I’ve been trying to master an affiliate business on and off for almost two years. It started really working for me only recently, to be precise a few weeks ago. I had around eight conversions a day for 5 days, which I was quite happy about. However, to my disappointment, my conversions showed up only in Google Adwords. I could not see any of my sales in Clickbank. I know that Clickbank has lags, so I waited for a couple days to see if the sales would eventually show up, after couple of day I had only 4 sales out of 40 that I have in adwords. I have had the same Google and Clickbank accounts for almost two years and I never had this problem before. I got very excited that my website was finally getting conversions, but now the described issue came up and I am totally not sure where to look for solutions. I checked everything I could think of but nothing helped. I thought that I might be having two conversion codes installed on my thank you page, but I made sure that this was the case. Any ideas on this would be appreciated. Thank you.
Are You Losing ClickBank Sales?
This is an important message for those promoting products from ClickBank as an affiliate. If you don’t know about this, you could be losing sales — a lot of sales.
Let me tell you what happened. I was testing a new advertising platform. To make it quick and easy, I chose a product from ClickBank, created the hoplink, write the ad and put it all up. And I got my first sale within 15 minutes or so. I was excited and that proves the ads work. And the merchant’s site converts. But then days went by… nothing. Hmm… maybe it was just a fluke…
So I kept changing my ads into something else… Still nothing…And during the process where I was trying new copy for my ads, I forget the actual hoplink that I was using. So I have this habit of typing the first few parts of my hoplink in my browser, and then the rest of it would appear like a drop down menu. And I would copy that. But this one-time, I entered and went through the hoplink, and arrived at the merchant’s site. I clicked on the order button, and I arrived on ClickBank’s order page.
And here’s the shock — I don’t see my affiliate ID at the bottom of the page!
If you don’t already know this, when you promote products from ClickBank, when the visitor arrives at ClickBank’s order page, they can see your affiliate ID at the bottom of the page. You can try this yourself. You should see something like [affiliate=your_id] at the bottom of the page. Give it a try and see if you see your ClickBank ID. Here’s how you create your hoplink…http://your_id.merchant_id.hop.clickbank…
Change your_id with your ClickBank ID and merchant_id with the merchant’s ID that you are promoting. Let’s just say that your ID is johndoe. If you are promoting The Rich Jerk, your hoplink would be…http://johndoe.richjerk.hop.clickbank.ne…
And then, when you are at the site, and your click on the order button, arrives on the order page, you should be able to see [affiliate=johndoe] at the bottom of the page. If you see [affiliate=none] — something is terribly wrong. This was what I was seeing. After using my hoplink, that is all that I see… [affiliate=none] Which means, I could have been losing sales, paying for traffic to this particular merchant. The hoplink is not working. Alright, what can I do now?
I thought, why not stop promoting this merchant and look for other affiliate programs with similar products. And start searching the Internet. I found merchants and I also found affiliates. I looked at what other people are promoting. And I found someone who was promoting the same ClickBank product I was promoting. Hmmm… maybe I can see if his hoplink works. So I clicked on his link, arrived at the merchant’s website and clicked on the order button. Now I am at the order page… And his affiliate ID appears!
At first I thought that this could be a browser thing and nothing much that I can do. But after seeing this, I know that there’s something that I am not doing. How come this particular affiliate’s hoplink works and mine doesn’t. I studied what he did. Of course it was a bit difficult because he was using a PHP redirection file. But I found my way around it and discovered what he did and what I didn’t.
The minute I fixed this, my hoplink works! It was such a simple thing to do, and depending on how much you advertise, not doing this can be really costly…Now, here’s what he did…http://your_id.merchant_id.hop.clickbank…
Maybe you know about the “tid” parameter that you can use with your hoplink. It is the tracking ID. You can assign it with any value like “tid=adwords001″ or “tid=ysmrichjerk” or anything else. When someone buys, you can see from which hoplink they bought it from. It will appear in your transaction report. You can use this to track your advertising efforts.
But apart from that, there’s also the “type” parameter and you can that to the hoplink. Apparently, when I use this, my ClickBank ID does appear on the order page. I don’t know about you. Maybe it’s an OS-Browser thing. I tried it on Internet Explorer 6, and there was no problem. I tried it on my wife’s computer, which is Firefox with Windows XP and it’s still OK. I am taking the safest way I know.