There was a huge hubub a few months ago when the PepperJam Affiliate Network (run by Kris Jones) opened to the public. I signed up early in their release but I wanted to use the system a while before I threw my 0.02 in on the issue.

How does PepperJam stack up?

Dashboard

All of the graphics and interface on the entire program continually blow me away. It’s fast, easy to use, and well presented. The black background takes some people a while to get used to, but I actually enjoy a darker background color in many cases.

Grade: A

Reporting

I notice that clicks and impressions are reported within 2-3 hours very consistently. This is faster than the likes of CJ, but not quite real time. However, I have not had any stats changed or revised either, meaning the reporting is pretty spot on. Real time reporting would be really cool, but this is hard to pull off with product based advertisers I think.

Grade: B+

Offers

Pepperjam opened with something around 100 offers (someone correct me if I’m way off here) and I think they’ve added something like 150 new advertisers since they opened. While not adding advertisers at a rate of 3-5 a day like CJ is, Pepperjam is coming close. There is a very high percentage of exclusive offers, with everything from the Star Wars store to Jelly Belly. They’ve got some very niche products which are cool.

One big drawback is that they have a ton of product based affiliates yet their product feeds leave a little to be desired (get to that in a second). Some affiliates do allow deep linking (where you link to any page on the advertiser’s site) which allows for some cool ideas when building lenses to promote things…

Grade: B

Product Feeds

I’d say less than 20% of the product based affiliates (those that payout as a % of sale) have product feeds on PepperJam. The feed can only be downloaded as a gigantic CSV file instead of by individual advertiser. Many of the product feeds have broken image links. This is probably the weakest part of Pepperjam’s platform and I know it’s something they are planning on improving. Right now, however, it’s hard to use because the data is spotty at best and from limited affiliates.

Grade:C

Communication

PepperJam has a little talk bubble next to each advertiser that lights up whenever the affiliate manager for that program is online. I’ve used this several times to ask questions about payouts, ideas, and lots of other things. It’s absolutely fantastic! I’ve also had nearly all of my direct e-mails returned promptly with personal responses from people that can actually answer my question. This actually let me to come back to PepperJam a bit after not doing much with it the first month.

Grade: A

Payouts

Every program I’ve seen migrate over from Commission Junction to PepperJam has increased their payout by close to 50% or more. In general, their payouts are pretty high, and if you talk to the affiliate managers and tell them about your marketing plans for the advertiser, you may be able to get a little bump. They’ve been very generous so far with increasing payouts on may account for advertisers I do well with.

I haven’t received a bank transfer from PepperJam yet so I can’t comment on that area of the payout cycle.

Grade: A-

Overall

Depending on a few different things, PepperJam could very well evolve to be a bigger part of my affiliate program strategy than Commission Junction currently is. If you haven’t signed up for them yet, they are worth giving a try.

Here is my super sneaky PepperJam sign-up link.

If you have already signed up, what have your experiences been so far? I’m interested to hear from others who have been using PepperJam the last few months.