Recurring Billing

You have spoken and we listened.  We’ve made changes to our analytics tool that will help vendors and affiliates who promote recurring billing products.  Previously, it was not possible for you to differentiate between sales made through the ClickBank Order Form and rebills on recurring billing products you sell or promote.  This made the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion) difficult to work with when reporting on recurring billing products.

With our release on October 26, 2009, you will now be able to differentiate rebills from sales that occur on the ClickBank Order Form.  We have added two new fields in analytics called Initial Sales Count and Initial Sale Amount.  These fields represent sales made on a standard product and the initial sale of a recurring billing product.  These fields also replace Gross Sales in the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion).

Coming in the near future, we will also introduce new analytics reports designed to further inform our clients on their recurring billing promotions.

Vendor Tracking ID

Our October 26, 2009 release will also be the introduction of reporting by Tracking ID for our Vendors.  This feature has been, and will remain, available for our affiliates.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 5
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4

This is part five of a five-part, five-day series about how to best take advantage of the new analytics.

The new ClickBank Analytics feature has been available for a few weeks now, and we would like to follow up with ideas on how to explore and utilize some of new metrics that are now available to you. Part 1 of this series details what the different stages represent and how to measure the full process from Stage 1 to Stage 4. Part 2 outlines Order Form Sale Conversion and Part 3 examines Hops Per Order Form Impression. Part 4 looks at order form impression count vs. order form submit count. Today’s post deals with Order Form Submit count vs. Gross Sale Count.

Order Form Submit Count vs. Gross Sale Count: Stage 3 to Stage 4

You will need to look at two metrics to measure the progress of prospects from the Order Form Submit stage (Stage 3) to Sale stage (Stage 4): Order Form Submit Count and Gross Sale Count. You may view these metrics one of three ways:

1.     Plot each individually on the trend chart

2.     Compare the 2 metrics on the trend chart (using the “Compare To” drop down box)

3.     View the metrics in the data table

Keep in mind what constitutes an Order Form Submit. It is defined as the act of a prospective customer clicking the Pay Now button on the ClickBank Order Form (our reporting will count up to one order form submit per customer visit to the order form).

For prospects to successfully make it to the Sale stage, the following must have occurred:

• The customer information from the ClickBank Order Form is validated.
• The customer is verified to not be participating in fraudulent activities
• The customer has the funds and is authorized to fulfill the sale transaction requested

Common barriers for prospects exiting at this stage include:

• An invalid Postal Code entered on the ClickBank Order Form
• An invalid Name entered on the ClickBank Order Form
• An invalid Card Number entered on the ClickBank Order Form
• The prospect’s payment method is not authorized due to problems with funding
• The prospect is identified to be participating in fraudulent activities
• An invalid Card Expiration Date is entered on the ClickBank Order Form

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 3
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2

This is part four of a five-part, five-day series about how to best take advantage of the new analytics.

The new ClickBank Analytics feature has been available for a few weeks now, and we would like to follow up with ideas on how to explore and utilize some of new metrics that are now available to you. Part 1 of this series details what the different stages represent and how to measure the full process from Stage 1 to Stage 4. Part 2 outlines Order Form Sale Conversion and Part 3 examines Hops Per Order Form Impression. Today’s post deals with measuring Order Form Impression Count vs. Order Form Submit Count.

Order Form Impression Count vs. Order Form Submit Count: Stage 2 to Stage 3

You will need to look at two metrics to measure the progress of prospects from the Order Form Impression stage (Stage 2) to Order Form Submit stage (Stage 3): Order Form Impression Count and Order Form Submit Count. You may view these metrics one of three ways:

1.     Plot each individually on the trend chart

2.     Compare the 2 metrics on the trend chart (using the “Compare To” drop down box)

3.     View the metrics in the data table

For a prospect to successfully make it to the Order Form Submit stage, the following must have occurred:

• The customer clicked the Pay Now button on the ClickBank Order Form

Check back tomorrow for details about Order Form Submit Count vs. Gross Sale Count.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 5
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 3
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2

This is part two of a five-part, five-day series about how to best take advantage of ClickBank’s new analytics reporting.

