CJ's Voucher Code email to Advertisers

In line with our involvement with the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council (incidentally we have just signed up for another year’s membership) we have sent the following communication to all CJ advertisers this afternoon. The purpose is to instruct advertisers on how to fill in all fields in our voucher code feed to enable affiliates to comply with the new policy.

Recently Commission Junction has completed a voucher code feed which is now available to all the voucher code publishers joined to your program. The purpose of this email is to provide you with some best practices to get the most out of your voucher publishers and increase your conversions whilst providing a positive user experience for your customers.

The feed will provide voucher publishers with more accurate data which will help them to comply with the IAB Voucher Code Policy of which Commission Junction is a signatory.

Many of your already provide voucher codes in two ways. The first way is to provide custom codes to small groups of voucher publishers. Typically, these codes can be exclusive to one or provided to a small closed group of publishers. The second method, used for providing codes to a wider audience of publishers is to flag your Commission Junction links as ‘coupons’. This email will discuss how to best use this second method.

This is what you would see when uploading or changing a link

Each of these fields will correspond to a particular column in the new voucher feed. For most of the fields you can fill these in as you would a normal banner. There are some notable changes to make however:

After naming your link, please select ‘Coupon’ from the ‘Promotion’ field. This means that this link will be picked up by the voucher feed. Next, ‘Set promotion start and end on’ field. If you do not have specific start and end dates, then choose the current date as the start, and enter a date far in the future for the end date (such as February 11th 2015). Do not choose ‘Ongoing’ as this will leave the end date blank in the feed which may lead publishers to think that this field is invalid or has been overlooked.

Now, continue to fill in the following fields as normal until you get to ‘Description’. It is in this field that you need to enter two things; the description of the offer and the actual voucher code. Please enter your description as normal. At the end of your description you need to display the code in this format: Code: EXAMPLE. Make sure that there is a space between the ‘:’ and the code. The code should be in capital letters. So voucher code ‘x7s9d’ should be inputted as Code: X7S9D.

An example below of the description followed by the code:

Free hamper worth £25 when you spend £50 or more. Code: XBM6

After you’ve completed the ‘Description’ field, continue to the ‘Publisher Group’ field. Please ensure that you choose ‘All Publishers’ as doing this will enable your voucher link to be displayed in the voucher feed.

Fill in the other fields as normal, taking care to make sure that the deep link URL is working and successfully landing on the offer. Whilst the feed will include all possible fields – coupon, free shipping, seasonal link, sale/discount etc – those links flagged as coupon need to have coupon codes included. For all other link types please follow best practices to ensure your promotional links have accurate descriptions, deep linking and start/end dates.

If you have any questions please do not hestitate to contact us.