Has anyone worked with Commission Junction?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

My demand gen team wants to start working with this company CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction), they asked me to talk to their technical team about how to track leads they will be sending to us in Marketo.

So I got on the call with them and a few minutes in I had a feeling that something is off, I asked them if they worked with Marketo customers before and they asked me "What is Marketo?"

My demand gen folks insist that we try to make it work, but we keep walking in circles with their tech people, they have no idea how Marketo works and I haven't been able yet to decipher what they need from us and translate it into Marketo-speak.

For example, they keep saying that every time someone comes from their link and submits a form on our website we need to send them an OID. I assumed they mean either a lead ID, as lead id is the unique identifier in the Marketo database, or a tracking parameter from their link that we should capture on Marketo form; I asked them if either one of these is what they need and they said they were not sure

It's getting frustrating at this point, so if you worked with these guys, please let me know how you set it up in Marketo

Funny thing is they seem to be using Marketo themselves US Affiliate Form - 2016 Marketo Step 1 | CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction)

[Emily_Jansen1]

Did they send you an integration guide?  We received a unique one from them and it greatly helped our setup. It talks through the required fields and expected integration steps for the conversion tracking.

Our first step was to create hidden fields on our forms to capture the parameters (like cjevent) in the affiliate URLs that will be sending traffic to the landing page. Once someone fills out the form these fields then save in Marketo (and Salesforce) and allow us to tie back any closed deals that come out of the program and notify Commission Junction for deal credit.

The integration guide that they give you will include a conversion pixel and some field values. The conversion tag resides in the HTML body of your Thank You, confirmation, and/or receipt page, which displays after the valid sale or lead process step. OID is part of this tag and is the unique order identifier. When a user clicks on a CJ link a cookie is stored on their browser containing data that can later be retrieved through the conversion tag to correlate an action with the ad and time of the click.

In all honesty, we had a really hard time setting this up and it took us about 2 months of testing to have our program up and running correctly.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Thank you so very much, Emily! Nope, they didn't share any guides

OID is part of this tag and is the unique order identifier. When a user clicks on a CJ link a cookie is stored on their browser containing data that can later be retrieved through the conversion tag to correlate an action with the ad and time of the click.

Now we are talking, I was asking them if OID is something that comes from their tracking link, and they told me "OID should come from your database", whatever that means.

Do you mind sharing the name of the person at CJ you were working with in a private message? I might ask them to add her/him to our case

[Emily_Jansen1]

The OID parameter is part of their tag BUT the value needs to be generated by your system. You can use the lead ID but you need to find a way to pass it back into the OID parameter which will most likely require developer help. We use some custom javascript that sets the value as a random number.

As an advertiser, you can find the details about how your integration is currently set up by going to CJ Account Manager>Account>Settings. CJ Client Integration should give you a list of account parameters that CJ can pass to your system (you pick which ones you want -- we use cjevent, PID, AID and SID) and then you need to pass certain parameters and values back to them (like OID, CID, Type, ContainerTagID).

Our integration guide was a version of this and goes into more details about the values you need to send back to them: https://developer.cj.com/techguides/en/advanced_integration.pdf