Clickbank having problems today?

I don't know what's going on today, but my hops per order today is spiking big time - on every product I'm selling and promoting. Some products that average 20 - 30 hops per order are above 200-300 hops without an order. Very strange. Anyone else noticing this? - Just trying to figure out if it's clickbank, or maybe one of my servers.

 

I dunno, I was converting consistently at 30-40 hops from Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue then all of a sudden took a dive yesterday afternoon to zero sales and today I have over 200 hops without a sale.

 

I was just talking to someone about this earlier today...

I should have had 8-10 sales overnight on a particular cb account... checked this morning at 8:35am and nothing....same traffic volume.

Did my CB shuffle (switch out hoplinks globally) to another account and within 4 (four) minutes popped my first sale of the day at 8:39am. Sales have been commensurate with traffic volume ever since.

Coincidence? maybe,... but I don't think so... I drive enough traffic consistently to various pubs to know what freakish sales volumes look like.

Hence the reason I am quickly prepared to execute the CB shuffle

 

what is the cb shuffle and how do you do it quickly?

 

rikat,

Are you saying that from your experience you will sell using one affiliate code while another doesn't sell?

 

Guys,

I have multiple CB id's that I use interchangeably. They are all established and on DD so switching them up at will has no impact on my cash flow.

I drive a lot of traffic/day and track to the nth degree. I have witnessed "cause and effect" traffic volume and conversions of all sorts, from trend marketing blips to special events (TV or other) to geographical weather, all of which can have positive and negative effects on your business.

Outside of all these variables there exists the CB effect.

From time to time an account will get "flagged" and suffer increased denial of transactions from CB or their processor (which is Paypal in case you wondered - CC's too!)

I believe this happens due to a fraudulent transaction(s) by a customer(s). The flag will remain for a set period of time (usually 24 hours - 36 max). This could be considered over-zealous fraud protection at work.

I firmly believe this phenomenon does not affect large k/day+ accounts (don't slap the hand that feeds), but anything under is fair game.

Having concluded the above, I put a system in place to switch out any or all of my hoplinks to any other account very quickly.

And it has served me well...

Yes, one can say it is a coincidence that everytime I implement this system my sales instantly come back to match historical norms.

I have no way to prove my theory to be true, but the end results speak other wise.


Ok, gotta go and finish my aluminum foil gyro hat ...

 

Tracking is screwed up for the day. A sale I made early this morning isn't showing up for my analytics, yet 2 sales later on are.. I don't know if sales are being tracked properly or not but something is a little bonkers at the moment.

 

Wow - Thanks for that Rikat. I've suspected that as well for a while. But I haven't really put a solid plan in place like you have. That's a brilliant idea. Do you use redirect scripts, so that it's easy to switch out? - If so would you mind sharing what you use?

Like you I like to do as much tracking as possible. And over the years I've come to the point where I can usually tell if the fluctuations in conversions is caused by me, google, or clickbank. It's usually one of those. Many times google will change things up, and you'll come into a forum like this, and see clickbank getting the blame.

But anyways, I'm going to give the clickbank shuffle a go. Thanks for that.

 

rikat, what is your trigger for switching, just dipping below a certain percentage, or just a feeling? How long do you wait when things are out of the norm before switching. I have personally been experimenting with randomly splitting my traffic between 4 accounts, and wanted to compare notes.

 

why not just have say 5 accounts and constantly rotate them randomly so if one of them gets flagged then you'd suffer only 20% decrease rather than full loss and then you don't need to worry about switching triggers.

Although to me it seems highly unlikely that an affiliate account would be flagged for fraud. I can imagine customer being flagged (happened to me - I had my CC stolen once and after that every time I buy from Newegg either the transaction bounces or I get a phone call from fraud department) or even publisher but affliate...

I guess it could make some sense in case affiliate would want to cash out a buch of stolen CC's but using clickbank would be one weird way to do it since they can trace where the money went and they hold it for two weeks anyway. And if someone would want to cash out stolen CC's they'd be talking $1,000/day anyway...

So it's a nice theory but personally I don't buy it.

 

The theory may not be right, but I do believe that clickbank IDs go dead for a while - whatever the reason may be. It may be a glitch, or some other reason. But like Rikat, there have been several times, where my sales would be coming in - several per hour, and then suddenly stop for hours, and sometimes days. Only to start up again a few minutes after I replace the clickbank ID. It may be a coincidence, but I've had it happen enough times, that it would have to be a huge coincedence. - Plus I've heard it now from several people.

 

It's been my experience that your account can be flagged for 2 to 6 hours at a time. I think Clickbank does this to make it difficult for an affiliate to steal credit cards, and then use them to buy products using their own affiliate link, then get payed commission on the illegal sale. One time I got blocked for 6 hours after a product was returned 20 minutes after it was purchased, even though I generally have a 2.5% return rate.

 

That is a good idea which I have pondered a few times...


