I have spent the past couple of days fixing ads on several different Blogs.  This all started because my strongest payer last year dropped off to zip.  They used to manage their own Affiliate program and I knew some of the principals of the company personally and could talk to them when ever I wanted to try something new.  They even let me customize some very targeted campaigns which were unique to my account only, and man they converted great!

Well a couple of months ago they switched their affiliate program over to a well known Affiliate management company and the notices that I received were not to worry, everything would still work the same.  What was I thinking?

Nothing worked the same.  Number one I got absolutely no credit for any of the purchases made from my websites until I started to fix things yesterday.  There was no link tracking because my account number was not applied to any of the channels in the banner or link ads.  Of course not.  I should have known better.

So after the first scramble to copy and past all new code into over a hundred ad campaigns that I had running, I started to look at some of the other companies and products older ads to see if they worked alright or not.  Most did, some didn’t.  Some of the advertisers had gone bye bye.  Some of them had switched affiliate management companies, and with some the links were just plain broken.  Who knew?

Commission Junction (CJ.com) has a spot that you can quick check by going to “Run Reports - Performance Reports - Invalid Links Generating Traffic.” I did find one company that had quit advertising with CJ so I had to take their banners off my sites.  Go figure.

I’m sure that if I had been paying attention to email notices through the year I would have been appropriately advised.  But I delete more emails than I ever read and probably just missed the info.  Credit Card advertisers are notorious for changing their programs on a weekly or monthly basis, so I just quit using any of their programs.  Let them get their free leads from all the other jerks like me that don’t stay on top of things.

So here is my point to all this.  We accumulate hundreds or perhaps thousands of ads on our sites and some of them do not pay you a penny.  Unlike Adsense it is OK for you to click on your own banner ads to test them, unless they are an unusual Pay-Per-Click program.  I urge you all to start the New Year by checking to make sure that you are receiving the proper benefit for all your hard work.

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

Rich Hill

richhill asked this questions on December 30th, 2008.

Posted in: Make Money Online. Also try searching: affiliate ads, Affiliate Programs

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