Clickbank's silent acknowledgement of tracking problems

Just get them on the phone as I mentioned before...it is your best bet to get a real answer and to bring the problem to someone who can look into it while you're on the phone with them.

I never even bother with email if you can talk to a real person 1 on 1. It's much more efficient to get the answers you need.

 

I can support your hypothesis.

When I was a publisher in '08 and '09 with a product that had over 100,000 sales, all of my sales were driven by affiliates but almost 5% of my sales didn't have affiliate tags connected to them meaning in some cases, affiliates were driving traffic but not getting paid for it.

 

And the evidence keeps piling up....

I've suspected problems in the past too but never really thought CB would be not giving credit for sales. There was quite a few times where Adwords told me I had conversions but no sales would show up in my CB account. I figured it was a technical glitch but now after seeing all of this...I really believe a lot of affiliates are losing out on sales due to poor tracking methods.

Even recently, I've been sending tons of hops to a vendor that converts a little better than 1% (I've seen screen shot/video proof) and gotten no sales or even order form impressions. How can I possibly send hundreds of very targeted hops and not even get order form impressions?

What are some other good networks that are similar to Clickbank? I think it's about time to start moving on and see what happens. I know of Plimus but I hate their layout, it's confusing as hell and impossible to find products.

 

That doesn't mean that those 5% were not credited to the affiliate.

It is very possible that those were customers who visited your site directly without an affiliate.

The ones that are behind these conspiracy theories, are creating hysteria, and ruining the chances of many newbies to make money. Now, when a newbie tries to promote and fails, and later sees this thread he will think 'Hey, clickbank is ripping me off, that's why I didn't make sales' , instead of working harder.

You cannot expect any affiliate network to have perfect tracking. There isn't such a network.

IMO, a bigger issue is credit cards not being processed.

 

That could be true too, but if he wasn't doing any sort of promotion himself, it would be a small chance that someone just stumbled across his site and decided to buy.

The only way I could see that working is if affiliates were driving traffic and then the cookie expired after 60 days and THEN they purchased.

 

I agree, I never got caught up in all the conspiracy hysteria either.

Clickbank has proven its potential to me, and if you focus on what you can control rather than what you can't, you'll go further.

 

The site is indexed on google for various keywords, so even without promoting, some people can buy directly without an affiliate. Also, the site may spread by word of mouth, which also means that the visitors will view the page directly without an affiliate.

If we assume what he said is correct, it would mean that 5% of your sales are not tracked.

That means that 1 in 20 sales are not tracked. So if you had a 100 sales, 5 sales would be taken away from you.

You're saying that you're having no sales at all, so I don't see how the 5% we assume are not tracked will eliminate all your sales.

Also, you have to see if the vendor isn't doing anything sneaky. Maybe the vendor is messing up in your situation.

 

Yeah that is a good point. I guess after seeing so many people with similar threads it makes you start to wonder...

The fact that I've seen conversions in my Adwords account and then getting no sales in my Clickbank account is what I am going off of though. It's just strange to me since a conversion can't be noted by Adwords unless that pixel fires on the Thank You page of someone visiting the site through your ad.

 

That is completely normal. Adwords tracking is always inaccurate.

Here's what happens:
-Visitor clicks your ad and gets your cookie
-Visitor decides to search for more reviews of the product
-Visitor finds a review and clicks the affiliate link
-Now the visitor is cookied with someone elses affiliate id
-He goes to the page and buys the product
-Adwords records this as a conversion, while in fact another affiliate made the sale

 

Thanks for the well thought and stated response Neil!

One problem for me is that... well, let me try to explain this briefly. I promoted another vendor who had pretty much the same exact products prior to this publisher. I went back to promoting his products again and got 0s for a week. I also created a new account, and keep drawing 0s. So at this point it doesn't seem to be exactly related to the vendor, or my account/nickname.

That seems to only leave me as the causing factor, but seriously, how hard can it be to create a hoplink? My hoplinks get traffic to the vendor's site, along with my ?hop=mynickname, as shown in google analytics. The problem is that according to CB's stats, my affiliate info doesn't make it to an order form.

Two vendors aren't a great sampling, I know. The other problem is that my audience has the most one-track mind I've ever seen. If it's not related to firearms (the topic of my website), they couldn't care less. I've tried tons of different things... insurance, financial, even outdoor related items, but unless it has to do with firearms, they won't have it. I can't even get them to go to Cabelas. I can get them to click firearms-related data feeds 1300 or 1400 times in a day, and they might go to Cabelas 8 times via a "save money" banner.

So what I'm saying is that there's really nothing else I can promote even remotefully successfully at Clickbank. Coupled with the fact that I'm not getting credit for the majority of traffic I do send, well, it makes way more sense to put some PPC or something up where I can be assured I'll be credited for the traffic I send.

So anyway, thanks again for the great response! And any more advice would be appreciated.

 

Am I missing something? Why dont you send them to firearm related CB products?

http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?dores=true&includeKeywords=firearms

 

You're very welcome. Your reply makes it easy to understand why you are so focused on this particular item, being as you have experimented already and concluded that this is definitely the best way to monetize the space you are using it in.

