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Why Choose Commission Junction
CJ Drives Results for Your Business
Whether it's monetizing website traffic, driving more sales or finding more customers, we understand that our clients' goals are our goals. Learn why affiliate marketing is critical in today’s marketplace and listen to top advertisers and publishers discuss the results they’ve seen running their pay-for-performance programs on the CJ Network.We believe we’re No. 1 for a reason.
The Power of Affiliate - Engaging with Consumers
The Affiliate marketing channel, with its unique, high performance online publishers, has the power to influence and connect with the new consumer at critical points in their decision journey.
1. Catalyst
Once a consumer decides they are in need of a product or service, they start with a short list of options based on initial brand awareness. TV, radio, print, word-of-mouth, online display advertising, social media and affiliate all play an ongoing role in shaping a consumer's awareness of their brand options.
Due to the influx of marketing noise we all experience, getting through the wilderness can be challenging. Connecting with potential customers during the next phase of their journey – Evaluation – has become more important than ever.
2. Evaluation
The affiliate channel powers a variety of powerful publisher websites that provide relevant, compelling information to the consumer as they evaluate their brand options and add new ones.
For example, search engine and shopping comparison publishers let users cross-shop countless products and services all in one place. They are a key destination for consumers who now desire more control over how they interact with and learn about products. The influence of Content & Community publishers, a.k.a. the blogosphere, is also on the rise. When a trusted blogger makes a recommendation, their readers listen…and often convert.
3. Conversion
The affiliate marketing channel is well known for its ability to close the deal – it drives the highest conversion rates of any channel, as well as higher average order sizes. But more than that, affiliate marketing is uniquely aligned with today's consumer focus on value.
At a time when 55% of shoppers say they always check for deals before making a purchase***, online publishers are more critical than ever. Shopping, Coupon and Deals publishers, who are committed to creating the most comprehensive and organized collections of coupons, deals, promotions, and sales, help bargain shoppers find an ideal combination of savings opportunities at the critical point of conversion.
4. Post Conversion
Each time a consumer interacts with a brand's product or service and compares the experience with friends in their social network, they continue to builds expectations that impact their loyalty. In rare instances, the post conversion experience is so powerful that a brand is able to produce a lifetime of conversions from a customer. However, more often than not, the next purchase catalyst will trigger another decision journey for the consumer... and another marketing battle for consumer attention during their evaluation process.
*McKinsey & Company, 2009
** Forrester Consulting, 2012
5. Loyalty Loop
A hyper-competitive marketplace and the evolution of the internet as a limitless information source have dramatically impacted consumer buying behavior and loyalty. Actively loyal customers, who not only stick with a brand but energetically recommend it, are especially valuable and increasingly rare. Only a handful of brands can truly command the consumer loyalty, bypassing the evaluation phase of the consumer journey and creating a lifetime of conversions.
Whether out of laziness or choice overload, most consumers today are passively loyal – despite repeat purchases, they remain open to alternative brands if given the right reasons to switch. In today’s digital world, even the most widely-recognized industry leaders must win back the well-informed consumer after every single purchase.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Some people remember the 1990’s as a tremendous period of growth for grunge music and Jim Carrey films. While this is true, most people will probably tell you the 90’s were responsible for this big, beautiful, technology called the World Wide Web (aka the internet, the web, the vast digital ocean of information at our finger tips). And with any new technology or media, companies quickly realized they had a new opportunity to market their products and services to consumers via the millions of websites they visit every day.
With the emergence of search engines in the mid-1990’s, the internet ballooned into a massive e-commerce and information machine. Website owners were creating valuable content and providing tremendous benefits to their visitors, and these website owners wanted to be compensated for their hard work. Early forms of online advertising like CPM or fixed placement started seeing competition from emerging, more accountable forms of online advertising, like affiliate marketing. So, what is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing at its very core is about relationships,
a relationship between three parties:
In the world of affiliate marketing, an advertiser can be a company selling a product like electronics, airline tickets, clothing or car parts, or an advertiser could also be an insurance company selling policies. The most important thing to remember is that you are an advertiser if you are ready to pay other people to help you sell and promote your business.
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A publisher is an individual or company that promotes an advertiser’s product or service in exchange for earning a commission. Advertisers contractually agree to work with a publisher, then provide the publisher with creative – in the form of links, banner or text ads or even unique phone numbers – that the publisher incorporates into their website.
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The final component that completes the affiliate relationship triangle is the consumer. The consumer is the one who actually sees the ad and then makes an action (either by clicking a link or by submitting their information via a form) that takes them from the publisher’s website to the advertiser’s to complete the action, which we call a conversion.
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How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Let’s face it: technology, especially the internet, can be pretty daunting to try to grasp, and with terms like malware, cursor and spam, it also seems pretty dangerous. So kudos to the guys who decided e-commerce and affiliate marketing should rely on an innocuous technology called a “cookie.”
In affiliate marketing, one task that cookies manage is to remember the link or ad the visitor to a website clicks on. Cookies can also store the date and time of the click, they can even be used to remember what kind of websites or content you like most. There are many different types of web cookies and uses, but the kind of cookie affiliate marketing relies on is called a first-party cookie.
When a user visits a publisher’s website and clicks an advertiser’s creative ad, the visitor's browser receives the CJ tracking cookie that identifies the advertiser, the publisher, the specific creative and commission amount. This data is stored within the link information in what are called “parameters” and can include even more anonymous data used for attribution.
The sample link below includes some of the identifiers Commission Junction uses to enable proper tracking and auditing of the affiliate marketing process:
<a href="http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-5377085-10590299?sid=012-123" target="_blank"> webservices.cj.com</a><img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-5377085-10590299" width="1" height="1" border="0" />
- PID: 5377085
PID (publisher website ID) is used to identify the publisher’s website. A CJ publisher may have multiple PIDs under one single CJ account (e.g. if you maintain multiple websites, you will have multiple PIDs). - AID: 10590299
The AID (ad ID) is a number which identifies a specific link and enables CJ to track creative performance as well as credit the publisher when they earn a commissionable transaction. Because each link has a unique AID, it also allows CJ to identify the appropriate advertiser. - SID: 012-123
SID (shopper ID) enables publisher to track where their referred actions originated so they can target and/or reward their unique shoppers. When the visitor makes a purchase or completes a lead form, that transaction is tracked and recorded by Commission Junction.
Links & Learning
Hopefully you’ve learned some basics about how to be an affiliate or an advertiser and how affiliate marketing works.
Below are a few resources out there to help you learn some additional tips and tricks.
CJ Support Center
Our Support Center has a wealth of answers and popular topics that will answer many of your questions. Only publishers and advertisers in the CJ Network have access.Find out more »
I.A.B.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the U.S.Find out more »
HTML Learning Websites
There are hundreds of HTML tutorials websites like www.htmlgoodies.com or www.w3schools.com where you can learn the basics.Find out more »
Get a Real (Good) Job!
With headquarters in Santa Barbara and offices in Westborough, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Westlake Village, and international offices in London, Paris, Munich, Madrid and Stockholm (with more on the way), CJ is truly a global company with limitless opportunity to grow from within. After all, the average CJ employee has been with the company over 4 years, so something must be keeping them here! We think we’ve figured out why… and once you get here, think you will too.
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