CJ Affiliate Review by Conversant for Publishers

Introduction to CJ Affiliate by Conversant

CJ Affiliate by ConversantOn February 3, 2014, Commission Junction was re-branded as CJ Affiliate by Conversant. CJ Affilate is one of the oldest and biggest affiliate networks. All of their offers are CPA, meaning that publishers get paid only when users convert into either a lead, subscriber, sale, or some other action beyond a mere impression or click. With thousands of advertisers and hundreds of thousands of offers, CJ is very popular among bloggers and small Web publishers.

Overall Rating: 4.00 out of 5.
  • What We Like: Ability to customize offers; large quantity of advertisers and verticals; reliable payment.
  • What We Don’t Like: Creating reports isn’t very intuitive; there is no single support contact, but rather you have to deal with each advertiser individually.

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Company Stats

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Support & Contact Information

  • Address: 530 East Montecito St, Santa Barbara CA 93103
  • Phone Number: 800-761-1072
  • Support Email: None

Publisher Requirements

  • Publisher Terms: https://www.cj.com/psa-us
  • Traffic Minimum: None.
  • Publisher Language Requirement: There is no specific language requirement in their Publisher Service Agreement.
  • Prohibited Publisher Content: “Objectionable” content, content that compromises national security, obscenity, violence, hate, pornography, murder, crime, or fear.

Advertisers & Offers

  • Advertising Types: Affiliate.
  • Offer Types: CPA.
  • Verticals: All.
  • Network Size: 2,500+ advertisers.
  • Sampling of Publishers: Unknown.

Tech Implementation

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Tech Implementation Rating: 4 out of 5.

CJ Affiliate by Conversant affiliate link offers
Example of CJ Affiliate by Conversant affiliate link offers
  • Creating an Ad Unit: Before running any ad units, you first need to be approved by the advertiser you want to run on your site. Often times, the approval is instant, but sometimes, a manual review is initiated, which can take a day or two turnaround. First, click “Get Links” tab; search or browse for the advertiser; click the advertiser name; apply to program; once approved, you can view links; click the link unit or display ad unit you want; click “Get HTML”; copy and paste the code into your website.
  • Display Ad Unit Sizes Available: Varies by advertiser.
  • Implementation Technology: HTML, JavaScript.
  • Compatible with Google AdSense: Yes, as long as ad units are not styled to look like AdSense units.
  • Mobile Ad Units Available: Yes.
  • WordPress Plugin Available: Yes (third-party only).

Publisher Reporting & Admin Control Panel

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Publisher Reporting & Admin Control Panel Rating: 4 out of 5.

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Control Panel
CJ Affiliate by Conversant Control Panel
  • Control Panel: CJ’s control panel provides control over account settings, advertiser offers, reports, and mail messages from advertiser reps. Navigation is intuitive. The main dashboard when you first log in displays yesterday’s performance summary along with new advertiser recommendations, announcements, tasks, and 3-month and 7-day EPC stats.
  • Reporting: The reporting functionality in CJ is powerful, but fairly confusing to understand at first. Pulling up the right reports is not an intuitive task and requires a pretty steep learning curve. Although, once you do master the reporting, there is a lot of data to pull and the ability to segment by website and/or advertiser is quite useful in determining performance.
  • Control Panel URL: https://members.cj.com/member/‎

Payment

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Payment Rating: 5 out of 5.

  • Publisher’s Share of Revenue: Varies by advertiser.
  • Payment Methods Available: Check, Direct Deposit, Payoneer
  • Payment Terms: Net-20.
  • Minimum Payout Threshold: $50.

Account Help

CJ Affiliate by Conversant Account Help Rating: 3 out of 5.

  • Knowledge Base URL: http://www.cj.com/support-center
  • Personal Account Manager: No.
  • Easy to Contact Support: There is no support email address, only a contact form.

 


FAQ's

What are the Commission Junction publisher requirements?

It’s Free to sign up an account for commission junction, but you have to apply for each affiliate program and get approval.  Some affiliate programs will review your website manually or automatically for quality content and optimized websites. If you do not produce any results in 6 months, you risk getting your account deactivated. 

What are the Commission Junction payment methods?