On the subject of the hoplink, I'm no expert, but I agree with you that if hoplink and conversion works once, it should work every time. I'm thinking it through as to how I would approach it, then, if it were me having this problem. Setting aside any "conspiracy" theories for the moment, and focusing on potential technical issues, what you have found indicates no problem in directing visitors from your site. The evidence suggests they are reaching the vendor sales page every time, regardless of whether you are being credited for sending them there, so I would be inclined to eliminate the hoplink on my own site as a potential source of the problem.

Instead it seems, as you pointed out, that your affiliate information is being dropped 3/4 of the time as they submit their order. This occurs on the vendor's site, not yours, so I would take the investigation there. ClickBank can't credit you with the sale if the data they are receiving from the vendor doesn't include your referral info. You mentioned earlier the vendor had contacted you out of a sense of fairness to let you know there was a problem. Would they be willing to take that a step further and double check the integrity of their own site to see if the problem could be there? Maybe they already have, but I'm just throwing some ideas out in the hope it will help.

Cheers,
Neil

 

Only two of those sell, and provide a decent commission. Those are the two I'm talking about.

 

Thanks again Neil. Where I'm not seeing many order form impressions, I tend to think my nickname isn't making it to the order form. Otherwise, when the order form was displayed it should register an order form impression to my nickname. If my nickname was being dropped on a form submit, I suspect I'd see a fair number of order form impressions and not many sales.

Two things are making me think this isn't a problem on the vendor's site:
1. It's happening only to me. He's only getting blanks when I'm running ads for his site. No other affiliate is having a problem.
2. Though I'm not in contact with the other vendor, I'm drawing 0s with him as well, which makes me tend to think the same thing is going on with website.

I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to use wireshark to do a sniff on the link from his website to the CB order form. That may shed some light. I'll post again soon.

 

OK, here's some header information. Hopefully I removed anything that could be identifying to either the vendor or me. If not, it's not the end of the world.

Just looking at these headers, the only thing I see that could represent some kind of affiliate tracking is the 'seed' parameter, bolded below.

If 'seed' is the value containing affiliate info, it's passed along via headers all the way to the secure order form. If 'seed' isn't the parameter carrying affiliate info, affiliate info would have to be passed by 3rd party cookie, which is highly unlikely considering how much browsers hate 3rd party cookie.


Submit at vendor site. Submit purchaser name and contact info, and then display JS redirect page.
---------------------------------------------------------
GET /begin-checkout.html?view=subscribe&id=5&gateway=clickbank HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/x-ms-application, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, */*
Referer: http://www.cb.domain.com/?hop=nickname
Accept-Language: en-us
UA-CPU: x86
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6.3; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Host: www.domain.com.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: __utma=133255388.962540060.1263144123.1264077640.1264476867.18; __utmz=133255388.1264476867.18.15.utmcsr=mydomain.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/part_of_url/category_name/-/0/; __utmb=133255388.3.10.1264476867; __utmc=133255388; __utma=152343150.2143004557.1262660550.1264066261.1264068029.8; __utmz=152343150.1262936243.4.2.utmcsr=myothersite.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/; ec62c7ce2780862cd0e494389fc249f2=c24b7b248da826a91e7d7db85a24a53c



Javascript redirect page. Printed by form submit on vendor site. JS submits form post.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:50:08 GMT
Server: Apache
P3P: CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM"
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.9
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=200
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

217
<html>
<body onLoad="javascript:document.getElementById('payform').submit();">
<center>
<b>You will be automatically redirected to payment page in seconds</b><br>
<form id=payform action="http://www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi?link=vendorname%2F2%2FProduct+Name+Name+Name&seed=97b6fb902d" method=POST>

<input type=submit name=button value='Click here if you do not want to wait any longer or if your browser does not automatically forward you'>
</form>
</center>
</body>
</html>


Form post from javascript redirect page directly above.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
POST /sell.cgi?link=vendornickname%2F2%2FProduct+Name+Name+Name&seed=97b6fb902d HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/x-ms-application, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, */*
Referer: http://www.cb.ffl123.com/begin-checkout.html?view=subscribe&id=5&gateway=clickbank
Accept-Language: en-us
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
UA-CPU: x86
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6.3; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Host: www.clickbank.net
Content-Length: 0
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache




301 Redirect (A redirect from one clickbank page to another)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:50:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0
P3P: CP="ADM OUR IND COM"
Connection: close
Location: https://ssl.clickbank.net/order/ord...6f78&item=2&titl=Product+Name+Name+Name&vvar=seed%3D97b6fb902d
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8



Header for https://ssl.clickbank.net/order/orderform.html
------------------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:50:13 GMT
Expires: -1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: gws
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
X-XSS-Protection: 0


******************** Goes Secure after this point

 

Have you actually gone to the order form through your link and checked your aff id is there?

 

Yeah, mine shows up on my computer. It also registers as an order form impression.

 

Clickbank now has a feature that lets you use your own google analytics, or google conversion code on a vendors site. If you do this, you should be able to track a visitor from your site to actual sale to see exactly what happens.

http://www.clickbank.com/help/account-help/account-tools/integrated-sales-reporting/

 

Wow! If that works the way CB claims it does (and I have no reason to beleive it doesn't) this should really help me figure out what's going on.

Thanks!

 

I set this up, and I guess I'll see what happens. I actually checked out the orderform source code for this vendor, and saw my google analytics JavaScript.

I do have to wonder if whatever problem causing order form impressions to not be registered will also result in my google analytics JS not being placed in the source code for a CB order form. If that's the case it'll be back to square one.

We'll see... I'll keep you updated.