ClickBank has been a source of endless frustration for so many of us who not only make money online, but actually make a living purely online!
On one hand the ClickBank network offers some of the best converting affiliate products anywhere. So, we all work with them. They also reliably make payouts every 2 weeks, yet another strong point in their favor.
But the major problem until just recently - they refused to show you how much traffic you’ve sent them, so you could never accurately figure out which affiliate products are converting better than others. AAAhhhhh!
So what’s the problem?
While this may not matter much to someone who’s happy to get a $50 ClickBank check every few months, for those of us who bring in several thousand dollars a month from affiliate revenue (from sales of many different affiliate products), optimizing your conversion funnel matters. It matters A LOT.
Can’t you track affiliate conversions yourself?
In short, no. The best you could do was to use OpenAds to track your outgoing clicks for each affiliate product, and then compare that with the actual sales at the end of the month. But that’s error prone.
What you want is to see a per-product breakdown of how many clicks you’ve sent and how many sales you made. THEN you can see what’s actually making you money, so you know where to focus your energy the most. Read: do more of whatever works the best.
So how can you see product conversion stats from ClickBank?
Well, this is a new feature, and it’s buried down deep. But, if you look deep within their reporting tools, and select just the right combination of options (see the image), you’ll get… drumroll please… conversion stats broken down by product! Yeah!!!
Note that currently this is only available for the "by publishers" report, and only for the past 30 days.
And this is what you’ll be seeing… Note how neatly the crucial numbers are computing for you. You see "clicks per order" and how much money you actually made per click. Looking at this graph, can YOU pick out the obvious winner?
While we found it quite by accident while reviewing our top money makers for the past several months, we’re very happy and grateful to see this new feature.
Any great tips to optimize affiliate conversions?
Absolutely. More on this in a future article, but here are some big ones…
Use OpenAds to split-test ad headlines, and see which attract more clicks to each affiliate products. Every couple of weeks, choose a winner, and add a new contender to "beat the control".
Use "goals" in Google Analytics to track how well your pre-sale review of the affiliate product is performing. You can see how many clicks to the product sales page you generate, and what your abandonment rate is. You DO pre-sell your affiliate products, don’t you?
