COMMISSION JUNCTION MERCHANT INTERFACE (Part I)

By Yash Waghela

INDEX Role of Affiliate Networks About CJ Merchant Interface Home Account Manage Publishers Links Report

Role of Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks play an important role in affiliate marketing.

It acts as a mediator between merchants and publishers

The main role of affiliate networks is to track the sales, clicks and

impressions coming through publishers.

Apart from this, it also acts as a platform through which publishers

and merchants can interact with each other.

Some of the Affiliate networks are as followed:

Commission Junction

ShareASale

PepperJam

LinkShare

LinkConnector

ClixGalore

AvantLink

About CJ CJ was started in 1998 by 5 students from the university of California Santa

Barbara.

In year 2000, CJ started CJ University which helped in bringing publishers

and advertisers under one roof from all over the world.

In 2008, CJ launched the Agency Support Services, this service is a boon

for the OPM and agencies who are managing the affiliate program for other

companies.

In 2011, CJ brings Pay Per Call services for their advertisers, which helps

companies to transform call center into revenue drivers.

Merchant Interface

CJ has one of the most attractive and clean interface as compared to

other networks.

The simple & transparent view makes it very simple for user to

understand.

A user can easily access any information from the “home” page easily

and can navigate through different sections.

HOME

Once the user logs into the account, he/she arrives at the “Home” page

by default.

Advertiser home contains 3 sections:

• Login Manager

• Messages

• Reports

From this section users can navigate to different sections in the interface.

Login Manager: This section gives the overview of the account. Viz. Account name, report period, commission paid to the publisher, sales generated in a current month, number of applications received for joining the affiliate program, any messages received from publishers etc.

It also has the option to download that stats in different formats like excel, csv etc.

Messages: This sections displays the announcements from Commission Junction team. Messages are like any announcement for maintenance work, updates on

new feature or a broadcast for advertisers. CJ also conducts some events and competitions on regular basis, so

announcement for such events are described in this section.

Reports: This is one of the most interesting section in the advertiser home. It gives a statics of your affiliate program including the Earning Per

Click (EPC) of last 7 days as well as 30 days. It also shows where your affiliate program stands in the network as well

as in your category by showing the rank. The lower the rank, the more popular is your affiliate program on the network.

It also shows the alerts if your account balance is below escrow balance (i.e $500)

ACCOUNT

This section gives the info about the account. Which includes merchant’s and his business information.

The sub-sections of this sections are:• Network Profile• Settings• User• Program Terms• Item Lists• Order Inquiry Manager

MANAGE PUBLISHERS

This section helps you manage the publishers.

In this section, you can see how many publisher applications are pending and

how many are approved.

Apart from this, you can also access the contact details and other information

about a specific publisher.

You can also search and delete the publishers from this section.

This section also allows you to group the publishers as per their performance or

other parameters.

The new tool from CJ called “Publisher Recruitment “ is in this section. This allows shows you the list of publishers who can be a best fit for

your affiliate program. And the most amazing thing is that, you can recruit them just by

clicking on it. Apart from this way, you can recruit a publisher if you know the

Publisher ID (PID), CID or a name of a publisher

LINKS

This section allows you to upload to text links and banners for the

publishers.

You can see the entire creative inventory in this section.

It also gives you the option to sort the creatives as per their types like

coupons, sweepstake, hot products etc.

You can view the specific type of banners by simply ticking the check

box on the left hand side of the page.

CJ also has the facility to upload the text links in a bulk.

REPORT

This is one of the most important section in the CJ interface.

As the name states, this section is responsible for displaying the reports

of the affiliate program.

Once we enter this section, we can see the performance on a graph.

Below the graph, it shows the day to day amount of sales or leads.

It also gives the details about the balance details of the client.

We can also edit the sales in this section.

THANK YOU!