Assuming there is any truth to my theory; I am not implying that the affiliate account gets flagged for fraud because the system believes the affiliate is trying to behave fraudulently.

I think it is a protectionary mechanism to prevent customers from behaving badly.

It is sad that all we have to go on are theories, but the fact remains that some of us do notice bizarre patterns.

No sane business person would stand by idly and not try to ascertain if there is indeed a problem, and if so try to isolate the problem / find solutions.

 

I noticed that when I created a new account with a different nick i've had more sales... all of a sudden.
So i'm thinking about setting a cron job to switch my nicks every night at midnight..

 

So basically all you do is just change your Clickbank ID on your websites to another one, which is also yours, and sales *magically* come back?

Then when again some problems happen, you change it back and sales start to flow in?

P.S. I had my account for like 1 year+ and never used any other accounts.....So maybe I should try.

 

There's also the phenomenon that many people are reporting - you email Clickbank with a question/complaint about your account, then "magically" sales pour in for a little while right after someone reviews the email. As if they manually turn the switch on at their end to make your user id viable again.

This happened to me. Interesting thing is it happened on both my publisher and affiliate accounts. At the end of October I went down to no sales with the same amount of targeted traffic in both accounts. I emailed them to ask what was up at their end and "magically" I got a cluster of sales in both accounts credited that same day, within hours after me sending the email. As if someone switched my two userids (publisher id and affiliate id) back on. This was two ids in this case, not just one.

Then sales went flat again and my accounts haven't performed normally since then. A weird blip where in both accounts I receive a cluster of sales in BOTH accounts in a 24 hour period, then zero sales for a week to three weeks. Of course I mostly swapped out most of my links to comparable Paydot.com or e=junkie products in my affiliate account now. But I notice the same weird fluctuations in both the publisher and affiliate account.

So I wonder if something is going on with traffic to their servers? That if your accounts are tracked on certain servers or something the system gets overloaded, but on an intermittent basis? I don't know. I'm not a programmer so I can't understand what the issues are.

Dan

 

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and I joined specifically because I saw this thread. I'm also having the same problem with sales stopping. It's happened in the past, for no apparent reason, and then they resume again -- and sometimes I'll get an unusually large number of sales in one day, sometimes showing sales two minutes apart. And, like someone mentioned, sometimes it happens after I contact Clickbank and ask them if there's a problem. Of course, I always get the same response -- check your links, etcetera, etcetera.

While looking for answers, I came across this article that looks like it was posted today (1/30/09). Don't know anything about this site or its author, but since, coincidentally, I've had two days with zero sales when I average $80 to $100 a day, it made me a little nervous.

http://www.codingelite.com/articles/237.htm

Does anyone know if there's any truth to any of this?

Thanks,
Lynda

 

I believe that's an old article. Clickbank did have problems w/ one of the major spyware detection companies. But have since worked it out. (I think)

But Clickbank does need to work on encrypting their hoplinks - making it harder for spyware to detect a clickbank hoplink.

 

When I ready the thoery, I cud nt believe it.

But my affiliate account was going through a similar problem.So I thought why not check the theory out. n Bam sales started pouring in another account.

What Happened :

Jan 29 - I usually get around 8- 10 sales per day ... it went to 2 that day.
Jan 30 - Switched the account - Sales started pouring in
Jan 31 till 12 PM - Switched back to affiliate account 1 for first 12 hrs - 2 sales but PPC conversion showed 6 - So my publisher still got the sale
Jan 31 till now - Switched to affiliate accout 2 and 8 sales within 6 hrs and conversion shows the same.

Another strange thing i noticed is that affiliate account 1 has a majority of non-paypal sales and affiliate account 2 gets a majority of paypal sales.

So I am slowly changing all my links now just to be safer.
I cant believe the theory still.

Account 1 :

Sat Jan 31 $86.57 - First 12 hrs
Fri Jan 30 $0.00 - i used account 2 on this day
Thu Jan 29 $43.54
Wed Jan 28 $160.83
Tue Jan 27 $256.22
Mon Jan 26 $161.19
Sun Jan 25 $251.72
Sat Jan 24 $422.56
Fri Jan 23 $367.06
Thu Jan 22 $271.96
Wed Jan 21 $308.62
Tue Jan 20 $298.65
Mon Jan 19 $291.83
Sun Jan 18 $309.26
Sat Jan 17 $272.91

Account 2 :

Sat Jan 31 $230.47
Fri Jan 30 $253.24
Thu Jan 29 $11.30
Wed Jan 28 $11.30
Tue Jan 27 $22.60
Mon Jan 26 $67.80
Sun Jan 25 $8.99
Sat Jan 24 $22.60
Fri Jan 23 $11.30
Thu Jan 22 $11.30
Wed Jan 21 $44.94
Tue Jan 20 $0.00
Mon Jan 19 $0.00
Sun Jan 18 $45.20
Sat Jan 17 $67.61

 

I don't think CB hates some particular accounts. why not try again and do the same research?