Hi all. I'd been promoting a clickbank product for a couple of years, and generally made a sale every other day or so. Then all of a sudden I stopped making sales all together. I checked my stats and noticed that I was still getting about the same number of hops, but the number of order form impressions decreased to just about nothing. I decided to try a different product, quite similar to the first (by a different vendor). The same thing continued happening. But this time the vendor contacted me and told me that not long after I started promoting his products, he started getting blanks in his affiliate columns for his sales. This vendor has an affiliate site that's an exact mirror of his normal site, and he's made sure that his affiliate site isn't indexed by search engines. So, all sales at this site are by affiliates, since there's no other way traffic gets to this website. When I started promoting his product, blanks started showing up for affiliates for him. So, for some reason my tracking ID isn't making it all the way to the order form page. CB has some instructions for testing hoplinks, and advises clicking your hoplinks and going all the way to the order form at the vendor site. You should see your affiliate ID at the bottom of the page. I've done this, and I do see my affiliate ID. None of the other affiliates of this vendor are having this problem; just me. Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks, Gregg
If what you're saying is indeed true, and I have no reason to doubt you, I think you've documented something a lot of the members here suspect is going on with CBs tracking system but are unable to prove.
The strange thing is that it's only happening to me. He's shown me reports of his sales, and everyone's doing great, except for me. Well, my blanks are doing great, but I'm not getting credit. Luckily he's been paypalling me what I would be making. I send more traffic to his site than any of his other affiliates, and google analytics confirms that. He's contacted CB, and hasn't gotten anything but canned responses. I've noticed what might be a similar problem with the Google Affiliate Network (which I joined about a week ago). I'm seeing very low conversion rates and EPCS. I just checked the EPC for one of my programs, and noticed that it's less than 10% of the average. That tells me something is really wrong, where I've sent enough traffic to get a good sampling. My EPN stats are about where they normally are, as far as conversion and tracking is concerned. I just pulled some text ads I was running on my site, thinking javascript or any cookie-setting they're doing might be causing a problem. I can't see how that would be the case, with the way the hoplinks work. As far as I know, no tracking cookies are set until the visitor arrives at the vendor's site, so I can't imagine how any cookies or JS at my website would be affecting anything at his website. Now the only thing I'm doing not doing is making the link target the "top". In the past I've used "_blank" and have never had problems. Another thing: my website is a price comparison website, and displays thumbs from other websites. Cookies are set in the requests for these images on a lot of sites. So, to a paranoid browser, my website might look kind of suspicious, trying to set all kinds of third-party cookies. My IE7 on default security blocks all of the 3rd-party cookies. Gregg
And, come to think of it, I'm also including a rel=nofollow inside of my link, if that would make any difference.
Take some screen shots. ClickBank's bottom line has always been that if you see your affiliate ID at the bottom of the order page, you will get paid. If you can document that this is not true, you will prove something that has sparked many a heated "discussion" here. Hank
Well, I can see my affiliate id at the bottom of the page. The question is, can everyone else? I did notice that the xdidi3idkd995950.hop.clickbank cookie is blocked at the vendor's site (I made up the first part of that... it's not real) by my browser. Still, my affiliate code shows up. So tracking must not rely on that cookie. Considering that to a browser this is a completely different domain than the vendor's site, making it 3rd-party, I wonder why they even bother setting it. It's been a long time since I've made changes to my clickbank ads. Does my memory serve me correctly that a while back, our CB ads sent the visitor directly to the vendors site, followed by hop=affID, which is where a visitor ultimately ends up now?
I'd call it bad luck. All you can do is to test your hoplinks, nothing much can be done.. If you have the same traffic sources, and the same amount of traffic then I can see no valid reason for not making sales anymore. Clickbank does have problems in their tracking system I don't doubt that. Al.
It's not bad luck. There's a definite problem. Tracking isn't working correctly, and it's only the case for me, so it has to do with either my site, or my links; one of the two.
Register for a new CB account, move your traffic to that new account and see what happens. Some people have document that their sales magically "reappear" when using a different account.
No tracking system is perfect. Every tracking system has it's problems. You might've missed a sale or two because of a tracking screwup, but that's all. If you're thinking that you lost all your sales because of clickbank tracking issues, you're far from the truth. Just check your hoplinks thoroughly each time you want to promote a new product, because there are some vendors that do shady stuff. Also, web sites with opt-in forms are also prone to foul play on the vendors side. I'm not saying that opt-ins are necessarily bad, in the contrary, they can increase the conversion rates, but sometimes vendors overwrite the affiliate cookies with it. I have several product and have a fairly high volume of sales every day. The amount of sales that are credited to affiliates are usually around 90%, which means only 1 in 10 sales are blank (no affiliate) sales.
