Commission Junction Still Not Working!

Paid hundreds into PPC and huge sale dropoff!

[adamlutz]

They better be tracking all sales,
I spend 500 a day that converts to 2-3 times that, and without changing any links over the past week I've seen a dropoff of only 1 sale!

They better have those lost sales for all of us somewhere...

Any thoughts? Why does a reputable company such as CJ take so long to fix this?

Adam

[adamlutz]

That was a dropoff TO only 1 sale...

sorry for the typo,

adam

[rfung]

Keep us posted - I've had minimal sales through CJ lately too, but I don't get the bulk of my revenue from them.

[Rachel]

I know I'm missing at least one sale, because I made the purchase myself on the 26th. I gave it through the weekend to catch up, but finally wrote to the merchant today to let them know. Hopefully they'll take care of it, but it certainly makes me wonder how many other commissions might have gone missing.

[webzilla]

"Hopefully they'll take care of it"

I would be more concerned about sales I don't know about more than the one that I do.

Looks like mud isn't the only thing that's sliding into the sea out there.

[Rachel]

Most definitely! Unfortunately, the only sale I know for sure that was missed was the one I placed myself.

This is probably the main thing I don't like about AM. With my ecommerce site, I know every sale that comes in, charge the card myself, pack and ship the order from right here. The customer service is a real pain in the behind, but it seems like you give up a lot of control with AM.

[fclark]

I felt the same drop-off of sales as many of you in Feb.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to view the merchant's panel in CJ for a program I'm an affiliate of. The merchant's report matched mine.

If the sales were not tracking for the affiliates, then they weren't tracking for the merchant either, in which case CJ loses too.

BTW, today I notice "more" sales -- back to normal for most of my programs.

[rfung]

All issues affecting data transfer processing within the CJ Account Manager have been resolved. All advertisers’ batch data has been successfully received and updated into accounts.

Has everyone that reported issues seen their numbers corrected?

[Procyon]

"but it seems like you give up a lot of control with AM."

That is the beauty of AM. :)

Selling almost any product with no service hassles, and you don't even have to know about it or what it is!

Procyon.

[DonQ]

Has CJ resolved this issue yet? Anyone seen corrections? My sales still on nil. Bad feeling in pit of stomach. Time to drown it with strong fire water. Talking to CJ is like being in a dark cave. Hello? hello? echo........

[Manolo]

I've been seeing sort of the same thing; the three our four days ending day before yesterday were among the worst I've had in months, and then yesterday was one of the best in an equal period.

It looked to me like a big batch processed at once, except all of the event and posting dates were yesterday and were spread out, so who knows.

I'm tempted to belive that it was just people not spending at the end of the month, followed by a buying spree as the paychecks rolled in. But then, thus far today has been back to slow.

Again, who knows? Thanks to that big day, I'm willing to wait a day or two before complaining.

[Automan Empire]

FYI, my bricks and mortar business was dead for almost 2 weeks, then yesterday was like the floodgates opening again. It was like this across much of the U.S. according to my online contacts. The paychecks rolling in effect is strong, and so is the tax-refunds-rolling-in effect.
After 20 years in my industry, I do notice certain long-term meta-patterns in business volume tied to events like school, holidays, etc. Thrown on top of this, however, are short-term, powerful, unpredictable events. Even though peoples' need for my service does not change day to day, on days when the headlines read "Dow plunges 500 points" or other dire news, the phone simply stops ringing!
When the "spending switch" goes off like this, throwing lots of extra money at advertising does not help, though it is tempting. Instead of throwing the last capital after fruitless ads, and worrying oneself sick over what is being done wrong, spend the time and capital getting ready to sell more than ever when the next wave hits. There is always a next wave, and a next.

[crobb305]

Problems began 2weeks ago. Never see a snafu this big at cj. I hope they get things figured out soon.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Chris

[Rachel]

I heard back from my merchant, who said, "We've had a lot of problems last week and this week also because CJ has had so much downtime!", and noted that their reporting may have been affected as well. Lovely.

[drlolipop]

At some point CJ needs to be honest about the fact they are not recording some transactions during this "outage" or whatever you want to call it. There are those of you who will shout it's a conspiracy theory to claim that they are not recording some leads and sales.
The reality is there have been times in the past when they admitted to missing some transactions and compensated publishers accordingly based on realistic estimates of how much those publishers would have made if tracking and reporting was working correctly in that period. Even though it says at the website "all transactions are being recorded", the reality is CJ has been forced to admit that's a lie in the past (including during one fairly recent outage) and will be forced to admit to the lie again. They will never admit during an outage that not all transactions are being recorded even if they know it's true....it could cause massive publisher flight to Linkshare and others.

