Clickbank Tracking Improved

While I’m still in over my head with putting the final touches on a product and completing the videos for it, this is pretty big news so I couldn’t resist bringing it up.

Clickbank is one of the dinosaurs of the online world. They’ve been around for ever and they are in many ways, prehistoric.

Their system only changes when the absolute force of necessity backs them up against the wall, which is happening more and more often these days.

As one of the online giants, they sure don’t help break the stereotype that’s giants are slow and clumsy. But this is about good news.

Clickbank has finally instituted IP based tracking to supplement their horrendously faulty hoplink system.

What forced them to do it was the latest release of Internet Explorer 7.

The new version has settings preconfigured to block what it considers bad cookies. The Clickbank hoplink is part of these bad cookies.

That means unless Internet Explorer 7 users go through the trouble of changing their settings to accept the Clickbank cookie so affiliates can be credited with sales, all people using the browser are a plague on affiliate marketers.

One online source estimated that 26% of internet users were running Internet Explorer 7. That means more than a quarter of the traffic you sent to Clickbank merchants with your affiliate link was not being credited to you. Instead the merchant was getting an un-referred sale.

On some campaigns, the conversions and payouts are so high that even losing one fourth of all conversions to a silly glitch wasn’t that big of a deal.

On the other hand, with campaigns that were only making modest profits and costing a bundle in Adwords clicks, 26% is a big deal.

Problem is, in almost all cases, it was more than a quarter of all profits lost. Some have reported increases in sales in the several hundred percent range.

Time to give some underperforming campaigns a new chance. I’ve already flipped on a campaign that was one of my first. In the beginning it did well and over a period of months it became unprofitable. In the last five days, it is now humming to the tune of 100% ROI once again.

Even after this improvement and the sub ID tracking which came a couple of months ago, Clickbank still has a long way to come in rivaling the more “mainstream” affiliate networks.

One of the biggest problems yet is being over accessible. This is a dual matter, one could argue. While it’s great that anybody can sign up for an account in a matter of minutes, I would bet that less than 10% of account holders ever make an affiliate sale or put up a product.

What they do is simply use their account to give themselves rebates on products other people are selling.

On Clickbank, this has become the norm. I’ve done it myself, more than once in the early days.

While it may seem good for the end consumer, it has a darker side.

As an affiliate that pays good money or invests their time in building a strong site or large newsletter, all traffic has a cost. Unless you run your business as a hobby, you clearly want rewards of the financial type for the effort and money you expend.

When you promote a product to this traffic asset you create one way or another, you expect your due.

On Clickbank, a very large slice of the traffic you receive, particularly in the internet marketing niche, will simply change a couple of letters in the link and get paid for the sale instead of you. It’s just too easy to do. 3 minutes and you have a Clickbank account which can be used for any product sold.

This forces affiliates to look elsewhere before selecting a possibly superior Clickbank product to promote because of the inevitable loss of sales. I know for a fact that response will be much better on non Clickbank products for this very reason.

That has the direct effect of losing sales for the merchant. If the affiliate is unsatisfied, the product doesn’t get attention, mailings and reviews.

One might argue on the reverse side that people would not have bought the product in the first place if they couldn’t get 50% off this way. Debatable for sure.

If they hadn’t been trained in this manner, that wouldn’t even be an issue. Most affiliate networks ask for a demonstration of minimal competence before attributing accounts to new users. Either a website, a list or some other proof. Clickbank needs to jump on that bandwagon and also make tracking links individual to each product, as well as enforcing the “no buying through your link” policy.

When that happens, they will secure their market position rather than leave it wide open for the competition to swoop in and steal it, the way it is now. Let’s see which happens first.

P.S. Go download Firefox, it’s 10 times better than IE.  Combine it with Opera for regular browsing needs, it comes with a great email client.