CJ cookies and sales tracking

[jstmike]

Hi All,

I've been with CJ for many years and I'm tring to figure out has sales are tracked on CJ.

I have a couple sites and one site is basically 1,000 CJ's affilate links and for December my stats are:

1,478,802 Impressions
590 Clicks
1 Sale
$1.59 Commission

This isn't my main business but making $1.59 per month on that site isn't worth anyones time.

I've asked CJ to look at my site to see if my links were ok and they said they were.

But now I've been trying to figure out exactly how they track purchases.

When I click on one link I see a cookie for qksrv.net being created. I look at the contents and there are 3 entries made.

I will click on another link and it might create another cookie called emjcd.com with again 3 entries.

Then I click on another link and it just updates the qksrv.net cookie with different values for the 3 entries.

There seems to be 3 different cookies that CJ might use: qksrv.net, emjcd.com and commission-junction.com.

So in effect did I just loose any chance of getting commissions with the first site if the cookie just gets replaced?

Now my main site is with eBay using CJ and that does very well but if I'm loosing sales because the eBay cookie is being replaced by the others then I need to remove those links to keep it all eBay.

Just wondering if anyone knows exactly how it works?

Thanks,

Mike

[LifeinAsia]

I've asked CJ to look at my site to see if my links were ok and they said they were.

Of course that's what they're going to say! I pretty much got the same answer to my question about similar stats. All I know is that since they went to their multiple redirect domains (4- to 7-letter domains that appear to be just random letters), our conversion rate has gone in the toilet. We were making $20-50/month, now it's more like 1 sale/quarter.

What's supposed to happen is a customer hits your link and goes to CJ's server for tracking then gets redirected to the supplier's site. That supplier is supposed to set a tracking cookie so they can track sales referred from your site. I have my doubts about a lot of them.

I went to one of their CJ University conferences (the 1st one?) where they said they checking for fraud was a very high priority. Since then, they seem to have gotten too big for themselves with expansion all over the world.

The main suppliers we worked with have left CJ (or been booted out), so we just continue with them because of the variety of suppliers. However, once I find some time, I will probably start weeding out things and focus on something else.

[jstmike]

Well I went through about 40 links and only 10 placed a cookie with 3 of those with any sort of affiliate id.

So that could be why people are not getting the commissions they deserve.

I'm using a free program called IECookiesView to see the cookies. Google it and it is the first link.

[topper99]

What's supposed to happen is a customer hits your link and goes to CJ's server for tracking then gets redirected to the supplier's site. That supplier is supposed to set a tracking cookie so they can track sales referred from your site. I have my doubts about a lot of them.

All this time I was figuring that if the clicks and impressions were getting counted then the sale ought to be counted too. I guess I'd better take a closer look. Apparently CJ tracks the clicks & impressions but sales tracking is largely in the hands of the supplier. Right?

[LifeinAsia]

Apparently CJ tracks the clicks & impressions but sales tracking is largely in the hands of the supplier.

That's what I assume. However, they could require the suppliers to put a tracking cookie on their order page (similar to whar Google & Yahoo do for conversion tracking for their PPC customers). But again, CJ is trusting the suppliers to actually put the code there. Although I'm sure they verify that as part of the setup process, I wonder if there's any on-going spot checks to verify the suppliers don't remove it as soon as the setup is completed.

[arran]

1,478,802 Impressions
590 Clicks

Your CTR suggests that the CJ link isn't well targeted.

[steve40]

I just did some checking on one of sites and that ctr and conversion does look extremely low even for CJ

CJ is not the best affiliate company I deal with but with that number of impressions you should be getting closer to minimum of $200 per month in commisions

suggest you have a look at the following

1 targetting
2 use of text instead of banners
3 And this has the the most significant impact on CJ earnings the use of smartzone text links that are relevent to the page if the percentage of your visitors who return to site is fairly high
4 If its not possible to find relevent textlinks for the page for use in smartzones then look at use of themed
i.e. currently valentines day, next easter, during olympics TV / Video sales etc etc

Affiliate marketting can still be productive in providing income but unlike adsense more time and effort is required to make it profitable

just my own 2 cents and I do not consider myself an expert in affiliate marketting their are many more on this board who have better understanding of the best way to moniterise websites

steve

[steve40]

One more thing I forgot to say try looking at sites like MSN who employ specialists to get the most from affiliate marketting to get ideas of how and where to market affiliate links

steve