Forum

[DevinTX]

Hey Guys,

I wanted to get some feedback from the Affilorama community on this...

Clickbank sales across *all* of my sites have been way down since Dec 2009. At first I chalked this up to Christmas shopping season, and people wanting to save money. Then in January I thought people may have a "holiday hangover" and not be spending much money.

I am in a variety of completely unrelated niches, but sales are way down on all sites for the last two months.

Are you seeing the same thing? No change? Doing better?

Looking forward to getting your feedback.

Thanks!

 

[carlmasure]

Yes Devin,

Sales are down for me at least. Had a good run for a short couple weeks, then nothing.

 

[wollowra]

Hi Devon,
May I ask if you got a lot of sales before you noticed the drop?

Regards
Troy

 

[nyxanyxa]

My sales were really low for January relative to last year. I have picked up a little in the last day or so. Some of my products are seasonal and related to the warmer part of the year, so I would expect these to start improving gradually.

 

[digiblue]

I got to admit that Clickbank is a strange beast! I go through periods where all my affiliate sales go down even though clicks to the sales pages are increasing. But the always bounce back up so I do not worry.

 

[DevinTX]

Thanks for all the replies guys... I know things vary wildly (rankings, sales, etc) and I'm in this for the long haul so no worries.

@Troy - no, sales where pretty consistent before they dropped off

It does make me want to start a Christmas/Holiday related site to pick up the slack that time of year :-)

 

[wollowra]

Hi Devon,
The reason I ask is some people around the internet have reported that for some reason the sales dropped off after having steady sales from clickbank. This is not meant to be a panic post or the sky is falling post, but I do wonder myself about that sometimes.
So what the people have done is get a second clickbank account and change the affiliate link or hoplink on their site and noticed sales increased again.
Might be something to think about.
However, sometimes the simplest explanation is correct and it could be seasonal as you pointed out.

Regards
Troy

 

[DevinTX]

Troy, thanks for the comment. I don't want to be alarmist or anything, but I would hope that the system works better than that!

I'd hate to have to start over with a new CB account, but thanks for pointing that out, it's something to consider

-Devin

 

[zuffeir]

I have 2 CB account which strangely they both on the same graphic of sales in January and begin to pick up sales in the first day of Feb.

 

[chris72]

Strange....I have only been with CB for around 6 months and for the first couple of weeks all was well, the clicks were converting at about 1:100 - as you would expect from a greenhorn marketer :o)

Then sales stopped and I struggle to even get an order impression registering every 500 clicks or so.

(For the record, I was using article marketing in combination with PPC, highly targeted Keywords yada yada)

Then I stumbled on a discussion in another forum about how Clickbank had changed their site and that how they could no longer allow masked redirects. I took the masking off and within 2 days made around $200 - a sale every 20 clicks or so...

Eureka! I thought, this stuff really works!

Then just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

I opened a new account, altered all the links accordingly sales rocketed for about 2 weeks and then abruptly stopped again.

All very confusing!

Before joining here I had decided to not use Clickbank anymore, but it is still so highly recommended by the experts and I am still a newbie so I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for a bit longer....

Just a thought - As this has happened with 4 different vendors I'm pretty sure that they are not the problem, but would it be appropriate to contact each vendor and see if they would be willing to compare their sales stats - days/times etc with our clicks - At least that could rule out the whole 'my clicks have been hijacked' fear!

Have a good day

Chris

 

[DevinTX]

Chris,

Thanks for weighing in, very interesting

I use a PHP redirect script for just about all of my links. When I click through to the vendor page is still says:

==> "http://www.VENDORURL.com/?hop=MYCLICKBANKID"

And when I click through to the order page it shows my affiliate ID. I also see all my hops in my stats page, but there have been thousands of hops and no sales, where there used to be a sale every few hundred hops (on one particular site).

Has anyone had issues with PHP redirects not giving credit?

Thanks,

-Devin

 

[sarfarax]

Hello Devin Elder !

I have noticed that there is always a day or two in a week in which our clickbank sales almost stops without any solid reason.I wonder whether clickbank does not count our these sales and we do not get credit for it....and clickbank also takes our slice of commision in their wallet :(

 

[DevinTX]

Hi sarfarax,

Strange. I would think that if Clickbank were skimming some of your commissions, it would be really bad for business once word got out.

I just want to make sure I'm not doing something on the technical side that is costing me sales. The traffic and hops are there.

Best of luck

-Devin

 

[sybiantex]

You might consider getting into physical product sales to help even out the Clickbank slump. The cool thing is you can use the AffiloBlueprint system with physical products, exactly as you would with Clickbank (same site structure, article content, reviews etc).

MarketHealth is a good one if you want to go after the "I've got a problem and I need it fixed now" niches.

A guy over at the Warrior Forum has also produced a very good training course on selling physical affiliate products. His course is called No Skills Profits...it also has a section on making money in the Clickbank 'Problem Solving' niches. You should be able to Google it and find it.

 

[DevinTX]

Hey sybiantex,

Great feedback, thanks for the info

 

[affilots]

Has anybody actually contacted Clickbank to see if they can explain the problems people are having here?

 

[cterao]

Curious about what's going on myself too. I used to get like one sale in 90 or so hop clicks. Now it's down to about one in 175.

 

[DevinTX]

Quick update:

Sales are back across all sites. This just underscores for me how random the conversion process can be, and the remedy is more targeted traffic.

 

[superaff]

There is no problem with php, since you only redirect. There is no masking or anything.

I use php all the time on my sites.

Franck

Chris,

Thanks for weighing in, very interesting

I use a PHP redirect script for just about all of my links. When I click through to the vendor page is still says:

==> "http://www.VENDORURL.com/?hop=MYCLICKBANKID"

And when I click through to the order page it shows my affiliate ID. I also see all my hops in my stats page, but there have been thousands of hops and no sales, where there used to be a sale every few hundred hops (on one particular site).

