Analyzing Commission Junction
Author: Matt DeAngelis

Commission Junction is one of the 800 pound gorillas of
Affiliate Marketing. CJ is part of the publicly held
ValueClick, which earned $39 million last year on marketing
programs, including affiliate programs, email marketing and
software for advertising agencies.

CJ handles affiliate programs for a lot of the big names,
including Home Depot, Yahoo and Citibank.

Can you make money with Commission Junction? Like most
affiliate programs it depend on the theme or niche of your web
site, and how well you match your content and the CJ programs.

Our spider ran through the site recently, and I've made a list
of the major categories and their average Earnings Per Click
(EPC). You will recall that EPC is calculated by taking the
total commission payout for the advertiser and dividing it by
the number of clicks that advertiser gets, so EPC measures how
profitable each click is for the publisher. We used 7 day EPC,
which measures EPC across the last seven days.

The spider also only saves the top ten advertisers in each
category/subcategory, and since some advertisers are in more
than one category/subcategory it tends to skew the results a
bit (higher). We came up with an average of .56 (fifty-six
cents) per click across the board averaging every category and
subcategory.

We've created a metric we call True EPC or TEPC, which measures
the actual Earnings Per Single Click, rather than the earnings
per hundred clicks that companies like CJ use to make the
numbers look bigger.

Note: I only included the first 5 categories here, and only
part of the data. All of the data can be found at
www.affiliateblog.com.

Here's a very interesting list by category:

Category True EPC / Top Ad & TEPC

Financial Services $ 2.41 / Get Smart $ 32.98
Insurance $ 1.25 / American Life $ 2.98
Home & Garden $ 1.16 / Sunsetter $ 8.21
Web Services $ 1.13 / Yahoo Hosting $ 3.75
Computer & Electronics $ 0.87
Accessories $ 0.80
Health & Beauty $ 0.76

What does it all mean? Well, to me it means that if you have a
website that gets visitors interested in Loans, Insurance,
Sunsetter awnings or Yahoo hosting, you should be a member of
Commission Junction.

More generally, if you think you can get decent clickthrough on
Finance, Home & Garden, Insurance or Web Services, I would
include some Commission Junction ads.

Some commentary on the top 4 ads: what strikes me right off the
bat is that the little Yahoo text ad at #4 pulls almost four
bucks. I actually signed up for that program myself, and I'm
going to put it on this site when I get the chance. My
calculations tell me that 1:5 to 1:7 clicks results in a
signup.

What's the flip side of all this data? There are categories
that aren't so great at CJ. If your site is about web services
advice, handbags, new age, car travel or rentals, commercial
insurance or weddings, I'd look elsewhere. Another way to
interpret the data would be to say that the marketers CJ has
for those categories don't pull well. Still another would be
that the type of sites that sign with CJ just don't attract the
type of people that would click on ads in those categories. No
matter how you slice it it still comes out the same — it seems
like CJ isn't the place to look to fill that ad space.

Not content with my mountain of data, I opened the firehose a
little more. I ran a program that compared the average EPC for
Pay-per-sale programs vs. Pay-Per-Lead programs. For per-sale,
the EPC was .36. For per-lead it was .67. Intutitively I would
say that advertisers pay more for sales than leads, so the
clickthrough on leads has to be much higher on CJ, which also
seems correct since less of a commitment is required from the
visitor for a lead than a sale. So if you have a choice in
programs between sale and lead, take the lead program.

So what did we learn here? It seems to me that if your site
visitors would respond to banners or text links about mortgage
financing, insurance, gardening or web services, add some CJ
banners to the mix. What the heck, add them anyway if you have
room, because experimentation is important to success in
affiliate marketing. If you have a site with content that fits
those categories or is a general interest or entertainment
site, there are many good programs to choose from at CJ.

Lastly, I did a quick comparison of the average Adsense payout
(using 80% of the average of keyword bids for different
categories), and Adsense comes out a better EPC about a quarter
of the time. So check Adsense first before you put up a CJ ad
that has an EPC of a dollar or more. A big banner ad vs. an
Adsense ad may seem like a good idea because more exposure may
translate into more clicks, but you can fit three Adsense text
ads in that banner space.

There are many hidden insights in the data, and I encourage you
to go to the website, print out the page and take a look. There
might be some terrific-paying programs you can ad to your
website.

I'd like to put together a free weekly email service that
provides stats like the ones on this page. If this is something
you might be interested in, drop me a line.


About The Author: Matt DeAngelis runs
http://www.AffiliateBlog.com. Matt is the former CTO of Modem
Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. Matt devised the
technology behind ad campaigns and online presence for a good
portion of the Fortune 100, including GE, AT&T and Compaq.

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