Clickbank: Am I Chasing Ghosts

This is not another "Clickbank Sucks" thread, nor "the Economy Sucks" thread either.


I have noticed a trend with Clickbank as of late, and I am simply questioning how they process sales. The following statements are based on my personal experiments with traffic flow on more than one CB account.

Sometimes hops just look way off from what they are in reality (as per my stats) or the hops are there but sales are just not matching their historical average.

Ok, I can accept variances in sales... that's life.


But at seemingly random points in time, some "mysterious" event occurs at Clickbank and all sales comes to a complete stop on what we'll call account "A".

And not just on one product, but all hops for all products on that given AFF account.

Nowadays when I see this anomaly I route all traffic for these "blacklisted" products to account "B". And BINGO, sales come back to their historical levels.

Then it happens again (7-10 days later) on account "B". Sales just come to a stop. I repeat the process and route traffic back to account "A" - BINGO again!


I believe there is something to the theory of over-zealous fraud detection at payment processing which puts a block on products / accounts for a given period of time when ONE transaction gets flagged.

There are so many factors involved in making sales that one can't look at the above phenomenon as an absolute, but it makes me wonder if I am chasing ghosts.

Clickbank almost always claim their system is operating properly, but don't give us anymore info to go on that could explain the odd occurrences that I and many of you are experiencing.


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I think you are really on to something there. I carefully monitor, and get an email everytime someone clicks on my pay link, then again after they buy the product. Usually this ratio will be about 3 pay clicks to every sale. Then sometimes, out of the blue, no pay clicks turn in to sales for 8 hours, then they slowly start up again. Maybe we should encourage people to use paypal?

 

I will try with 2 accounts. I'm :O....3 days after 3 - 4 Sells, now... 0... With more hops....

 

So to combat this should we simply shuffle our TID's?

 

rikat is using two accounts not just changing TIDs

 

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

interesting ... would seem to match up with other posts i've read about their fraud detection techniques ... anyone else doing this?

 

What you describe sounds very familiar to me. But I don't have any real data to back it up. But it definitely SEEMS like what you are saying happens, does actually happen.

 

I wonder if it would be worth developing a php script to alternate between say 4 affilate accounts, so at least only 25% of the sales would be blocked, instead of 100%. I presume Clickbank wouldn't care...

 

This is what many people do, and yes I would recommend trying this if you are indeed being affected by their RMS on your account. It might not make a difference for some instances and it might make all the difference in others.

N.

 

In an earlier thread I showed some five-week stats of my own experience dividing my traffic between three CB accounts. There was no significant difference in overall conversions between the three.

The post with my stats is here.

Iain

 

I'm waiting 2 or 3 days to put the new account ni my websites.

 

I understand the logic of this concept and how to implement it to get it to work. But I have no clue about PHP. I guess maby I should take some classes in it so I can further my web marketing skills.

 

Check out w3schools php tutorial. They also have great tutorials for html, java, css etc...

 

Hows that testing coming?? Im interested in hearing more results!

 

That's an interesting issue to investigate. I have two ClickBank accounts, so I'll make the redirecting php file to alternate between them. Let's see if ClickBank really has a problem.

nadavs