CJ Deep Linking Guide

What it is

A deep link is an affiliate link that drops the shopper on a precise inner page of your site rather than the front door. Normally a CJ tracking link points at one fixed landing page you've set up. A deep link lets the partner choose the destination themselves — they take a URL like yourstore.com/running-shoes/trail-x, run it through CJ, and get back a tracking link that lands the customer on that exact shoe while still recording the click.

Think of it like the difference between a taxi that only ever drops you at the airport entrance and one that takes you right up to your departure gate. The first one technically gets you there, but you then have to wander through the whole terminal to find what you came for. A deep link skips the wandering: the reader clicks, and they're standing in front of the exact thing the article was talking about.

Why it matters

People rarely write content about a homepage. A blogger reviewing your noise-cancelling headphones wants to link to those headphones, not to your store's main page where the reader has to search all over again. Every extra click between the content and the product is a chance to lose the sale — and on mobile, where attention is thin, that drop-off is brutal.

Deep linking also unlocks the most valuable affiliates you have: review sites, comparison tables, "best of" round-ups, and creators who mention dozens of individual SKUs. These partners simply can't do their job well if they can only point at your homepage. Turn deep linking on and you make your programme worth their effort; leave it off and you quietly push them toward competitors who let them link wherever they like. Better landing relevance also tends to lift conversion rates, which means higher earnings per click for the partner and more revenue for you from the same traffic.

How it works

From your side as the advertiser (the brand running the programme), enabling and supporting deep linking looks like this:

1. Switch deep linking on for your programme. In your CJ account settings, allow partners to create links to your own pages rather than restricting them to pre-built links only. This is the master switch that makes everything else possible.
2. Approve your destination domains. Tell CJ which domains are legitimately yours — your main store, any regional sites, your sale subdomain. Links that point to an unapproved domain won't track, so list every domain a partner might reasonably want to send traffic to.
3. Make sure tracking fires on every page. Your CJ conversion tag needs to be present and firing across the whole site, not just on the homepage or checkout. A deep link is only useful if the click and the eventual sale are both recorded wherever the customer lands.
4. Handle redirects cleanly. If a deep-linked URL later moves or 301-redirects, confirm your tracking survives the hop. Broken or stripped parameters after a redirect are a classic reason deep-link clicks vanish from reporting.
5. Give partners a deep link tool or instructions. Point affiliates to CJ's link generator (often a bookmarklet or in-platform builder) and a short note on how to wrap one of your URLs. The easier you make this, the more partners actually use it.
6. Test a real deep link end to end. Build a deep link to an inner product page yourself, click it, complete a test order, and confirm the click and sale both appear in reporting against the right link. Do this before you tell partners it's live.
7. Communicate it to your partners. A feature nobody knows about gets used by nobody. Send a short message announcing that deep linking is available and give one or two example pages worth promoting.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting to approve all your domains. Partners build perfectly good deep links to a regional or sale subdomain you never registered with CJ, the clicks don't track, and everyone assumes the feature is broken. List every domain up front.
• Tracking tag missing on inner pages. The tag lives on the homepage and checkout but not the product templates, so deep-linked landings record nothing until the customer happens to move to a tracked page. Audit the whole site, not just the obvious pages.
• Redirects that strip the tracking parameters. A tidy-up of your URL structure or a forced https/www redirect silently drops the CJ click identifier, so sales stop attributing. Always re-test deep links after any redirect or URL change.
• Leaving it switched off by default. Many programmes never enable deep linking at all, then wonder why content and review partners underperform. If you sell more than a handful of products, it should almost always be on.

Reporting tips

Once deep linking is live, your reporting gets richer because you can see which destination pages partners actually send traffic to. Pull a report that breaks performance down by landing URL and you'll quickly spot your hero products — the pages that convert deep-link clicks at the highest rate. Those are the items worth featuring in newsletters and giving to your strongest partners.

Watch for deep-linked clicks that arrive but never convert: a high click count against a particular URL with near-zero sales often points to a page problem (out of stock, broken layout, slow load) rather than a partner problem. Compare conversion rate on deep-linked traffic versus homepage-landing traffic — if deep links convert noticeably better, that's a clear, evidence-backed reason to push more partners toward using them. Finally, keep an eye on destination URLs you don't recognise; an unfamiliar domain or a competitor's parameter sneaking into the data is worth investigating.

When to use / when not to use

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