Commission Junction offers 3 payment methods with NET 20 terms, including check, direct deposit or payoneer provided you meet the minimum payment threshold.  They do not support paypal as a payment method.

What is the Commission Junction minimum payment threshold? 

The minimum payment threshold is different per payment method.  For direct deposit and payoneer the minimum balance is $50. If you receive payment by check the minimum is $100.


Editor's CJ Affiliate Review

Founded in 1998 and publicly owned by online advertising conglomerate ValueClick, CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction) is arguably the largest affiliate advertising marketplace. With over 3,000 active advertisers, Web publisher and bloggers have hundreds of thousands of marketing offers to choose from when it comes to monetizing a site with affiliate links and banners.

The affiliate marketing offers available in the CJ Affiliate by Conversant marketplace are CPA, meaning that publishers earn commissions when their users convert into a lead, sale, subscriber, or when some other action is performed by the user on the advertiser's website. Merely generating impressions or clicks alone does not produce revenue, though publishers do have the option display revenue in terms of EPC and eCPM rates on their reports, allowing them to compare apples-to-apples figures with display networks such as Google AdSense.

Unlike most display advertising networks that rotate a handful or dozens or even hundreds of advertisers with just one ad unit code, CJ Affiliate by Conversant lets its publishers choose exactly which advertisers' products it wants to display and where. So an ad unit code not only specifies the size and/or type of creative (banner or text link), but also the specific advertiser offer.

When you insert a Google AdSense ad unit code into your shoe review website, that same code may display ads for several different advertisers, including for instance Nike, Reebok, New Balance, and more. On the other hand, with CJ Affiliate by Conversant, you get to choose exactly which advertiser you want running in every particular location on your site. So if you have a review page for Reebok shoes, you may wish to run only Reebok offers there, as an example. And in this particular example, this presents a perfect opportunity to use CJ as a monetization method.

The flexibility in being able to choose your advertisers and product offers with such granularity is very powerful. But it can also present quite the challenge: each advertiser may offer dozens or even hundreds of different affiliate links and banners. And with each new advertiser you sign with, you have another account rep to deal with and another set of terms and conditions to abide by. If your site offers reviews of say 1,000 different products from 100 different companies, and you want to monetize those reviews with CJ offers, then you're going to be dealing with 1,000 different ad unit code snippets and 100 different advertiser program representatives and T&C contracts.

The corollary here is that there are a lot of moving parts to manage with all of the different advertisers and product offers on CJ. But if handled properly, revenues can greatly exceed those earned through a traditional display network such as Google AdSense.

Even more so than a contextual traditional display advertising network, who will over time optimize your ad units based on CPC, you will need to constantly be testing and updating link codes and offers based on performance with CJ. From time to time, offers expire, advertisers drop their programs, or performance deteriorates due to other factors.

There's a lot of upkeep to prevent obsolete or poorly-performing links and banners from being live on your site, taking up valuable real estate. Without keeping a keen eye on your site's performance, revenues can rot away within months, if not weeks. From a customer service standpoint, CJ Affiliate by Conversant is reasonably reliable, even if not quite as supportive as those networks who provide a dedicated account rep.

CJ publishers are not assigned a dedicated account rep, nor is email an option for contacting support. Instead, support requests must be made through a contact form, which is by no means a dealbreaker, but is an inconvenience nonetheless. For support requests regarding specific advertisers or product offers, publishers should not contact CJ, but rather the advertisers themselves.

Many advertisers are very open to receiving requests and a real person will get back to you right away via email to offer support. But some advertisers are not so responsive and have no single person handling such requests, but rather a team of individuals who are generally not as helpful or responsive.

Regarding payment, CJ is very reliable, offering payment on Net-20 terms, meaning that payment will be received within 20 days of the end of the month. While payment can be received via paper check or direct deposit, PayPal is not an option.

Overall, CJ Affiliate by Conversant is a very good affiliate ad network. The control panel is usable (even if reporting can take a while to master) and getting the affiliate links and banners is simple enough.

Optimizing your offers is another matter. When it comes to running multiple offers from multiple advertisers through CJ, constant attention needs to be given to ensure good performance is achieved and maintained.

Supplementing display advertising with CJ offers can work very well on certain sites, especially review sites whose users are already in the buying cycle and prepared to take action on the affiliate offers that are presented.

References

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