YSM Flaw and Long Overdue and Major CJ Rant

I posted yesterday at SEJ already about a embarrassing flaw in the Yahoo! Search Marketing landing page code, which was not caused by Commission Junction, but made transparent due to a “feature” of CJ that is very questionable. Not the YSM flaw, but the old CJ “feature” and some of their new ones are the subject of this post.

This whole thing caused some very bad memories of mine to come back into my mind. Bad memories from over 3 years ago. Nothing did change at CJ to this day obviously.

This is a rant, a major one, but I think my points are valid. I also make suggestions to how to change and improve things, very specific ones and also suggested ones. This time is it CJ’s turn again I guess, but I am “as nice” to other networks as well, specifically to Linkshare. They got “hit” the last time. See Scott’s nice post and the not so nice comments from this January at his blog.

I double checked the text and could not find any inappropriate words that did crossed my mind, but not made it into this post, also not by accident .

It is well known that expired links and even banners and other creative’s that were provided through CJ keep working perfectly fine on an affiliate website (for the visitor). The affiliate does not see a dime in commission and the advertiser is getting free traffic and even can relate to the argument that affiliates should take down expired links from their sites as soon as possible. I will get back to that side of the issue in a moment.

Now from an advertiser point of view does that kind of behavior seem to be a good thing and CJ also claims that this is wanted by Advertisers. I was told that by a CJ Rep in 2002 when I was one of the AM’s for the BevMo.com affiliate program. My problem back then was that I deleted expired promotional links and banners to create new ones. I had no idea, that the links and images (hosted by CJ) were not deleted, but simply disappeared from the Advertiser interface.

Yes, I was told, it is recommended to update links and banners and should not delete them, sorry. Nice, I deleted (expired) the links because I wanted to cause the banners to cause broken images on the affiliate sites and the links to get a CJ error screen, because we restructured the format and type of banners and text links because of some major changes and additions to the BevMo.com website.

The CJ Access advertiser account restricts the amount of links that can be created. “Hey we give the affiliate whatever they need. Special image size? Sure!” Oh no, I can’t add another banner in CJ, sorry.

The request for additional banners was rejected, because we still had some banners and link left that were not so popular with affiliates and could be replaced by something better. Anyhow, I deleted the links, period.

I could not un-do that (CJ could have, but … I don’t want to go further…. ) and had not the issue that I had a) links and banners out on sites that were outdated, some even with a coupon code, but no expiration date shown in the image itself (I learned to add the date to the image from this experience). BevMo got “all happy” because of unhappy customers that saw the promo somewhere and had to learn the hard way that the coupon code simply did not work (anymore). Okay, I followed the suggestion to find those images and links on the web.

Anybody who ever attempted this will know that it is virtually impossible to find all of them. Sure, the reports showed traffic for the deleted links, but the issue were not the high volume affiliates, but the long tail and the long long tail affiliates with virtually no traffic. BevMo also had the program for a brief period of time on auto-approval when they tried to get a grip and feeling for this themselves, before they handed over the management of the program to my company (who developed the site and suggested the affiliate program to them).

Some sites where I found links and banners had no contact information anywhere (another hint for new AM’s) and advertisers have no access to publisher data at CJ.

Great, even when I terminated the affiliate did the banners not disappear or the links stop working for visitors of that affiliate site. We ended up modifying the code of all affected landing pages (hard coded check) to look out for traffic with the expired AID’s and redirect the user to a separate page with an error message, kiss kiss, sorry, apologies etc. The only thing that seems to make links not work anymore is to terminate the program with CJ or not pay the bills. Every CJ affiliate probably knows and has seen the infamous “Advertiser Expired” error page in the past.

Yahoo! became now a victim of this, although their landing page has a flaw, which only adds to the problems.

Yahoo! consolidated all their programs into one at CJ. The old individual programs were closed (kind of), but all old banners and links are still working.

Here is the link to a nice $50 in free credits offer image (which is not valid anymore):
http://www.tqlkg.com/image-2045901-10280699 (change “image” to “click” in the URL and you will get yourself the affiliate link, which will work, but not track = no money for me).

I am sure that CJ will be a bit more “understanding” in Yahoo!’s case and probably disable it soon, so here is the saved image served from my site.

Affiliates that did not change the links yet, are promoting an outdated YSM offer that looks perfectly fine, thanks to the flaw of the Yahoo! landing page and the working links and banners served by CJ. Affiliates don’t get paid, even if somebody signs up and does not complain to Yahoo! that he did not get his promised credit.

I know that there are the “Expiring/Expired Links” report, also the “invalid links generating traffic” and the “Ending Promotion” reports as well.

Those reports are nice and good and provide everything an affiliate that spends all day in the CJ interface with enough information to manually search their site (or sites) for those expiring and expired links and update in their database the expiration date of promotions.

