Invalid Clicks: Whose Traffic Is It Anyway?

Adam Viener has an interesting post about CJ’s passing of expired links on to the merchant with no compensation for the affiliate, which differs from their previous practice of routing to a non-active page.

Adam raises the point that it would be nice to have a voice in this as it is “our traffic” that is being passed to the merchant through the network…

Wiseaff: Invalid Clicks – Affiliate Networks Can Do Better!: “In the past CJ used to link those bad links to a ‘No longer active page’, but appears to now pass the old expired link and traffic on to the merchant without compensation. I am not so sure how I fell about that personally. It makes it harder for me to identify bad links when I click on them, but can understand it’s a better user experience.

Honestly, I think that if they are not going to pay us for the traffic, than it should be up to the affiliate how this invalid traffic is passed, it might be nice to actually let us define a url where the traffic goes so we can track it and monetize it, after all it’s OUR TRAFFIC, not theirs.

I agree with Adam off the top of my head, but I think there are other implications for calling traffic “ours” in affiliate marketing… there’s some sort of proportional ratio behind traffic in my opinion. How much of a potential customer’s decision to follow an affiliate link comes from an affiliate’s site and how much comes from the merchant’s creative?

Nice piece, Adam. More of my thoughts soon…