Modern Digital Marketing for Affiliates: Q&A with CJ Affiliate’s Scott Ginsberg

Irina Marciano

January 25, 2017

Can you tell us a little about CJ Affiliate by Conversant and your role with the company?

CJ Affiliate by Conversant is the leading global performance marketing network. We are committed to delivering solutions to allow our marketers, both advertisers and publishers, the ability to engage the omni-channel consumer wherever they are in their decision journey – online, offline, and cross-device.

CJ Affiliate has been a publisher-centric company since its founding in 1998. We made it our vision to create an equitable network that would make it easy for publishers and advertisers to connect. Our competitors were primarily focused on addressing the needs of advertisers, but we realized early on that digital advertising is a two-sided industry that requires support and advocacy for both advertiser and publisher needs. We needed to give more support and transparency to publishers in order to help them build the type of long-term advertising relationships that benefit everyone.

I joined the company as the VP of Publisher Development in 2005. Coming from a traditional advertising background, I was attracted to the transparency and accountability that CJ Affiliate offered to both publishers and advertisers, and the innovation that the company was bringing to the affiliate marketing space. CJ Affiliate by Conversant is the market leader in affiliate marketing, and we attribute this to the success that publishers and advertisers alike have been able to realize through our network.

What makes CJ Affiliate different from other ad networks?

CJ Affiliate by Conversant is now the largest affiliate network in the world. Besides allowing our publishers to connect with the largest number of advertisers possible, our position as the market leader has given us unique insight into industry needs and trends. We are able to see what drivers are helping our top affiliates succeed, and ensure we are meeting their needs and provide best practices and strategies derived from our vast network to ensure that publishers are set up for success. In addition, CJ Affiliate is innovation-driven. We look beyond today’s needs and continually assess where the industry is going and drive innovation to provide greater tools and insight for sustainable success. Being one step ahead has helped us become the market leader.

One of the key trends we’ve been seeing is the increasing importance of data. Our vision is to provide our publishers with truly actionable data. We are bringing modern digital marketing to affiliates by offering audience profiling, relationship recommendations, ad personalization, cross device and cross channel tracking and much more. We see that publishers that make informed decisions have the most success; for that reason, a big part of what CJ Affiliates focuses on is bringing the best forecasting, reporting, and analysis to our publishers.

Speaking of trends, what do you see happening in the digital media industry today?

Well, first and foremost, it’s data. Actionable data has been transforming the industry. In addition, the continuous shift from desktops to mobile and social has also had significant effects. Desktop tracking is no longer sufficient – affiliates must have insight into multi-device tracking to understand their customer’s behavior. It’s more important than ever to be able to tap into the consumer’s journey.

From an even higher level view, one of the largest trends that we’ve seen is the move towards borderless ecommerce. Now, no matter where an affiliate is located in the world, they have the ability to expand globally and reach new consumers. The opportunities that this new landscape provides are incredible. We’re reaching audiences in over 200 countries. Affiliate marketing was always meant to be global, but now we’re seeing this become a reality.

Is that why CJ decided to partner with Payoneer?

Absolutely. The CJ Network is truly global, and so we understand how challenging the global payments process is. There are so many regulations, hidden costs, and general complexity in this space. It was important for us to make sure that our affiliates could receive payments easily, securely, and in their local currency, no matter where they were in the world. We also wanted to work with a partner who could integrate via APIs, so that affiliates can have a singular payment solution when they work with CJ. In short, we needed a partner who was both innovative and dependable, and who could put the payment needs of our publishers first, the same way we do.

Payoneer is the global leader in cross border payments when it comes to experience, capabilities, reach and scale, so they were the obvious choice for a global payments partner.

Can you give us some of your top tips for affiliate success on the CJ platform?

Identify your top areas of need and set clear goals. This allows you to communicate your intentions and needs clearly with partners and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
Build marketing strategies and prioritize resources that directly tie into meeting your goals. This often requires assessing the technology and user experience needed to meet these such as having a mobile friendly, social media optimized site.
Make sure you optimize your website with professional design and quality content that engages the visitor. Maintaining your website is also crucial to making sure you get the most high-value traffic.
Look at your content and match it with the right opportunities. If you’re a blogger, you don’t necessarily just want to do display advertising, you also want to write about the product and put a text link in. Affiliates need to consider all this when optimizing their strategies.
Finally – data, data, data! I can’t emphasize this one enough. Use the actionable data that’s available from the CJ platform to improve your website. For example: if you put a link up, check the conversions on it. Run a report a see which of your links are getting the best conversions, or which coupons are resulting the most valuable behavior. Which call to action is most effective? Affiliate marketing is always a learning process, so the more info you have, the better decisions you can make.

If I want to sign up for CJ Affiliate, where do I do that?

Just click here!

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