Hello, I was approached by a publisher that said that they would like to deep link to the products on our website and that they would be able to do this with a URL that allows for redirection. They mention that this would allow them to send people directly to our detailed pages instead of our home page. I'm new at this on the advertiser side so I wanted to know if this is legit? What are the pros and cons to doing this? Thanks so much!
As a publisher I would really like to be able to do that with all my advertisers but only some allow for it. The main pro is that you would be getting a very targeted visitor, the main con is that the visitor would not see much, if anything, of what else you have to offer. The advertisers that get most of my traffic are the ones that allow for the deep linking as I get a better bang for my visitor buck.
Thanks for your insight jaxrefinance. I can see from the prospective of publishers how linking into a specific product may be more relevant if they are pulling products from our data feed. Anyone else know what other cons there may be? Thanks again.
Sure... if an affiliate resells and gets the customer ready to buy why would you want to distract them by forcing them to wade through an additional series of clicks? Bottom line is you want to take customer from visitor to purchaser as quickly as possible. I have this problem with a Travel Affiliate. I want to send the customer from my site to a specific hotel.... I don't want them to be distracted by a hundred other hotels. A lot of Affiliate Managers have never been in the trenches, they have no idea what it takes to get someone from point a to point b.
I think that a lot of advertisers do allow the deep linking, SuperT. You should look at the ones with the product catalogs and go from there. There are a lot ways to get the traffic to the publishers sites as well. You can use the CJ webservices API for instance, blog about something that interests you and then using the proper tools find ads from publishers relevant to the content of the blog post. This has actually made a tremendous impact on my marketing over the past month and a half. With the right plugins for wordpress, the ads appear seamless into the post almost as if you added the content and the link yourself. As far as the travel sites, I have found the same issues. I am, in fact, trying to figure out how to write a program that will allow the different hotels in cities appear on a test site to see if the API program would work well for that.
Speak with your advertiser rep at CJ - I'd say that 99% of advertisers who sell multiple products allow deep-lining. Your advertiser rep will be able to get you info on how to activate either a full product catalog or allow redirection on certain links (you can restrict redirection to specific AIDs, but that really doesn't matter).