The new ClickBank Analytics feature has been available for a few weeks now, and we would like to follow up with ideas on how to explore and utilize some of the new metrics that are now available to you. Part 1 of this series details what the different stages represent and how to measure the full process from Stage 1 to Stage 4.Today’s post deals with measuring Order Form Sale Conversion.

Order Form Sale Conversion: Stage 2 to Stage 4

Order Form Sale Conversion measures the success of moving a prospect from viewing the order form to completing a sale. It is measured as a rate or percentage, and therefore the higher the rate, the more efficient your conversion process is. This metric is particularly useful in the case where a product is sold without the use of a HopLink. In this situation, Order Form Sale Conversion measures the full sale process.

For a prospect to successfully make it from the Order Form Impression stage to the Sale stage the following must have occurred:

• The customer clicked the Pay Now button on the ClickBank Order Form
• The customer information from the ClickBank Order Form is validated The customer is verified to not be participating in fraudulent activities
• The customer has the funds to fulfill the sale transaction requested

Check back tomorrow for details about the Hops per Order Form Impression metric (measuring stage 1 to stage 2).

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 3
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 1
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4

This is part one of a five-part, five-day series about how to best take advantage of ClickBank’s new analytics reporting.

The new ClickBank Analytics feature has been available for a few weeks now, and we would like to follow up with ideas on how to explore and utilize some of new metrics that are now available to you.

As you know, optimizing the conversion of prospective customers into completed sales is key to your success as a ClickBank affiliate or vendor. The new analytics offer more insight into this process than you have previously had. The process of sales through ClickBank flow through the following stages:

• Stage 1 – Hop: Prospect clicks on HopLink and is taken to vendor Pitch Page
• Stage 2 – Order Form Impression: Prospect views order form
• Stage 3 – Order Form Submit: Prospect submits order form
• Stage 4 – Sale: A sale/order is successfully processed

At each stage of the sales process, your prospective customer chooses to continue or exit the process. To maximize successful conversion from prospect to sale, you must minimize the number of customers that exit the process along the way. The metrics introduced are intended to inform you of where prospective customers are exiting the process so you can improve the tactics you employ to convert prospects into sales.

Over these five posts, we will explore various ways to measure conversion from one stage of the sale process to another, beginning with measuring the full process from Stage 1 to Stage 4.

Hops per Order: Measure the Full Process (Stage 1 to Stage 4)

The Hops per Order metric will tell you how successful your prospects at the Hop stage are in converting through the full process to the Sale stage.

For a prospect to successfully make it to the Sale stage, the following must have occurred:

• A valid, properly formatted HopLink is clicked on
• A vendor pitch page is rendered on the web browser
• A customer decides to proceed with purchasing the product, following a link to the order form
• A valid, properly formatted link to the ClickBank Order Form is clicked on
• The ClickBank Order Form page is rendered on the web browser
• The customer clicked the Pay Now button on the ClickBank Order Form
• The customer information from the ClickBank Order Form is validated
• The customer is verified to not be participating in fraudulent activities
• The customer has the funds to fulfill the sale transaction requested

You can explore this metric either in a trend chart or view it in the data table. To create a chart of the metric, locate the Data Type selection box and choose Hops. Then locate the View selection box and choose Hops Per Order. The metric will be displayed on the trend chart for the timeframe you choose.  The metric is also available to view in the data table located below the trend chart. The data table allows you to view the metric by a specific attribute of the sale and in total over a specified time period. For example, you can choose to view Hops per Order for a specific country or product.

If your Hops per Order is 100, that means on average it takes 100 prospects at the Hop stage to have 1 prospect successfully reach the Sale stage. The lower the metric, the more efficiently you are converting prospects from the Hop stage to the Sale stage. You may use the trend chart feature to find time periods when your Hops per Order is lowest, and then correlate that metric to specific marketing tactics that work well.

Check back tomorrow for information about Order Form Sale Conversion (measuring stage 2 to stage 4).