Wait, no affiliates do not have the time to spend everyday and all day in the CJ interface. They have a lot of other things to do as well, such as doing something with those links that will make other people that are interested in the offerings click on those links and hopefully decide to buy the advertised stuff to pay the affiliates bills. Affiliates clicking their own links does not do that. Also test purchases and purchases for themselves will not result in a positive ROI unless the commission is over 100%.

Outsourcing to a low wage country sounds like a reasonable alternative. Have somebody else do the tedious job for you, who works for $1 a day.

Just create an “Analyzer” account and… wait, an Analyzer account can still see everything. Isn’t there a labor law that protects employees to see profit figures that are generated with help of their labor which exceeds a certain multiple of their wage? No? Well, there should be, because it first tortures the person that has to see this and then makes the employer worry and become paranoid, because he dreams at night about how his throat is being cut by one of his cheap laborer who could not bear the torture any longer and made it his life mission to punish the torturer.

Okay, this is very extreme, but the reality will be somewhere in between “everything is peachy” and my example.

Lets offer the ability to download those reports, same options as for the commission and transaction reports. While you are at it, add this option also to the various Advertiser lists and link lists as well.

Oh, that’s right, RSS is hip and cool now, ah wait, the RSS is only for newsletter summaries that link to the HTML page which is can also be found in the body of the email that contains the same information in a easy to process (for humans) format.

May I present the new and great CJ Publisher Promotions RSS feed that will excel affiliate marketing to catch up a little more with the rest of the internet.

http://cju.cj.com/rss/publisher_promotions.rss (requires CJ publisher account and being logged in with it)

Here is the complete content of the CJ publisher promotions RSS (XML) “Feed” :


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<channel>
<title>Commission Junction Publisher Promotions</title>
<link>http://cju.cj.com</link>
<description>The Publisher Promotions feed from CJ. Includes the Weekly What's Hot blog, the monthly What's Hot newsletter, and the bi-monthly CJ Wire newsletter.</description>
<copyright>Copyright 2007 ValueClick RSS Portal</copyright>
<generator>GeekLog</generator>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:20:01 -0700</pubDate>
<language>en-gb</language>
<item>
<title>Weekly What's Hot - updated 4/2/07</title>
<link>http://cju.cj.com</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://cju.cj.com</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:24:58 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:subject>Publisher Promotions feed</dc:subject>
<description><a href="http://cju.cj.com/connect/featured_promot.html">Weekly What's Hot - updated 4/2/07</a><br> Featured Promotions from top Commission Junction advertisers for the week of April 2nd, 2007.</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>


Sorry, that’s it. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Shoot, I was thinking about RSS feeds, or XML feeds or even delimited feeds for that matter, which contain the actual information, such as Advertiser ID, Advertiser Name, Promo URL (or AID), Description, Start and Expiration Date, Coupon Code and Image URL (for a promo feed for example, Advertiser Feeds should contain other information of course).

A feeds that can be pulled without being logged in with the browser to the CJ interface, with the login credentials and filter and formatting options passed along in the request for each actual feed, that CJ would be able to provide the same data to the affiliate as if the affiliate would use the interface.

This is not that hard to develop and CJ is not a Google in size as company as well as number of customers and number of data centers and amount of extra hardware needed for a new feature like that (e.g. Google’s search API).

Look at Scott Jangro and BumpZee.com, the time he (with probably some freelancer help) needed to implement features that are comparable in scale, but beyond the simple purpose of spitting out some text data based on a 4-5 parameter look up request. Did he started 6 months ago or was it 5 months?

Yes, that are kudos to Scott and a slap into the face of CJ. You might want to hire Scott to give you some 101 on rapid, but scalable development. He can’t (and probably would not even want to) work for you as a Developer, since he is for sure too busy with BumpZee.com and his other projects that do pay his bills.

Yeah, Scott is the guy that worked for the company that was purchased by CJ a few years ago, which had the much better (even though it still had some flaws too) data feed solution and advertiser/publisher relationship management system, which made it to about “0%” into the CJ system.

Note on the side: the description of the report is “30 day report of expired/expiring links”. My report shows March 9th for the oldest and May 3rd 2007 as the newest. That’s a pretty long date range for 30 days. Please don’t change the report, but the description instead

CJ got obviously “hit” more or less hard by multiple bloggers this weekend. See this and this. Well, they get it all at once and will be faster over with it this way .

p.s. Pranav: I did not refrain from any commentary. Why should I? Feedback is good and valid and constructive critique is helpful. Specific recommendations are gold. I use CJ myself since end of 2000 and do care about what they do and how they do it.

The harsh words are only for the fact that they didn’t do anything during the past years and the bit stuff they actually did manage to come up with is only half way done or makes things worse rather than better.

They deserve it, like anybody else who screws up like that and is also fortunate enough to have somebody take notice and points it out to them. Some people screw up and run into big problems without anybody saying anything. That would be much much worse.

So CJ, I hope you get the message and consider at least some of the things suggested. It’s still early April and plenty of time to do and finish some good until CJU that publishers and advertisers still got enough time to use it to some extent before and during the holiday season.

Cheers!
Carsten