Alyson Gagne

Assessment

I lead the assessment of the publisher signup experience and discovered two important facts:

First, I spoke with dozens of advertisers and heard over and over that they were frustrated by their attempts to find partners in the CJ network because there were too many inactive or low quality publishers in the network that finding partners who are even just actively logging in is like finding a needle in a haystack. Because of that, most advertisers simply don’t bother to try finding partners within the CJ platform, and look to outside tools to accomplish this.

Second, I analyzed the behavior of new publishers to identify trends. CJ has a dormancy process that removes publisher accounts that have gone six months without earning a commission. However when looking at newly signed up publishers, I found that the vast majority of publisher accounts do not log back in after the day that they sign up for their account. The vast majority never completed setting up their account, including such crucial steps as providing program details or banking information.

I was able to identify three main types of publisher signups:

1. Potential publishers who sign up for an account just to learn about CJ, but who aren’t ready to start yet. Some take what they learn and go back to build their website, while others decide it’s not the right fit for them and just move on. Either way, these potential users are just trying to learn, not earn commissions.
2. Potential publishers who sign up expecting their CJ account to be something that it is not. Many inexperienced content producers expect affiliate marketing to be a get rich quick scheme, but when they log in they learn it’s actually going to be a lot of work, and they abandon.
3. Potential publishers who are making a good faith attempt to be successful as a publisher, but who don’t know enough to get started and the CJ tools do not set them up for success, so they get flustered and abandon.

For all three of these user types, their accounts remain in the CJ network, visible to advertisers, but they are not engaged and advertisers have no chance of partnering with them.

Actions

In order to address these issues, I spearheaded the initiative to roll out a new publisher onboarding workflow, including the following:

• The introduction of a new “onboarding checklist” that walked publishers step by step through the process of creating their accounts, so that they are set up for success and ready to start promoting advertisers and making money when they get started.
• The introduction of a new “onboarding” account status, where publisher accounts do not appear in the network until they complete every step in the onboarding workflow and click to activate. This meant that accounts that aren’t ready to partner with advertisers are not visible to those advertisers.
• The introduction of an in-context interface walk-through, so users can learn where everything is and how the product works. This allowed users to answer distracting questions like “how will I get paid?” so they could focus on the more immediate task, which is setting up their account correctly.
• A website verification workflow that allows potential publishers to verify ownership of their promotional property, via a tag or third party login for websites or social media accounts, so that advertisers can trust that publishers are who they say they are.
• A completely redefined set of publisher categories and promotional methods, so that publishers can actually describe what they do and how they do it in a way advertisers can understand and find.

Outcomes

After the introduction of the publisher onboarding workflow, the total number of publishers who joined the network decreased, but importantly, the number of publishers who went on to be successful increased substantially.

In just the first six months after launching, the new publisher onboarding workflow reduced the rate of publishers who were deactivated for dormancy by a third.

It also increased the number of publishers who were able to earn a commission by a third

“Cleaning up” the publisher network was an important prerequisite for other larger initiatives as well. Having publishers verify ownership of their websites and social accounts enabled future development, specifically integration with third party website and social engagement tools. (For more on this see the page on the partner discovery tools!)

Resources

Blog post announcing the launch of the new workflow

The video below isn’t mine, but it gives a full walk-through of the signup experience I built: