Commission Junctions really SUCKS

Well , I registered with CJ Because i only want to buy hosting and domain service , I don't want to be an affiliate marketer.
Buy it through CJ save more than 50% to buy it directly (Like IPower , Netfirms)
Some Package of Netfirms is $180/year and pay commission $115 (Netfirms allowed CJ publisher to buy their services)

 

I promote eBay (and vBulletin) via cj, and have got a warning for inflated clicks/traffic/transations. I have only had listings on my website, and have not specifically tried to promote the pages apart from search engine listings. No newsletters, ....

So far this month - 2k clicks on 87k impressions = 2.65%, then under $50 commission. 13k unique visitors. Ranking high on many search terms.
The impressions seem reasonable, the clicks are a similar percentage to my adsense clicks. Nothing seems a problem.

The forum happens to be my own, and one that is registered on the cj account.

I have no way of knowing who is coming onto my site, and no way of controlling who clicks through. If I knew an ip address that was causing trouble, I could ban that ip from the forum, but cj are not interested in letting me know what ip address is the issue. People are able to block referrers via firefox, or using a bot.... I personally dont want to ban people from the forum just because they have no referer, although I suppose I could ban such people from the site via htaccess. That would be banning people that came direct to the site via a bookmark etc. I am not going to do that!!!

How can I be responsible for my end users. The traffic comes via the search engines, I dont happen to have much of a community on the site for me to be able to be in any way "responsible".

Surely it is cj that can filter out bad clicks. And anyway, I am not paid per click, I am paid per sale. So I really have no idea what this is all about!!!

Commission Junction are being in my view totally unreasonable. They want to hold back $ for wrong traffic, when I am not paid for traffic, but for sales. Total stupidity!!!!!

I will be interested in seeing the resolution of this.

 

That is pretty damn ridiculous... all over $50 in commissions? I could see if you were owed quite a sum they would want to check it over, but seriously... I don't know how they expect you to be responsible for user clicks.

>>3. Explain why several of your clicks are not registering any referring urls.

hahah this sounds like a question from someone with about 2 months HTML experience. Umm.. some browsers, proxies, and ISPs turn off the 'referer' header. Duh.

 

Utter stupidity as far as I can see.

Now they are wondering about the tracking I do for the vbulletin affiliate links - and I have only had 12 clicks in total for April/May.

But I am not paid for clicks! I am paid for sales. Duh!!!!

 

You must be ruining some merchant's EPC. I got the boot from a famous loan program 3 weeks after joining because I was dragging the program EPC down and they might have lost their top spot.

All in all, quite asinine of them. I hope you get it resolved. Maybe you can ask them for the IP so you can ban it... or start funnelling your click traffic through an intermediate script so you can track it yourself.

 

Yes, I asked for the ip address in my first email.

I actually removed the footer ad for vbulletin from my site ages ago since I got so few click throughs from it. I get better conversions from my targeted pages. So my ratios became lots better.

But given that ebay pay so well, I try and promote them heaps. Just a pity that the conversion percentages are so low. But just when I start getting traffic from Google, and some ebay $, cj start complaining.

And all about less than $50.

 

I Attend to agree with you , CJ never pays me even $2 commission from netfirms domain

 

The more I looked into it, and debated with cj, the more it looked like any clicks via the javascript had no referer being noted.

I tried to access the javascript directly by putting the url into the browser, but that did not show the javascript. Since the only way any url's are shown for the ebay listings is by access to the javascript, I am not sure that it could have been accessed via a bot of any sort, at least not easily.

I had had a number of emails with cj on the issue, then when I mentioned that probably no referer was coming through because it was accessed via the ebay javascript, I got no email reply. So my hope is that the issue has been resolved.

I will know for sure when/if I get paid. Keep you posted.

 

t2dman.. how did this all pan out? You still using ebay/cj?

hanji

 

Part of the t&c's of CJ is that you don't quote correspondence .

So I got booted when they saw this thread. Rather sux, but they had booted me anyway. Without community involvement, I considered I had no way of finding out what was happening. Not the nicest guys at CJ when you happen to get on their wrong side.

 

Tough break, T2D. Not that it was a windfall of income for you, but it shuts the door on future possibilities. I almost got the boot a few months ago because some chowderhead had clicked through a PPC link and submitted dozens of fake leads. Even though I've been 5-bar for over a year, they were going to boot me for a few hundred bucks in fake leads that were painfully obvious. I get the feeling that if I weren't an earner with them I would've been kicked out without a second glance (much like the Adsense QC gestapo).

 

5-bar? How/where do you get that information? I'm curious how many bars I'm running with.

Thanks!
hanji

 

On your "home" screen, in the upper right, you will see Performance Level. The first stat is your green bar level. They do it with vague 5-step rankings like this so they don't have to show actual numbers, but the mark for 5-bar is usually around 2.5k/mo in commissions... same way that they rate advertisers with 1 to 5 bars based on their amount of commissions paid each month.

 

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm still showing 'new', but I'm sure I have a long long ways before I get any ranking there. I've only been a CJ member for 2 months now.. but have $180 in commissions so far.

hanji