Has anyone had issues with PHP redirects not giving credit?

Thanks,

-Devin

 

[cantdome]

i just became a cb affiliate like a week ago. here's my analytics so far:

July 27, 2010 - 0 hops
July 28, 2010 - 3 hops
July 29, 2010 - 17 hops
July 30, 2010 - 28 hops
July 31, 2010 - 0 hops
Aug. 1, 2010 - 7 hops
Aug. 2, 2010 - 0 hops
Aug. 3, 2010 - 0 hops
Aug. 4, 2010 - 0 hops
Aug. 5, 2010 - 0 hops

and today Aug. 6, 2010 sill no hops, WTF!!!!

As you can see, i havent gotten any hops for 5 days straight already!!! Has this ever happened to anyone? Please tell me what is goin on!!!!!!!!

 

[gradyp]

Cantdome,

That's the traffic that you are referring... How is the actual traffic to your site? Is it steady across that same time frame, or has there been a dip? If no traffic is going to your site, then that could be the reason.

Grady

 

[sonitin]

In three years of my experience I have found clickbank to be nothing short of a rollercoaster.. you have to really look at monthly averages or so.

My personal observation: If you are an affiliate promoting thru reviews and other similar things then I think sales are on a slow but constant decline in last two years. Reviews used to do way good earlier as compared to what they do now. A part of it may be a change in shift as to how people search and look on internet. E.g. people might be giving more credibility to facebook recommendations than anonymous review sites...

If you have any comments or observations in this regard then let me know too.

 

[cantdome]

gradyp, so hops arent considered to be traffic? doesnt a hop mean that someone has visited ur site? i thought getting hops IS getting traffic. can somebody, please please please explain?

 

[jmpruitt]

Hops are traffic from your site to the affilitate product. traffic to your site is different.

 

[cantdome]

so if hops are traffic FROM ur site to the affiliate site and traffic TO ur site something completey different, then how do u check to see how much traffic ur site received? anyone? im confused....

 

[gradyp]

One thing you can use to track traffic to your site is Google Analytics.

Basically, the hops represents how many people click on your link. You can have 100 people coming to your site and on of them clicks on your link. But if your traffic suddenly drops to 10, then not as many people are coming to your site, so it will take longer to get those hop clicks.

I hope this helps clear things up for you.

grady

 

[cantdome]

thanx alot gradyp!!! i think i get it now

 

[webcars]

New upgraded browsers are killing the cookies of clickbank, thats why there is a massive drop in clickbank sales for AFFILIATES only. Specially "Internet Explorer 8.0" and above which is largely popular. Also I have noticed now a days that
most people are using anti spyware apps. which on demand wipes out almost all form cookies from system.

Coming days would be more problematic for specially CLICKBANK afilliates, not for the CB Vendors.

So work hard & earn less money it would be.

(Also FTC guidelines will be more reinforced)


thank you..
Do not forget to visit my CB store - link removed by moderator

 

[SirMatts]

Yes the sky is falling and affiliate marketing is dead :) No but seriously It is certainly something to consider and plan and i feel the same that Clickbank sales are way down. And as you mention browsers are evolving with more strict rules against cookies. A lot of virus scanners and anti spyware tools are flagging cookies as spyware. And who does not want to remove spyware of the computer lol. But all the fake reviews all over the net has probably taken away a decent amount of the effectiveness.

just take a look at this http://web-hosting-review.toptenreviews.com/ . Now toptenreviews is a pagerank 7 review site. Hard to find any other strictly made for reviews site that has that much of authority. And they are listing the 2 worst hosts on the planet Justhost and Godaddy as the best and ipage is heavily promoted on cpa networks so go figure lol... Go into any hosting forum and check what real people think about Justhost and Godaddy..... and you will find out something complete different :)... Sometimes we as affiliate marketers think people are more stupid than they are...

Now site visitors are probably never going to submit a review no matter how good it is to Digg or stumble upon or like it heavily on facebook... So just have to create better content than ever lead that content to the review pages... And Email marketing just becomes more and more important with all aspects of everything happening from panda updates to cookies to people not buying because of reviews to anything you can think of . a lot of ramble here but :)

The opportunities to make money online have never been bigger just need to get smarter about it. And in the end of the day if thousands of people are using same blueprint it got to loose it effectiveness as long as there is not an own unique spin applied to it.... just my few cents added to this thread :)

 

[justonce94]

Just don't give up. Maybe try getting affilorama's products like Affiloblueprint. I'm sure that'll help!

 

[aditd]

I did not pay to much attention to Clickbnack ( promote it ) so I can't say up or down. There is some income from there.
But with the rest quite constant.

 

[scheme]

I am increasinging puzzled with not only with my sales but it only seems to apply to those in USA.
Below is my stats for the last ten days (12th Oct 11)

http://www.wilf.biz/clicbank-screenshot.jpg

Now my USA sales used to always be the majority but for the last year have virtually disappeared. (I only sell one product)

As can be seen from the stats that over 50% of the hoplinks are from USA but no sales, yet I am getting sales for the same product from countries with fewer hop.

What is equally disturbing is that for this period I am not even getting order impressions without sales either.

This has been happening week after week then occasionally I might get a small spurt of sales from the USA.

It is the same product using the same hoplink yet Have only made one USA sale this month yet made 8 sales in UK, 3 in Australia and one in New Zealand for far fewer hops.

Now I know The USA is going thru a bad time but so are countries like UK so i do not think this is it.

It is the hops that count and this has been consistent and rising slightly over the year. So the problem is not the traffic.

Has anyone else noticed this anomally.

Wilf.