Forgive me for a mini rant here. I have been dealing with affiliate marketing since 1996, when Amazon started their affiliate program and I owned an ISP called Cyberia in York PA. (Links: Cyberia 1996 | Tony’s Archived Site 1998)
So, Affiliate Marketing has been around for a while now. Why is it that the only network I have seen that is able to show me an invalid click report is Commission Junction?
How hard is it to track the links that come through the network that not working because of dead links, inactive merchants, or disabled programs?
This is invaluable information folks!
When I log in to CJ today, it shows 6 invalid clicks, and I can tell that Earthlink (oddly enough the company who ultimately acquired Cyberia through a series of acquisitions) is no longer an active merchant on CJ and I have an old outdated link getting clicks on my Great-ISP-Deals.com site.
Now I can take action to either remove them from my site, or figure out if they moved their program somewhere else.
In the past CJ used to link those bad links to a "No longer active page", but appears to now pass the old expired link and traffic on to the merchant without compensation. I am not so sure how I fell about that personally. It makes it harder for me to identify bad links when I click on them, but can understand it’s a better user experience.
Honestly, I think that if they are not going to pay us for the traffic, than it should be up to the affiliate how this invalid traffic is passed, it might be nice to actually let us define a url where the traffic goes so we can track it and monetize it, after all it’s OUR TRAFFIC, not theirs.
What do the rest of you think?
- All networks should have an invalid click report, and show this number of invalid clicks on the login screen or via a daily email.
- Networks should not pass non-monetizing outdated links on to the merchant for free, they should let the affiliates define a URL where we would like this traffic sent so it can be monetized and tracked.
Leave a Reply