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 3
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2

Earlier this week, we released several major improvements to our system that will help both vendors and affiliates grow and improve their businesses. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of what we released.

Help Center

You’ve probably already seen the new Help Center tab on the right-hand side of our navigation bar, but if not, be sure to check it out! The Help Center contains many new articles for both affiliates and vendors, covering everything from creating a ClickBank account to attracting more affiliates and learning about common ways to promote products. It’s a great place to look for any information you need about being more successful as a ClickBank client.

New & Improved Client Analytics

We’ve made major improvements to our Client Analytics, allowing you to see more detail than ever about your sales and promotions. Our improved Client Analytics lets you look at trends, order form impressions data, reporting by various dimensions like geographic location, and more.

To view the new Client Analytics, log in to your account and click the Reporting tab. Then click Analytics NEW! on the right side of the subnav:

To read more about all the features Client Analytics has to offer, and how to use it, see our Help Center article.

Integrated Sales Reporting

Clients can now track successful orders (conversions) by linking the ClickBank order process to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing, giving you more information about sales and the effectiveness of promotional efforts than ever before.

Read more about Integrated Sales Reporting in the Help Center.

ClickBank API

The ClickBank API makes it possible for a wide range of computer programs to securely access ClickBank account information on behalf of ClickBank account owners. Some of the functions available to users of the API include the ability to:

• Request a refund for a customer’s purchase
• Request a cancelation for a customer’s subscription
• Retrieve a list of transactions in a ClickBank account for a given timeframe

Read more about the ClickBank API in the Help Center.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Coming Soon: Enhanced Reporting Analytics
2. Pilot Participants Wanted for New ClickBank Reporting Feature
3. ClickBank Introduces Mobile Commerce Features

ClickBank will soon be releasing major improvements to our reporting analytics capabilities. We understand that our vendors and affiliates rely on timely information from ClickBank to effectively manage their business. In that spirit, we are pleased to be introducing several new and exciting features:

• Interactive Trend Charting
• Order Form Impressions Data
• Expanded Dimensions with Drilldown Capability
• Expanded Date Range
• Improved Performance
  

Interactive Trend Charting
Imagine being able to see daily sales trended graphically at the click of a button. Now imagine being able to view that same trend for a particular geographic location…or product…or tracking ID. Quickly compare those sales to the number of Hops or order form impressions during the same time period. All this and much more will be at your fingertips when the new reporting analytics interactive trend charting capabilities are released. Enjoy the freedom of exploring and learning from the intricacies of your sales and sales funnel data.

Order Form Impressions Data
Further understand the sales funnel of your business as potential customers navigate from HopLinks to pitch pages to order forms to order completion. Also manage your sales retention efforts on the other side of the funnel by viewing refund and chargeback rates.

Expanded Dimensions with Drilldown Capability
Find new ways to slice and dice your business with the introduction of several new dimensions. New dimensions include customer country, customer province, product, category, currency, language, and billing type. Also, you can further explore each dimension. For example, you will be capable of seeing trends on your sales in Australia, France, or any other country where your product has sold.

Expanded Date Range
Explore your data in time frames you define, whether that be for the last 3 days or the last 3 months. Data is available for up to the last 120 days.

Improved Performance
We understand that interacting with your business information requires a smooth and timely experience, and our technical team has paid great attention to building a tool that responds quickly.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 3
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 5

We would like to invite you to participate in the pilot of this exciting new feature. To participate, you must use at least one of the following programs:

- Google Analytics

- Google AdWords

- Yahoo Search Marketing

If you use one of these programs and would like to participate, simply fill out the form below with your name, ClickBank nickname, email address, and which of the three programs you use.

Please note that only a limited number of respondents will secure a spot in the pilot, so apply quickly!

If you are chosen to participate, ClickBank will contact you via email with additional information regarding the pilot.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. ClickBank’s Great New Features
2. Coming Soon: Enhanced Reporting Analytics
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 4

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.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Power of Data
2. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 2
3. New Analytics in Depth – Exploring Sales Funnel Metrics: Part 1