Affiliate Network User Interfaces: CJ, Performics, Linkshare

From my recent build of giftcardfavors.com It was necessary for me to do 2 big tasks for each post. 1) I had to determine if the merchant had gift cards for their store and 2) see if they had links either in the standard formats or product catalog for those gift cards. If yes, proceed with building a link and testing. Keep reading, I let you in on the trick to making this more efficient at the bottom.

Commission Junction (CJ) was definetly the best to work with. The tool to search the product catalog for “gift cards” and return with images and tracking code, sped things up considerably. I am also a fan of the way they have the program “directory” to find new merchants across dozens of categories.

Side note on CJ: Merchants are having a hard time seeing the value in affiliates when they are NOT a 4-5 bar earner. How do expect to grow your program?

Linkshare, not bad at all. They have a tool available for most merchants that has a split screen. I navigated through the merchants site on the right, when I found the gift cards I just had to copy/paste the url into the link builder on the left. pretty simple. Not a lot of merchants in the this network anymore.

I would say Performics needs a bunch of help. They do have a build your own link tool, but I have found there to be a 10-20 minute delay in the links before they activate, I needed to keep a list of posts to go back to and test/publish.

Shareasale, kind of hard to get around for exactly what I needed, but they also have a link builder that works very good. I haven’t found a lot of merchants large enough to offer gift cards though.

The only saving grace on this project was using Popshops.com. It allowed me to easily find all merchants with terms i searched for (”gift cards” & “gift certificates”) in their product catalog. It returned a list by affiliate network, I could test the link, review the landing pages and create a list of merchants I needed to go signup for.