Assuming most of those sales actually came from affiliates, 10% is rather a large number, especially for people doing PPC who have margins to worry about. That's like your employer "forgetting" to pay you 10% of your income and saying "oh sorry, you lost that 10% due to our tracking system - nothing we can do it about it"
I'm just saying that 90% of the sales are made by affiliates. That doesn't mean that the rest 10% were not tracked properly or were taken from the affiliates. It is quite probable to assume that 1 out of 10 customers make purchases without being referred from an affiliate. My point is, clickbank might screw up, and you might lose a sale or two now and then. However, this won't cause you to go from XXX$ or XXXX$ monthly to zero sales per month. It means that you need to revise your game plan and get back to work. We're talking about people here that are claiming that they are having no sales because clickbank tracking system is screwed up. It is quite normal for the sales to stop one day withe the same traffic, even tho you had a lot of sales before that. It has happened to me many times. That's just the way it is, the market is changing each day and something that produced sales might stop working.
What a grate point you have there. Not only PPC. Even people getting traffic from free sources. It takes a lot of headache to write, publish and SEO your articles to see results. If you were paying yourself on an hourly basis, you will notice that you also have a margin to care about, - just as people doing PPC! 10% is a very huge number. Internet marketing is not easy. So your profits should not be taken away from you.
No, I didn't just miss a sale or two, and that is not all. If that were the case I wouldn't be here. And how could you possibly know that, anyway? I've gone weeks without showing a single sale - unless the same crystal ball that showed you I've only missed a sale or two shows differently. So please let me know if I haven't actually gone weeks without showing a sale, because if anyone would know, it would be you, evidently. Meanwhile, my vendor's website, which isn't even indexed by a search engine, whose only traffic comes from affiliates, whose google analytics prove all of this, is showing blanks in the affiliate column. Meaning - and there could not possibly be any other meaning - that certain affiliates aren't being credited for the traffic they refer. Because all of the traffic to this website comes from affiliates. As evidenced, once again, by the fact that it's not indexed by search engines, and google analytics shows a ?hop=affid for just about all the traffic. Google analytics shows me as being the largest referrer. It also shows my traffic behaving the same way other affiliates' traffic behaves... similar time on site, bounces, etc. But for some reason only a handful of sales were credited to me, while a whole load wound up blank. I'm not blaming CB for this. I'm just trying to figure out how to fix this problem.
That sounds like pretty good advice. I just did that. I'll keep you guys posted as to whether this, or any of the other things I tried made any difference. Thanks, Gregg
I had an incident this past summer where I didn't have sales with Clickbank for 1 1/2 days. Rather than open a new account I e-mailed Clickbank and told them NEVER have I had a zero dollar day with them and I suspected maybe hoplink hijacking and that I was willing to work with Clickbank to investigate any possible illegal activity. Within the hour I had 5 sales. Was that coincidence or did I trigger something?
You may not be blaming Clickbank but a lot of people do. I worked with a company that had their own paysite and so did one of the employees, he was in direct competition with the company. He and one of the company's programmers modified the company's code so that every so many sales were diverted to him. Whose to say someone at Clickbank isn't doing the same thing and covering their tracks?
And again, rather than open a new Clickbank account I've taken a lot (most) of my business elsewhere. I was never one to get on the "Clickbank steals commissions" bandwagon but I have seen activity (or lack of it should I say) that I've deemed questionable. Bringing other APs into the picture then seeing sales increase on the same product line plus other things I've seen happen reinforces my thinking about "questionable activity" occurring over at Clickbank.
This is exactly what I've been telling people in here for a long time. I do pay per click and have 6 campaigns that used to run clickbank products. I went from 300-600 dollar sales days to 0 dollars for 5 days! I still had people telling me that this was normal sales fluctuation and to work harder...LOL...meantime I was losing hundreds of dollars per day on PPC when I used to Triple my investment. I won't be suprised if some people chime in on this thread to say that it's something you did wrong and not Clickbank (terryd and patchkaa are good for this although I think they have created some more accounts so who knows who they are now). Even if it is'nt Clickbank...it's some form of link hijacking that's going on. I know at Traffic Vance you can bid on URLs and a pop up of the bidder's website will popover whenever that URL shows up in the users browser...(This would replace your cookie). Because Clickbank is a major AP it is the target of alot of parasiteware out there. I firmly believe that you have been a target of an individual or a group of individuals that saw your link and figured you must be sending a ton of traffic to clickbank so they could make some quick cash by jacking your affiliate link. They may or may not be affiliated with clickbank. The other possibility is a competitor decided to disable your Clickbank account by sending bogus Credit Card Numbers to your ID thus activating clickbanks fraud system and blocking your sales until your account has been deemed legit again. I believe that one way or another it's somebody screwing with you and stealing your cash. I was in a highly visible highly competitive couple of niches bidding for the number 1 position and I'm sure someone figured a way to take me out. Anyway this is rather long winded but after much consideration I came up with only 2 a solutions. Find a lesser known AP or create your own product! You could create a product that mirrors the one you are promoting through Clickbank and collect all the money yourself. You can outsource this work and once it's done you could swap out the links in your articles and you're running again. Clickbank simply needs to protect their links better. They have the new encrypting, but when the hoplink shows up in the browser address bar it's still easily identifiable. There is better technology out there to protect links but clickbank has'nt gotten to it yet.