Commission Junction is one of the 800 gorillas of Affiliate Marketing. CJ is part of the publicly held Value Click, which grossed $39 million last year in marketing programs, including affiliate programs, email marketing and software for advertising agencies.
CJ manages several big name collaboration programs, including Home Depot, Yahoo and Citibank.
Can you make money with Commission Junction? Like most affiliate programs, it depends on the theme or niche of your site, and how well you match your content with CJ programs.
Our spider passed the site recently, and I made a list of the major categories and their rating of Earning Per Click (EPC). You will recall that EPC is calculated by taking the amount of the advertiser's commission payment and dividing it by the amount of clicks received by the advertiser, so EPC measures how much each click is to the publisher. We used a 7-day EPC, which weighed on EPC for the past seven days.
The spider also saves the top ten advertisers in each category / section, and as some advertisers are in more than one category / sub-category it tends to tilt the results slightly (top). We have come up with a value of .56 (fifty-six cents) per click on the board that evaluates all categories and subsections.
We have created a metaphor we call True EPC or TEPC, which measures Real Revenue with One Click, with the advantage of one hundred clicks used by companies like CJ to make the numbers look bigger.
Note: I have included only the first 5 categories here, and only part of the data. All details can be found at www.affiliateblog.com.
Here is a list of the most interesting by category:
Real EPC / High Advertising category with TEPC
Financial Services $2.41 / Get Smart $32.98
Insurance $1.25 / American Health $2.98
Home and Garden $1.16 / Sun setter $8.21
Web Services $1.13 / Yahoo Hosting $3.75
Computer & Electronics $0.87
Accessories $0.80
Health and Beauty $0.76
What does it all mean? However, to me, it means that if you have a website that makes visitors interested in Loans, Insurance, Sun setter awnings or Yahoo hosting, you should be a member of the Commission Junction.
Generally, if you think you can get a decent click on Finance, Home and Garden, Insurance or Web Services, I can include Commission Junction ads.
Another comment on the top 4 ads: what impresses me the most is that a small Yahoo text ad at # 4 costs about $4. I actually signed up for that program myself, and I will post it on this site if I get the chance. My statistics tell me that a 1: 5 to 1: 7 click triggers a subscription.
What is the side of all this data? There are some very bad sections at CJ. If your site is about web services advice, handbags, new age, car travel or rental, commercial insurance or weddings, I can look elsewhere. Another way to interpret the data would be to say that the advertisers CJ has in those categories are not pulling well. What’s more, it could be that the type of sites that sign with CJ aren’t just attracting the kind of people who can click on ads in those categories. No matter how you cut it, it still looks the same
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