13 Comments

We Made a Mistake. Send the Cops.

May 11, 2007
by

I got today a “nice” email from Commission Junction, which I hope no affiliate that is doing the right things will ever get.

Dear Carsten Cumbrowski,

By way of this letter, Commission Junction provides you notice that you have violated the Commission Junction Publisher Service Agreement (http://www.cj.com/pub_agreement.jsp). To avoid termination of your Publisher Service Agreement and prevent deactivation of your account, you are required to comply with the following actions:

An investigation in to your account’s traffic revealed that you are promoting an offer for Yahoo! Search Marketing that is no longer available for any of the affiliates in our network. Your site, http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/sem_ppc_searchengines.asp, has the following link listed on it that is promoting an expired Promotion Code “USCJ16″.

Again, this offer is not provided by our network. As per the Publisher Service Agreement you are prohibited from this type of activity since it could be considered misleading. You must update this promotion immediately to bring your account back into compliance.

Please respond by replying to this specific e-mail immediately upon receipt. If you are reading this notice through your CJ Account Manager (Mail tab) and do not have access to the e-mail notice, please respond using Ask a Question, available through the “Contact Us” lik available in account manager, and include this original message. Failure to respond may result in Commission Junction exercising its right to terminate the Commission Junction Publisher Service Agreement upon 15 days of this written notice.

If you have any further questions regarding this or other issues, please respond to this e-mail.

Sincerely,

Program Quality
————————————
Commission Junction, a ValueClick company

This email was completely unwarranted and it is also making statements that are simply wrong. Here is the proof.

Anyway, that is not the point I wanted to make with this post.

Just about a month ago did I blog about a flaw in the Yahoo! Search Marketing sign up landing page. I also contacted Yahoo! and they resolved part of the issue the last time I checked.

If the coupon is not valid then did their team obviously did not fix ALL the flaws as I suggested to them in the post and via email. What strikes me most is the fact that the link in the CJ interface that has the code embedded is fine and active. It’s not a redirect link or a link where I could have manipulated the arguments. The code is specified in the URL Yahoo! configured for this link.

I responded brief and blunt to CJ that I use a link that was provided to me by the advertiser as they can easily verify and that I expect them to retract this warning. They better also remove it from my account history that it can not be used against me in the future.

I had direct contact with the AM of the program before, more than once and are very disappointed to get “contacted” this way. Shooting me an email would have done the job just fine and everything could have been sorted out nicely. At the end of the day would I even have gotten a “thank you” for helping them doing their job.

Affiliate marketing is about relationship and communication, yeah, but not LIKE THIS. You don’t send the cops only because your spouse is late for supper. Where did Yahoo! got their communication skills from? From one of those crooked loan companies that fine you a late fee, because of of their clerks did not process the payment on time as he is supposed to?

I believe somebody needs some training.

Cheers!
Carsten

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
  • http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=82588 Chuck Hamrick

    I am seeing an increasing number of these situations. The perception is that CJ shoots before they yell “put yuor hands up”!! It seems the Top 3 networks are pushing the limits on their people and more situations like this are common place.

    I am enjoying my new found relationship with Performics and take the responsibilty for my program. Affiliates have the abiltiy to contact me on half a dozen different fronts.

    “Affiliate marketing is about relationship and communication” you said it brother!!

  • Jonathan (Trust)

    “I supposedly advertise a Yahoo! Search Marketing promotion at my site, which is not valid.”

    They’re on the wrong on this. It’s been one of my major pet peeves over the years with merchants having expired links or links with expired promotions available for affiliates to grab. Sometimes they’re labeld as such, many times they’re not and you have to test to make sure they work. Same with Linkshare. They added these “valid dates” on all the links, even ones that were already expired. It’s a mess. You would think it would be a simple thing for an affiliate manager to keep the links in the creative up to date, you would be suprised.

  • http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=82588 Chuck Hamrick

    Since I know that affiliates do not like perpetual coupons as much I move mine ahead monthly. I give myself two weeks before they expire to do so in case I am away or just busy. It comes down to time management!!

  • Jonathan (Trust)

    I kind of like perpetual coupons. If the affiliate wanted, they could just make up an expiration date, say end of the month and then they could update on their own. I know at ABW when we had that coupon thread about talking about options, having both short term and long term coupons. With long term, you’ll get affiliates putting them up that usually don’t since updating is very time consuming and affiliates that don’t normally deal in them are more apt to try them with the longer expiration dates.

