Something is VERY ODD with clickbank!

First I just want to know if anybodies sales picked up and is back to normal. I haven't seen anyone really say anything so I'm assuming it may be?

 

My sales are picking up.

 

kinda i wont no till tomorrow i got a few sales today however

 

yeah I got 10 sales today , definately picked up for me. I think it was a PPC prob

 

today sucked for me... yesterday was brilliant tho

 

My sales are fluctuating from day to day. I still believe there is a problem.
Publishers, again, will you please share if you've seen a drop in affiliate generated sales?
Thanks,
nadavs

 

What do you mean?

My PPC goes to a landing page and then on through cloaked links.

How does a PPC problem affect sales?

 

my affiliates sales have been fairly consistant. Nothing out of the ordinary

 

Some of my customers and affiliates have informed me that they cannot purchase through the clickbank order form.
I think there might be some problem with their credit card processing system or something else.

 

thats what I think the major problem is. Its cost me a ton of sales!

 

Yesterday, after a very slow morning, I moved my most profitable campaign to another (dormant, but not new) clickbank account, and got more sales for that campaign than the last two days combined. But then, that doesn't really prove anything. I mean who knows? I could have made the same number of sales if I hadn't switched to a different account, especially since Sundays have always been the best performing day of the week for me.

Overall, for yesterday, sales were still below the normal level for Sundays, but much better than for the two days before yesterday. Again, that doesn't really prove anything...

What I'm going to do now is add the "type=nohop" option to all my hoplinks just to see if it would make a "difference". I don't know what it does exactly. I saw it in the following post:

http://speedmoneymaker.com/speedblog/?p=34

And tried to find out more about it, but googling it yielded no additional information. I did some trial and error to find a way to include both the "type=nohop" and "tid=xxx" extensions to my hoplinks:

http://myid.merchantid.hop.clickbank.net/?type=nohop&tid=xxxx

Although I don't know what nohop actually does, I'll try it anyway just for the sake of trying things out, to make myself feel better that I'm doing something.

The other thing I'm planning to "test" is xtreme conversions, which I use to track all my campaigns. It seems to be working fine, and I certainly haven't touched it in over a month since I reinstalled it in January on another domain, so it would be very unlikely to have caused the sharp and sudden decline in sales. But I'll take all the xtreme conversions coding out of my redirect pages and see if sales will pick up at all.

I'm really just writing this post for the sake of comparing notes. The thing I find troubling is that none of this "testing" I'm doing is going to get any conclusive findings. If I change something, and sales pick up, I won't be able to attribute the extra sales to the change I made, and vice versa, because the extra sales may just as well be due to "normal" market fluctuations. All I'm doing is shooting in the dark until either (hopefully) sales are back at where they were before, which may or may not be a result of all this tweaking I'm doing. And if sales don't pick up, I think I'll just suck it up and move onto other affiliate networks - no use crying over spilled milk. I'm sure tons of people have written clickbank about this "problem" in the past, so I'm not going to add to the email pile, especially since I'm not even sure myself that it's a clickbank problem.

Again, sorry for the long post. I feel somewhat better now.

Amy

 

Hey guys,

I'm glad I found this thread, my own clickbank affiliate sales have been yo-yoing like crazy over the last 3 weeks or so. I was on the verge of emailing the publishers I deal with to see if they have been changing their sales pages - although it would have been some heck of a coincidence if they'd all changed on the same days.

I'm in lots of niches and my traffic is natural, so adwords or competitors wouldn't be able to have such an impact - I was averaging $500+ per day but now I'm lucky to make $350, even though traffic & hops are the same as they were, and the sales are going up and down so much it's hard to understand what's going on.

It used to be say $450 one day then $600 the next then $520 or whatever, but over the last few weeks it's more like $350 one day $102 the next then $200 etc etc.

It definitely seems that something strange is afoot. Sales fluctuate naturally due to a million different factors, but I don't see why the fluctuation would suddenly go crazy when it's been nothing like that before, and it seems especially odd now that I see others are having similar issues.

Has anyone emailed clickbank and pointed them to this thread? I'd be very interested to hear their opinions.

Amy-I know how you feel-I've been wracking my brain to see how I can make some sense of this but there is no way of knowing anything for definite until clickbank can give us some kind of definitive answer.

Thanks guys

 

Downloadsonline.org - Have you communicated this finding to Clickbank? It would be much easier to provide proof of this kind of technical problems than for an affiliate complaining "my sales levels have dropped and I think it's probably a clickbank problem".

Amy

 

This needs to be done ASAP. Problems like these (specially when they happen often and leave affiliates clueless) can ruin things irreparably.

 

Now this makes sense, have publishers noticed a big drop in sales?

I can't believe Clickbank don't monitor these forums and respond to their customers, has anyone heard anything of use from them?

 

That's the one point I've been pondering with all the cb threads I see around. Where is the customer service at? I read a lot of complaint posts, but I don't think I've ever seen a post indicating cb has resolved a problem, they're looking into a problem, etc.

I'm a newb to cb (1 month old), and reading around on these boards lately and not seeing any fruits of my 6-14 hour a day labor (1 sale ) is really making me sweat a little with promoting products from cb.

 

picked up again, i had a few sales, also resumed ADs and will monitor this.

This is *especially* disturbing since one of my best selling products (Affiliate Hijacker) depends on that the affiliate programs work - the reason why i was so disturbed by that period of 11 days without a sale was that someone purchasing AH emailed me, telling me something must be wrong with MY product since sales dont get credited!! So i checked my very OWN sales (as an affiliate) and didnt have any sales either!

This made me panic of course.

There WAS something up, no question. I got an email from CB back (upon my inquiry) telling me that all is (as usual) normal and always was (including the mentioned period ) and i have active hops...but i still say the last two weeks something was up. I just hope its solved now whatever the reason was.

G.

 

It is so sick to hear form CB saying everyting is normal bla bla......
Never do anyting useful to help our affilates.

 

OK...another update from me.

A couple of days ago, as I said before, I added the "nohop" tag to all my hoplinks. Now I don't know if this was a coincidence or if clickbank actually fixed its systems, but my sales have come back somewhat - not to the point where they were at before but definitely a lot better than when they were at their worst. I don't know if the positive change was because of the "nohop" tag though...

Perhaps now I should try taking out my xtreme conversions code and see - I highly doubt that's the cause though - it's always served me very well without hiccups before.

Amy

 

I'm a published that has also seen unusually slow sales the past few weeks.
I don't get enough affiliate sales to know if the lack of sales on that front is statistically significant.
But I've got a new product that I'm not yet offering to affiliates since I haven't shaken out price point and other things yet, so I'm split testing it with half my traffic going to CB for payment and half going to PayPal. In a couple days it'll be interesting to see what the conversion rates are for the two processors.