Many of the visitors actually click those ads. I had started this thread long back to share my first considerable sale from CJ ads. Its here...
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=10255

I made around $20 that time.