Commission Junction

The CJ Affiliate Program is tagged similar to Paid Search. The C3 tag present on your landing page captures the data from the query string in the destination URL.   This article will provide specific details for tagging your CJ Affiliate Program and retrieving spend data to match at the Publisher level. 

In this article

Read This Tagging Rule First

When adding parameters to any URL, there's a simple rule which MUST be followed or your links may stop working.  The rule has to do with whether you use a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) when adding to your link.  It is really simple:  the first parameter added to a link has to use the question mark.  For example, if your link is http://mydomain.com/123.html and you're adding a C3 Metrics tag for CJ, the resulting URL would be following:
http://mydomain.com/123.html?c3ch=CJ&c3nid=CJ-[ENTER Publisher ID (PID) and REMOVE BRACKETS]
Notice how the first parameter is using a question mark (/?)
If your link was instead   http://mydomain.com/123.html/?utm_source=CJ&utm_creative=red-dress, the resulting URL would be:

Notice how the parameter for C3 is utilizing an ampersand (&) prior to the C3 tags.

CJ ULR Append / Tagging Options

There are two options for tagging links coming from your CJ Affiliate Program, which are dependent on how granular you wish to go.

Option #1) Granular Tagging at the Publisher Level
If you wish to learn all your can about your CJ program and discover which affiliates are driving value at the top of the funnel, vs jumping in at the last second, you will want to tag at the Publisher level.  This means that you will be adding the Publisher ID or PID to every destination URL.  Unfortunately, this is NOT a change which you can make on your own within the CJ dashboard.  You will need to make a request to your Account Manager at CJ to add the following append to your URLS:

&c3ch=CJ&c3nid=CJ-[ENTER Publisher ID (PID) and REMOVE BRACKETS]

Following the tagging rules, if this is the only append in your destination URLS use the following instead:

/?c3ch=CJ&c3nid=CJ-[ENTER Publisher ID (PID) and REMOVE BRACKETS]

How To Get Spend Data from CJ

Log into CJ and navigate to the Reports tab

Change the Performance pull-down to Website as shown below and click 'Run Report'

Export the report as shown below

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