Posts Tagged ‘data’

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of IT Operations

Some ClickBank clients have raised concerns that the traffic and clicks that they see in external analytics applications such as Google and Yahoo Analytics sometimes don’t match their ClickBank Hop analytics or sales numbers.

Affiliate-driven sales account for the vast majority of ClickBank’s sales, and we are completely committed to making Hop tracking as accurate as possible. ClickBank will soon release new functionality that will allow you to integrate Google and Yahoo Analytics into the ClickBank Hop and sales cycle. This will give our clients complete visibility into the ways in which affiliate promotions translate to Hops, order form visits, and eventually completed sales.

Since the Vendor Thank You page is the last destination for a ClickBank consumer following a purchase, it would seem as though comparing the number of completed sales to the number of visits to the Thank You page would be relatively straightforward. However, I’ll share with you a number of different ways by which traffic can reach this page, demonstrating why this comparison can sometimes be inaccurate.

1.       ClickBank Sales: The most obvious and rewarding way in which traffic lands on a Vendor Thank You page is via a successful ClickBank sale. As mentioned on our Vendor Tools page, ClickBank will always pass nine query string parameters to the Thank You page. These parameters indicate that the visitor has placed an authentic ClickBank order.

2.       Robots: Search engines spider websites to improve search capabilities. The Thank You page should never be scanned by search engines. The Vendor should always add the META tag described in our Vendor Tools to prevent robots from adding the Thank You page to a search engine list.

3.       Customer Bookmarks: A ClickBank customer can always bookmark the Thank You page. Once bookmarked, they can visit the Thank You page as many times as they like.

4.       GOTO link in the receipt email: When a customer makes a purchase, ClickBank sends them a receipt email that includes a GOTO link to the Thank You page. This GOTO link is only valid for 14 days after the sale is made. It contains an encrypted identifier that ClickBank verifies and ties back to the original Thank You page URL given to the customer at the time of sale. A customer is allowed to visit the Thank You page via this GOTO link as many times as they want within that 14-day window.

5.       ClickBank Customer Service: In some cases, ClickBank can provide a customer with the original Thank You page URL and parameters. This is done in cases where sending the customer the Thank You page URL will keep them from requesting a refund, such as if they were unable to download the product immediately after purchase. This is typically only done within the 60-day refund period.

So how can you, the vendor, better protect your Thank You page and get more accurate traffic statistics? ClickBank provides multiple ways to protect the Thank You page in our Vendor Tools. Here are a few highlights:

1.       A Thank You page should always be a script-based page, such as PHP, ASP, Perl, etc. A scripted page can read and evaluate the parameters that ClickBank passes. The Thank You page can easily be scripted to only permit visitors that have valid ClickBank parameters, like the ClickBank receipt.

2.       A Thank You page should always be protected by the ClickBank Link Security Script and a Secret Key. ClickBank provides code examples on the Vendor Tools page that show how a scripted page can verify the ClickBank Proof of Purchase (CBPOP) value. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors that have a valid CBPOP value. It is worth mentioning that less than 2% of registered ClickBank vendors use a Secret Key. However, for sales on any given day, over 50% of the sites that make a sale use a Secret Key. The lesson here is that the most successful ClickBank vendors protect their product using the ClickBank Secret Key and CBPOP.

3.       Check the time. ClickBank passes the time of the original sale in computer epoch time (seconds since 1970). A scripted Thank You page can easily verify that the order occurred within a given number of days. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors within a specific number of days since the original sale. This prevents people from accessing the Thank You page URL via bookmarking or sharing.

4.       Script and log the visitor data. Once your scripted Thank You page has filtered out robots and unverified visitors, you can now accurately track unique visitors by logging the receipt number. Obviously, some consumers will download a product twice if they have problems, but a scripted Thank You page will allow you to match unique visitors with unique sales.

I hope this helps demystify the occasional inconsistencies between ClickBank sales numbers and Thank You page visits. The new ClickBank integration with third-party analytics programs should help even more. Look for it in the near future.