[inasisi]

Yesterday was great till 9:00 PM PST even though there was a gap of nearly 5-6 hours between the event date and the posting date. But I haven't seen a single transction with an event date after 3-1-2005 9:00 PM. I get atleast 20-30 transactions in an hours and it is hard to assume that there has been nothing since then. Anyone else see anything?

[drlolipop]

I noticed the exact the same thing, a complete disappearance of transactions from about 9 p.m. yesterday through about 3 a.m. today. But I don't think they were really catching everything yesterday before 9 P.M. (especially Ebay registrations, which they don't seem to be counting at all any more).

They need to start admitting they are missing transactions and compensate publishers justly to avoid a flurry of fraud and deceptive business practice lawsuits. I've been with CJ for years and the wheels have never come off nearly this badly....till now.

I also noticed their reversal transactions (where they reverse transactions judged to be "unworthy") have continued unabated through the breakdown.

Until they catch up with all the transactions they've missed for the last 2 weeks, they need to turn off their reversal machine.

[DonQ]

When the "spending switch" goes off like this, throwing lots of extra money at advertising does not help, though it is tempting. Instead of throwing the last capital after fruitless ads, and worrying oneself sick over what is being done wrong, spend the time and capital getting ready to sell more than ever when the next wave hits. There is always a next wave, and a next.

I run a few merchant sites as well as an aff site. Jan was bad(ish). Feb was good an all of them with steady sales throughout the month. None had a dead patch. Really don't think this can be attributed to spending 'switch' going off.

[iblaine]

Here's info on how calculations are done for lost tracking:
Read section 3.3: [cj.com...]
What it says is if you are an advertiser and your tracking goes down then you are obligated to pay publishers as described in section 3.3 of the ASA...I'm not sure if it applies to CJ itself but at least its proof that a process exists for calculating damages due to lost tracking. Having said that, this incident is probably delayed reporting. For the technically inspired people out there, I recommend creating your own home brew pixel tracking and having your big advertisers use it as a way to audit affiliate networks...

[suzyvirtual]

Just noticed that CJ is saying that the issue is now completely resolved. Hope it's true!

[hannamyluv]

Just noticed that CJ is saying that the issue is now completely resolved. Hope it's true!

Not as far as I can see. I am still seeing serious issues with merchants who batch.

[wnshops]

Cj.com is not tracking correct sale.It's truth . Some one work for cj.com blow the smoking gun.

[captain muttla]

What's the CJ sales situation at the moment - do things seem to be returning to "normal"? (whatever that might be!)

I've got a PPC campaign paused because there seems no point spending money sending traffic to CJ merchants when I can't tell if sales are happening.

When I have some confidence that CJ aren't misplacing sales I'll turn the PPC back on, but until then I can't afford to continue.

[hannamyluv]

Well, I am happy to report that it does seem that my missing transactions got posted last night. That's really what I was looking for to ease my mind. That one big spike to show that the transactions really did exist and were tracked.

[flobaby]

Oooh, please tell...what were the event dates?
(one can always use a bit of hope)

[Michael Anthony]

All my CJ campaigns have been tracking perfectly all week although there were some reporting delays.

[Manolo]

I've become convinced today that CJ is screwing things up. Except for Monday of this week, this has been the worst two week period I've ever experienced, my sales are down about 75% over the same period last month, and showing no sign of recovering.

My site traffic and my click throughs are setting new records, I've checked the codes, and the cookies, and everything on my end is working. Worse, I know for a fact that they've yet to report a purchase made yesterday.

Things are so bad that I emailed one of my affiliate managers and asked him what was going on. Here's his reply:

"The problems, as far as we can tell, are due to CJ issues since 2/15/05, and you are certainly not alone in that regard."

Commission Junction claims to have fixed the problem, but I'm not so sure now. In fact, self-preservation is telling I should probably be moving as much as I can away from CJ until they get themselves straightened out.

Has anyone else been talking to their affiliate managers about this?

[metakomm]

I got suspicious for a minute but then backed off when my numbers went back up after a temporary dip. Things seem to have been smooth the past couple of days...

[Rachel]

Manolo, yes, I've been talking with one of my merchants about a sale that I know is missing. They're saying basically the same thing that your merchant is.

I'm new to all of this, so maybe someone can answer this question if they check back to this thread:

If you know you're missing a sale, is it possible the fault could lie with the merchant? It seems that since CJ does the tracking, the fault would truly be theirs, but maybe I'm not understanding exactly how all of this works.

[webzilla]

When making a test purchase, check the confirmation/thank you page code on the merchant's site for a cj tracking pixel.

If it is not there, the merchant is a very bad doggie.

If it is there, the problem is with CJ.