Forum Moderators: skibum
Something is horribly wrong from what I can see. It may be about time to drop them.
C
If there are some server slow down issues, then many of us would have the same symptoms of reduced commission on the same day - as a portion of users would get too impatient and close the window.
whenever the customer arrives at the confirmation page, it will ask the customer if they want to display the unsecured items(cj tracking codes), typically you would just say no and go about your business.. but saying no means no commission for affiliates like us.. since the unsecured items will never load...
have you looked at your merchant pages lately whether they had a recent change from http to https?
I think this is one of the many reasons why people are seeing a huge drop in commissions... probably unintentional.
But the issue was eventually resolved. In one case, the merchant's security cert had simply expired. You have to keep a close eye on this stuff because cj is in shambles right now and they will NOT notifiy you. The problem resulted in dozens if not hundreds of lost sales.
On a brighter note, one of my merchants emailed us last night to acknowledge cj's incompetence and that leads were being lost but that they (the merchant) will credit all lost leads via batch submission on Monday.
What a mess.
Chris
I chose CJ to start out with because from what I read they seemed to be the safest bet to start out with. I wanted to be able to concentrate on my sites and tweaking them to get the best results.
Unfortunately, I just happened to do a small test run of my first CJ affiliate site during the worst part of the current issues. The clicks were there but only a couple of sales and no leads. I was down because it wasn't the start I was hoping for even though it was just a test run. Then I read that there had been issues going on for the past couple of weeks and still hadn't be fixed so I just decided to wait a bit and see if maybe that was it. My account finally updated a few days ago and I found that I had indeed gotten some leads from my small test and made some decent money. I figured if these profit margins remained consistent then I could have a winner on my hands.
I wanted to try some more test runs. For two days I consistently sent a lot more clicks to the merchant than I had sent on the day I made my best money. I stopped the tests because no sales/leads were registered despite all of the clicks. It's been a day and still nothing. I'm kind of in limbo because I really don't want to promote my site and send a bunch of free clicks to the merchant in return for nothing. As with everyone else in affiliate marketing, I'm in this to make a profit. If I'm not making a profit then so be it. Sometimes things just don't hit. I'd just tweak my site and if necessary move on to another merchant. However, right now I can't even begin to assess anything because I don't know if CJ is just terribly slow or if they didn't register the leads properly or if the merchant's just not converting.
It's frustrating to me, but I can only imagine what it must be like for you guys who are already established and know for sure that you're getting gipped out of money.
That's not to say they're not having problems, but if they are, it's probably specific to certain merchants or types of merchants.
They're clearly having some serious systems issues keeping up with whatever load their new update has introduced to their servers. That, combined with all the stats-freaks trying again and again to look at reports is probably killing them.
Things seem to be settling down, but if they've still got catch-up to do, they should just shut it down, get it together, and be done with it.
I'm also one of the lucky ones whose check still has not processed.
jd
[edited by: eljefe3 at 4:48 am (utc) on Aug. 31, 2005]
[edit reason] no specific programs please [/edit]
C
C
C
I am also at the point where I need to start moving things out of CJ. I think this is all caused by CJ growing too big, having too large a network of advertisers, publishers and transactions to track. Their database systems just can't handle this and are alwys going down or bogged down.
I have seen this sort of thing on the inside with another large company which experienced similar issues frequently.
Someone should show CJ this thread so they can at least see frustrated published considering their options.
Br Marti
They are easy to get a hold of via phone...
I have emailed CJ the URL to this thread today, I haven't started with them yet and I would like to see their comment to this.
Well done, thanks. It is nice to give them something like this in an email. If the person receiving the email cares to give it the attention it deserves, they can forward it on to higher ups.
CJ looses money too when this happens. They are not only screwing us out of money, they are screwing themselves too. I am guessing it is hectic inside CJ right now. I can't even log in to my account.
The latest report we saw is about Lending Tree at CJ.
David
[edited by: Drastic at 4:42 pm (utc) on Sep. 20, 2005]
[edit reason] no self promotion please [/edit]
Going by the 12 month graph:
My conversion ratio is 2/5 of what is was last month.
My number of clicks is over 2x (so far this month) what is was last month.
My number of sales is ~75% of what it was last month.
The last part is the interesting part. Given that the number of clicks has increased (as expected given the traffic increase), I would expect my number of sales to be at least what it was last month (even taking into account that the month is not over and sales have yet to clear).
Am I maybe missing something here?