    Or coupon text links like Buy.com or Lamps Plus have, where they update the date on the landing page. Very easy, those are my favorite.

  • http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=82588 Chuck Hamrick

    I think its a mixed bag. I am tracking RSS feeds from affiliate who track dates on coupons. I get a ding when one of mine is ready to expire and make sure I change it. There are some slick tools that affiliates can use with RSS to have their sites auto updated which Google will index. The big couponers although automated are not plugging in the tools yet!

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    The problem is that the landing page also acknowledges the coupon and its validity, but that is just adding to the story, plus the fact that I made Yahoo! aware of this issue. Via email and blog.

    Before they consolidated their affiliate programs in CJ did they have a permanent $50 off coupon. That one was valid for ages. With the consolidation did that coupon suddenly change to $25 without notice. I complained about this back then and the response was that they are sorry, but no word that the coupon is not valid at all.

    If it expired, what I still don’t know (I can’t create a new account, that would be fraud), did this happened after they consolidated the programs. I don’t know, because I did not get a notification.

    That’s the part that makes me mad the most.

  • Sheryl

    Sorry to hear this happened to you, Carsten. I know how you feel. I was wrongly terminated by a Linkshare merchant last year (Linkshare itself was not involved) for allegedly providing a link to a promo that had expired more than a year earlier. Fact was, however, we were not running it. The merchant wouldn’t even tell us where it was on our site, only that their Linkshare reports indicated it was getting impressions from us. So they were allowed to terminate us without providing any proof (no link or screenshot) that we were running an expired promo. Then a few days later (after we removed all of our links to that merchant), they reinstated us with no explanation at all. The affiliate manager was such a low individual that she didn’t even have the guts to admit her mistake or apologize.

    Please let us know what type of response you receive from CJ.

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    I got two phone call. It was a bit confusion on their part. They appologized and will check internally and also with Yahoo! who also has a big chunk of responsibility in this case.

    I also got told that CJ is planning to open up communication again in forums like ABestWeb and Blogs like ReveNews. I told them that there are plenty of people that are willing to communicate and talk and that it will be up to them to engage, listen and act on it.

    We will see how that goes. It would be a step into the right direction. Lets hope for the best.

  • http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=82588 Chuck Hamrick

    There is a regular buzz in the ABW CJ forum but not by them. Nor is there much from LinkShare.

    Performics however has been responding to their forum on ABW and I have been pinging them when I see a serious issue that needs their response like the Target move.

  • http://CooperativeAffiliates.com Scott Hazard

    It seems that the networks are getting lazier by the minute in these type of situations.

    I got an email from a Linkshare affiliate manager a while back saying that I had to tell them where the traffic I was sending this merchant was coming from and generally what my overall business plan is, or I would be removed from the program.

    These affiliate managers have access to referral URLs. I don’t play click games nor do I use any adware, spam or anything like that in my marketing efforts. It is lazy network affiliate managers and network associates who do these type of things because they did not take the time to research it in the first place.

    I’d bet that the same person at Linkshare that sent me the email is the same one Sheryl is talking about in the post above.

    What ever happened to due diligence?

  • http://www.affiliatecrew.com Chuck Hamrick

    Scott, I think there are two dynamics at play here. One may very well be lazy affiliate managers or they could just be understaffed. There is a rise of AM’s with no previous experience who couldn’t make a buck a month as an affiliate if they tried. The other scenerio is the company management that wants to know everything in the name of justifying their jobs. Its not good enough to make money for the company they want to know every detail.

    I remember being asked to put together affiliate demographics because it was available. When that was done I got an “oh cool” Wasted half a day!!

  • Kibitzer

    The letter was a bit “ham-handed”, but the bigger question is why you aren’t utilizing the smartzones to place your ads? Once you upload the code, you can manipulate your ads directly from the CJ site, and they would then bear responsibility for adjusting expired supposedly expired codes.

  • Carsten Cumbrowski

    Hey Kibitzer, thanks for the comment (I deleted the duplicates).

    I use smartzones or creatives where the advertiser specified that he updates it on an ongoing basis. There are places where those make sense and helpful (less work fo rme). This was not the case in this example. If you look at this page on my site, you will probably understand.