Most of the new merchants in CJ do not allow directlinking or they will allow and then prohibit after few weeks or after few months. During this 'allowed' time the merchant is quitely gathering aff's keywords their placements and their marketing strategy and then develop in-house team to do the same and cut-off the aff that has done the original hard work. So how to go about having this happen to you? 1) Make sure when direct linking do not use cj's aff link directly - use a free tracking software like tracking 202. This 'hides' all the relevant info to the merchant. 2) Contact the merchant and create a relationship with them if you are starting to get decent number of sales. You'll be surprised that some may be 'flexible' in their policies for DL 'only' for you. 3) Look for merchants that are couple of years old instead of new ones. The olders ones are tried and tested and if they allow DL it means affs have been using them and you need to research more with your KW. I show how to go about doing this in video below, and if you have questions just PM me.
Hello veracious Why do you prefer direct linking vs. creating landing pages? Also, tracking 202.. is that frowned upon? Seems a bit sneaky. Thanks! hanji
Ya if you use direct linking better hide or cloak your link because now have a lot spy tool or spy software will know what you doing , tracking202 are best free tool .
Thanks jjyy2006 for your reply. Yes as far as free tool tracking202 is the best. Yes DL is great to start with and then move to landing pages once you see conversions.
That's not true - most companies use an outside agency or CJ to manage their programs, and don't want affiliates competing with their SEM agencies or bumping their ads. It's usually more efficient for internal/agency search teams to run the primary search campaign than for the merchant to pay more to affiliates. Most teams don't even have the technology in place to see the keywords from search affiliates on the basis that you're talking about. I can almost guarantee you that most merchants have been doing SEM for much longer than affiliate marketing. I used to work for an agency that provides both SEM and affiliate management - the SEM team never sees what keywords are coming in on the affiliate side, and the affiliate team can't even see that through CJ (CJ strips the keywords from referring URLs) - they have to go directly to the merchant in order to investigate issues related to keywords (such as forbidden branded bidding) or look through the 3rd party tracking system. You're just paranoid.
The main drawback to DLs for me is that you miss your opportunity to 'get your two cents worth in,' i.e., your presell, particularly useful if the merchant doesn't have a good pitch page.