Contextual ads for Clickbank products.

Hi,
I know this is not the way to go, but coming from 9 years of adsense, I'd really like to see it working.
So I bought a lifetime membership a week ago on a service which does contextual ads because as you may know Clickbank has terminated its own contextual widget named HopAd Builder on 4th september after removing all pages from its site on 23th july.
Well in this thread I'd like to share with you my results.. So far there are no sales at all despite tens of thousands impressions and over a hundred clicks.. So yes the CTR is pretty bad, I'll talk about it later, now here are my stats:

Day / Impressions (of the widget) / Clicks (hops) / CTR
9/4 / 3,865 / 9 / 0.23%
9/5 / 5,679 / 11 / 0.19%
9/6 / 7,498 / 21 / 0.28%
9/7 / 9,934 / 24 / 0.24%
9/8 / 11,687 / 19 / 0.16%
9/9 / 13,277 / 28 / 0.21%

The widget is well located and has colors matching my theme..

With adsense I'm used to CTR near or above 5% so that's a big change, but of course there are 2 problems:
- Clickbank inventory is poor compared to adwords advertisers
- The context matching is rudimentary since I take the title and tags of my pages and feed it into the widget and then I don't know what it is doing with the keywords I give it. Most of the time it does an honest job of it but for some topics not so much.
- My sites are not niche sites, quite the contrary, it is about everything and anything. If one was even only about one category, like fitness for instance, then perhaps I could restrict the widget more to show only products from fitness category in clickbank and all products would make sense more or less to the visitors.


Have you tried yourself this way? I know it is not the right way that everybody advise, so I suppose many have tried and failed with this way, but did you try on your own sites/blogs?

 

Just adding more stats:

Day / Impressions (of the widget) / Clicks (hops) / CTR
9/10 / 20,630 / 18 / 0.09%
9/11 / 19,838 / 39 / 0.20%
9/12 / 23,988 / 24 / 0.10%
9/13 / 23,881 / 23 / 0.10%
9/14 / 39,833 / 27 / 0.07%

 

i have questions...is this safe to use adsense in this way..?

 

I don't use adsense anymore since they kicked me out. I don't care about adsense anymore, I freed up the best spots which were taken by adsense and now I can put other ads inside.

 

If hopads was performing well CB would not have terminated it. Your poor performance is due to a number of factors.

First of all, you have poor traffic, you need laser targeted niche traffic to generate sales.

Second of all, stop trying to automate the sales process. Link to aff links naturally in posts, so you can promote specific products to your readers instead of it looking like an advertisement.

Making money takes hard work. Too many of your posts seem like you're taking the lazy approach to online marketing.

 

I'm taking the lazy approach, you're right about that and I don't hide it. I have read several times the good advices for affiliate marketing, but since I've just started I want to try the lazy adsense-like version for a little while, like one or two months, see that this doesn't work, and then move on.. But in parrallel I also do the correct things too, I've built a site focused on a topic I have aweber and I am collecting emails with a form, offering free ebooks, the usual.. But I don't do it fulltime, I'm still trying to make it lazy too.

The advantage of cbproad over the old hopad from cb is that in cbproads they have rewritten a lot of the product's description and title so they don't talk to affiliates but to buyers, also they have associated for many products, their related image. Plus they offer different widgets to add variety. The cb hopad was very crude because it had nothing of what I've just mentionned.

But still I know you're right that it doesn't work, but I'll give it some more time to try before I come back in the right path

Thank you for your advices, I have set myself a deadline to reach my goal with clickbank, so I can't play around for too long with things that don't work. And you're right on several of my sites the traffic is not targeted to anything in particular, but to each individual page's topic, so that's why I initially tried to use something contextual on it, because the task was daunting to hand select products and add them to the pages, it is not possible by hand, just too many. But it's true that with google analytics I can take the past month and just do it on the top 50 pages which attract the most traffic.

 

More stats..

Day / Impressions (of the widget) / Clicks (hops) / CTR
9/15 / 83,813 / 33 / 0.04%
9/16 / 99,188 / 50 / 0.05%
9/17 / 30,295 / 47 / 0.16%
9/18 / 21,813 / 30 / 0.14%

 

I have a few more days of stats, but after I won't post anymore, I'll keep track of them on my own site, since obviously it is not interesting.
But just so you know, I haven't seen ANY sale out of those few dozens daily hops/clicks..
I can see them all in clickbank's analytics, so it is not because of some scam from the contextual ads widget owner, simply it doesn't work, I would have at least hoped for one sale every 100 hops on different products that visitors have chosen to click on, but it's not happening..
Will need to finally do things the correct way I guess

Day / Impressions (of the widget) / Clicks (hops) / CTR
9/19 / 21,407 / 30 / 0.14%
9/20 / 20,190 / 25 / 0.12%
9/21 / 19,755 / 32 / 0.16%

 

Finally my last statistic recording is on 7th october, the result is very clear, I made exactly ZERO sales from those contextual ads widgets..
So the conclusion is easy, no need to calculate anything like CPC or CPM..
http://www.best-reviewer.com/clickbank-contextual-ads-widget-does-it-work-my-results-9370.htm

I hope you enjoyed this real testing, so the next step is to go back to what is being advised and has been advised all along for affiliate marketing!

 

sir,
Finally what do you say?Is it Affiliate marketing is easy or difficult for beginners?Should work how many hours per day?

 

I have used facebook for the same purpose. It conversion is not bad. Thank you for sharing your insight, I could learn something new.