Here at CJ Affiliate, we are always preparing for Q4. One great way to do this is to run an activation campaign in Q3 to ensure that you are promoting your top partners in Q4.
What is an Activation Campaign?
An activation campaign is one of the easiest ways to increase your commissions. If you've been a publisher for a few years, you're probably joined to a few hundred advertiser programs but only a portion of them are active on your site. Every publisher can benefit from a once-a-year review to find the top tier partners that they may have forgotten about.
To do this you just need to run two reports in your CJ account and compare them. Here are instructions for running the reports:
The First Report: My Advertisers (Active)
This report is run from the Advertisers tab. Click on the Advertisers tab in the navigation bar at the top of the page. When you get to the Advertisers page, click on the My Advertisers (Active) radio button and click the Search button. After you hit Search, the total of joined advertisers will show in the top left of the page. Click on the box next to the button and it will choose all of your joined advertisers to be included in the report. Once you've done that, click on the Download icon on the top right of the page.
This report takes a few minutes to generate, so you may want to grab a snack or a cup of coffee while you're waiting. When it downloads, it will be in CSV format and will contain all of the program terms for all of your advertisers. It's a big file. You may want to delete all columns except for Advertiser ID, Advertiser Name, and Network Ranking.
The Second Report: Performance by Advertiser
The next step is to run a Performance Report. Click on the Reports tab in the Navigation bar and choose Performance from the drop-down menu. From the Performance by drop-down menu, choose Advertiser. From the Trend drop-down menu, choose No Trend. Under Date Range, I recommend a Custom date range of at least three months. Click on Run Report. Download it and compare it to the list of joined advertisers.
Interpreting the Results
The Performance Report will always be shorter than the full list of advertisers. Any advertisers missing from the Performance Report are not active. Check your site to find out if they are being promoted. Do they have a store page? Are the links active? In my experience, publishers are surprised to find that there are many valuable partners on the list.
Use the Links tab to find their best offers and products. If any of the advertisers on the list are a good fit for upcoming promotions or Q4 placements that you have available, reach out to them.
This year plan to get ahead by reviewing your full list of partners. You and your advertisers will benefit in Q4 from an activation campaign in Q3. If you have any additional questions about how to prepare, let us know in the comment section below.
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