Getting Started with OpenX and CJ

Looking for some blogs or guides

[CopperMint]

I have OpenX up and running, and I've been doing Adsense for a year now. I decided to expand into CJ. Can anyone point me to a blog or user guide for affiliate marketing that gets into the actual nuts and bolts of it, like:

In CJ what about:

_ Encrypt Link? (pros and cons)

_ Hide tracking code in link?

_ What's the SID?

_ Javascript or HTML?

Redirects

_ What's the reason for redirects? SEO?

_ What kind of redirect should I use?

_ Does the merchant get all my keywords in the referrer field?

Testing

_ is there some way to test that purchases are getting tracked?

I couldn't find any good resources in the CJ help (not to mention their ridiculous half-window help screen) in the hour or so I looked around.

Who's got some advice?

Thanks

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[ibQuixote]

Im not sure what OpenX does, but it sounds like some sort of ad management software? Does it allow you to connect with Web Services platforms?

I cant answer all your questions very well, but maybe I can a least confuse things a bit more :-)

_ Encrypt Link? (pros and cons) (I cant think of any cons, but the pro's are keeping things neat and making it more difficult for prying eyes.

_ Hide tracking code in link? (Same as the above really.)

_ What's the SID? (Shopper ID, allows you to pass a variable to CJ who will pass back transaction information back to you pertaing to that ID.)

_ Javascript or HTML? (I'd do Javascript if you can, but I hear many databases have problems with Javascript. There was a big stink about CJ pushing JavaScript on publishers a couple of years ago, but now its optional. I think you may find longer image download times with Javascript too, but Im told its the way the ad business is going.)

Redirects

_ What's the reason for redirects? SEO? (Reason is CJ cant track using first party cookies without redirecting through their own servers. In short they cant track without redirects)

_ What kind of redirect should I use? (Are there mutliple kinds?)

_ Does the merchant get all my keywords in the referrer field? (I think CJ can see your key words, but I dont think the merchant can.

Testing

_ is there some way to test that purchases are getting tracked? (Yes, do a test purchase and see if it was tracked :-)

[CopperMint]

OpenX is an ad server. You create a zone on your webpage and then just put the ads into OpenX. Google Ad Manager does a similar thing.

SID -- so, I CAN populate it if I want some extra tracking info, but leaving it blank is fine?

Javascript/HTML -- the thing is, Javascript seems to take a long time to load, and a small percentage of visitors turn it off. Spider and bots can't see it, so I guess that's good, though.

Redirects -- well, I'm not sure. I can just send the vistor to the merchant, but a lot of aff links I see go to an intermediate page that redirects to the merchant. Why do they do this? There are several redirect methods that I'm aware of -- javascript, jump links, 302, 301, htaccess are some types I've seen. I'm not sure why though.

Testing -- I just don't want to send the merchant hundreds of clicks and find out I didn't set something right, and I'm not getting any conversion credits.

thanks for reply

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[leadegroot]

a lot of aff links I see go to an intermediate page that redirects to the merchant. Why do they do this?

Well, off the top of my head I can think of 2 reasons
1. to stop the link juice passing to the affiliate program - although you could just do it with a nofollow
2. to limit people taking off the tracking so you (are more likely to) get paid.

oh, and 3 - to make it tidier. If you stop selling widgets through program A and move to program B, you don't have to change all your pages, only the redirect pages :)