Analyzing Commission Junction

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