I have been trying to sell a clickbank product, and haven't made any sales yet, but I can see in the analytics that there has been: 31 Order Form Impression Count, and 3 Order Form Submit Count. but 0 Initial Sales Count. Now, if someone has filled out their credit card details on the order form and 3 have submitted, then why are there 0 sales? How can they submit the form and there not be a sale made????
If you do a quick search in the ClickBank forum on this site, you will see this question has been answered several times. There are many reasons why an order form would be submitted and not result in a sale. The customer chose PayPal as the option, got to the PayPal site and abandoned their purchase before completing the process. The customer credit card could have been declined either because there wasn't enough money available on the card, or because the automatic fraud detection service declined the card for a number of reasons. The customer could have just hit the submit fun for the hell of it. Yes, people do that. It could be a fake customer trying random credit card numbers that are either stolen, or just completely fake to see if they can get the product for free. ... and many other reasons. Just because the Order Form was submitted doesn't mean the order was approved or valid. But at least you can see in the analytics just how many times people went to the order form, how many clicked submit, and how many resulted in a sale. 31 Order Form impressions with no sales starts to demonstrate that people may be having the trouble finding out how much something costs so they go to the order form to find out. Without knowing what you are promoting, that is just a guess but it is certainly not uncommon for there to be many order form impressions and a far less order form submits.
thanks nyxano! this is what i thought, i just wanted to make sure if they only counted the submits on valid credit cards, then perhaps it just needed a few days for the payment to process. but it seems that I just didn't make any sales!
Basically they count how many times the Submit button was clicked because at that time, the ClickBank system has no idea if it is a real submit, fake submit or a payment declined submit. Sales would be the number of approved submits that resulted in a sale. It is just a few more statistics ClickBank provides us to help us make better decisions about a product. Before all we had were Hops and Sales but we never knew why there was such a difference between the two. Now we can see how many people make it to what stage of the process - product page, order form, submitted order form, payment successful. That compared to your own statistics on how many people click on your PPC ad or how many people land on your own pre-sell / landing page will give you a picture of where people start and finish. Using those numbers help you better determine if what you are promoting is actually worth promoting.
Also I discovered that people in the US enter their zip code and then get a new field that opens and it says in it - Please select a county/city. It opens when you put your cursor in the field below it so it is hard to notice. If people submit with this new field not selected they will bounce back to the order page to correct the error and that will count as 1 submit. I think! Mike