FYI
I just manually integrated several thousand datafeed links from six Commission Junction merchants into one of my web sites, and made an interesting discovery: when I added "
sid=" tags* into links to Wiley (book publisher, John Wiley & Sons), the links generated an error on the Wiley web site.
After some experimentation, I determined that the problem was that I'd included the underscore (_) character in my
sid= tags, and Wiley's server choked on that. (It didn't matter whether I put the
sid= tag before or after the
url= tag.) Basic alphanumeric values ("12345", "ABC123") worked fine within the
sid= tag.
I finally decided to just drop all the
sid= tags from the Wiley links, rather than spend the time required to manually code them differently from the other
CJ links (or to recode all the
CJ links).
The same format of
sid= links (with embedded underscores) work fine for the other merchants' links.
*/ The
sid= tag is
CJ's equivalent for the SAS
afftrack= tag, which can be used by publishers to insert a tracking code which is later displayed in the affiliate network's reports alongside transaction data.
Code:
http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-1234567-12345678?sid=my_text_goes_here&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.merchantsite.com%2Fproducts%2Fproduct-name-1234
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?afftrack=my_text_goes_here&b=12345&u=123456&m=1234&urllink=www.merchantname.com/product-name-1234