Posted by: Greg Lems, Director of Application Development

Have you heard of a Wordle before? A Wordle is a visual representation of words contained within Web content. Words used more often appear larger. When you create a Wordle of Clickbank’s Blog, here’s what you get (click to view the full-sized image):

We’ve been doing our company blog for several months now and I think this Wordle tells us some interesting things about what we’re trying to accomplish at Clickbank. Some of the words that jump out at me (besides the obvious “Clickbank”):

Products and Business – Of course we’re in the business of selling products, but a quick look at other words nearby show “information,” “computer,” and “digitally,” which highlight the unique nature of the products we sell compared to other affiliate networks. “Sales,” “purchase,” “publisher,” and “affiliate” are also critical components of ClickBank’s business, so it was good to see that we address them frequently.

Can – I like that “can” is a big word here. If you’ve got an idea-any idea-for a digital product that you want to sell on the Internet, we say “YES YOU CAN” (to paraphrase a currently popular politician and/or Bob the Builder). As long as it complies with the ClickBank client contract, of course.

Data and Transaction – We’ve spent a lot of time and effort over the past couple of years enhancing our systems and infrastructure to be more reliable and dependable. We want our publishers and affiliates to know that the technology infrastructure at ClickBank is rock solid, and that each and every order transaction is of the utmost importance to ClickBank.

While realizing that the Wordle is just a fun little widget, we had a good time at the ClickBank offices analyzing its contents. Since ClickBank is a pretty unusual business model and can be difficult to explain to outsiders, it was interesting to see how we describe ourselves to the outside world. At the very least, it was a good way to make sure we’re talking about the topics that are most important to us. Try running Wordle on your blog, and see what message you’re sending to the world!

Posted by: Greg Lems, Director of Application Development

Here’s a riddle: What travels at the speed of light, takes up virtually no space, and changes constantly, yet is vitally important to ClickBank publishers and affiliates? Data!

The key to being effective as a ClickBank affiliate or publisher is having the knowledge of how one’s efforts to attract and convert customers are faring. Data is the key to this knowledge. In recent months, ClickBank has built functionality to help our clients receive data that is vital to their success as publishers and affiliates.

Starting last year, ClickBank made the “tracking ID” (or TID) functionality available to affiliates. This allows affiliates to pass parameters via their Hoplinks that show up at order time, enabling them to track anything they are interested in. Keywords, campaign names, anything that affiliates adjust to try to improve performance can be recorded in the TID and analyzed after orders have been placed.

ClickBank Analytics (available on the “Reporting” tab of your account) takes TIDs and many other factors into account to provide important data to affiliates. It shows how many Hoplinks have been attributed to an affiliate’s account, and also how many sales have occurred. Affiliates can view this data by publisher, to see which of the publishers they promote have the highest conversion rates. They can also view this data by hour or TID. All data is also downloadable by CSV (comma-separated values) for use in analysis tools or charting packages, such as MS Excel.

Additionally, ClickBank Analytics is useful to publishers as well. They can see how well their pitch pages convert, even breaking performance out by affiliate or hour of day.

Another new data-related feature we recently introduced is instant payment notification (IPN). If you choose to enable it, ClickBank will notify your server on a near real-time basis of every transaction event you were involved in, either as a publisher or affiliate. Programmers can write code to receive ClickBank IPNs and create a whole host of functionality, such as a running total of sales for the day or other dashboard features.

In upcoming releases we plan to build upon the data-related functionality we offer. One feature that has been frequently requested is charting or other graphical functionality on the analytics page. We look forward to hearing more from our community about your data-related needs.

As Director of Application Development for ClickBank, I’m keenly aware that there’s a world of programming opportunities available to our clients who want to analyze their ClickBank data. My job is to make sure people can access it and make good use of it. In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss tips and tricks that programmers can use to interface more closely with ClickBank systems.