I have worked with Commission Junction (CJ) as both a publisher and an advertiser for years. Personally I find the system somewhat confusing, and the GUI outdated - but - it does work, especially for certain types of affiliates/products. Here is the first in what I hope is a series of real world examples for publishers and advertisers.
As a publisher, I often want to link into specific products or services of an advertiser - not just their homepage or a generic topic page. Some advertisers make deep linking possible - and some don't. For those who do, these steps should help you out:
Log into your CJ account, and click on "Get Links".
Then click the "By Relationship" sub-menu - you should all the programs you belong to.
Click on the "View Links" or "View Products" link for the program you want to work with, and on that page find their deep linking option (note: this will only be available if the advertiser has made it so in the system).
All the way to the right of the deep link row, there are links to "Get JavaScript
Get HTML" - click on which ever you prefer.
When the window pops up, paste in whatever advertiser URL you want to link to in the "Destination URL" field (you should have their site open in another window with the page you want to link to) then click the "Update Link Code" button.
You will get a URL returned that is coded to that specific page, with the advertiser name as the anchor text (unless you change it first in the "Text Hyperlink" field). You can then change that to whatever you want, or, use it to make an image a link, etc.
Copy and paste the link code from the "Code" field wherever you want on your blog or website, but remember that linking to individual items may eventually produce a not found page when and if that item is out of stock.
Good luck!
Anybody have advice on how to increase organic affiliate income? I've done well for years at Adsense, but barely a dime from affiliate marketing.
Thanks
I think you really have to have a user base that follows what you do and listens to your recommendations to succeed with affiliate programs. This is for bloggers or niche content sites. The other success I have seen is the exact opposite - large sites that can utilize data feeds and catalogs to present a lot of items. Intent is a big issue for affiliate marketing - if your site has nothing to do with shopping for the item or service offered, even if the topic is relevant, your traffic just may not be people who are "shopping" or ready to purchase, but just looking for information.
I've seen 2 articles w/ roughly this explanation, but I don't see the destination url when I click on either banner, text, advanced, or keyword urls in the CJ interface.
Thank you! I have been trying to figure out how to do a deep link for quite a while now. This was very helpful information!
So if the destination url doesn't appear, does that mean there is no possible way to deeplink, or is it something we'd have to run down with the advertiser?
Matt the deeplink option is advertiser by advertiser - at least that was how it was when I wrote this. You will probably have to ask them. What program if you don't mind - maybe I could poke around and see.
I'm looking to add some CJ products to my site right now, have seen them added on other sites WITH deep linking, yet for the best of me I cannot find how to do this.
I mean there is no Destination URL, as I've seen in some screenshots from tutorials.
Wouldn't it be normal for CJ to somehow mark the links that have deep linking enabled ? It's ridiculous, do we have to search link by link ?
Thank you for the post though, it pointed me in the right direction :)
The thing is that YOU have to supply the destination URL - you need to have been on the "advertisers" site and surfed to the item you want to sell/promote. I agree that CJ does this poorly, other affiliate sites make this much easier (sometimes).