Affiliate marketing in general and Clickbank in particular
If you are entirely new to affiliate marketing you should probably learn the basics first. I'm working on some articles
that would cover these topics. Meanwhile good places to read would be forums like Digital Point
or Wicked Fire. There is also good Q&A thread specifically about Clickbank
that is definetly worth reading if you are new to Clicbank.
About Clickbank Analytics
I started this website in the fall of 2007 as a personal research tool as I'm a Clickbank affiliate myself. Clickbank has a lot of
products by many publishers. Thousands of them in fact. Dozens of new products are added every day. It may be hard or time-consuming
to find products that match your niche and are worth promoting. Clickbank marketplace has some search functionality and provides
some current data about each product. However it's impossible to see how each product behaved in the past. This informnation can be
quite valuable.
Home page contains global clickbank information. There top 5 products by gravity, gravity gain and loss (movers and shakers). In
short gravity represents popularity of a product among affiliates. This is not the same as sales volume. In fact there are ways of
inflating gravity with very little sales. For more details please read the Q&A forum thread mentioned above.
Header contains last data update date. Normally data is updated every day regardless of holidays around 4AM PST. If it doesn't drop me a line in email
and I'll take a look. Active products are ones that have sold recently. Inactive products haven't sold in sevelar months and most likely never will.
"Clickbank index" is the total of gravities of all products. It represents overall health of Clickbank affiliate community. When it
climbs everything is good. When it drops you may want to double check on your PPC campaigns as they may have become unprofitable.
Hovering your mouse over the gray star on the graph will bring up menu that changes time scale of the graph. This works on almost
all graphs on the website.
Product information page
Product page contains the following information:
- Product landing page URL. Hovering over the URL will popup dialog with hoplink url. If you have provided your affiliate
id in the personalization page the hoplink will have it in it. You can also cloak this hoplink
using http://moveto.ws/ cloaking service. This service also allows you to hide referer from
the publisher. You can read more on how and why this should be done on the information page of the cloaking service.
- Gravity. You can read more about gravity in the information resources mentioned above. Current gravity as well average
gravity for the last 7 days are shown. Difference between the two is called "gravity delta" and is used to determine whether product
is gaining or loosing favour with affiliates. Please note that this does not correlate with sales volume or with amount of effort
needed to promote this product.
- Earned per sale (EPS). EPS is the measure of how much an affiliate earns from one referred sale when commission
percentage, clickbank fees and refunds are taken into account. (With clickbank if the customer refunds affiliate looses his referral
commission as well). Please note that there may be multiple products associated with one publisher. EPS is for all of the products.
If there is only one product or all of the products have the same price it's possible to estimate refund percentage from EPS. However
is there are several products with different prices this becomes impossible since only the publisher knows how many of which are sold.
- Initial EPS and rebillSome products on clickbank have recurring payments associated with them. Customer pays fixed initial
price and then makes some monthly payment for as long as he/she uses the product. If the customer decides to cancel the payments
stop. EPS descibed above combines these two values. Initial EPS shows the first portion, rebill - the second one. Rebill is accumulated
over time so if customers on average keep the subscription for 3 months it will be 3x affiliate commission of the monthly payment.
If you see rebill graph climbing in steady steps month by month - this is a sign that most customers keep their subscription.
- Referred% shows what percentage of sales is referred by affiliates (rather than attracted
by the publisher himself).
- Commission% shows what percentage of product price (after clickbank fees are deducted) is awarded to the affilate who
referred the customer
- Unique visitors / month is the monthly traffic estimate according to http://www.compete.com/.
According to their website these estimates are based on toolbar logs and ISP provided statistics. In my personal experience Compete
provides more accurate data than Alexa since the latter is only based on web-master oriented toolbar data and therefore is heavily
biased towards web-maseter oriented resources. On the other hand Compete seems to disregard websites that have relatively small traffic.
- Google & MSN SEO. These numbers are based on the overall rankings of product website in Google and Microsoft search engines
respectively. Final number is based on number of keywords product ranks for orignically (not pay-per-click advertising), popularity
of these keywords among user audience and ranking for each specific keyword. Overall SEO index shows how much traffic does website
supposedly get from search engine. Underlying data on which these numbers are based are provided by SeoDigger.
Below the graphs most frequent keyword information is also presented.
- Lifespan indicates when was the product first and last seen by CB-Analytics. CB-Analytics first downloaded data on the October 22nd, 2007. So all
products that were active on that date have it as their "birthday" regardless of when they were really launched. If product doesn't sell for a while, is
banned or otherwise removed from the marketplace it will no longer show up in the marketplace XML feed and the date when this happened will be marked in the "lifespan"
- Total gravity is the measure of how established the product is. Every day product is present on marketplace it's gravity is accumulated.
This value is total gravity. It's very useful for separating well-established and stable products from ones that have their gravity spike to hundreds
in a matter of days and then slowly decays without generating much sales for most of the affiliates
- Category rankings show how the product ranks compared to other products in same categories. Exact formula is kept secret by
Clickbank but it looks like it heavily relies on gravity.
- Landing page screenshot and keyword cloud give you an idea on what the product is generally about. The large the font the more frequent word is on
the landing page. Please note that sometimes page may fail to load, is generated by Javascript or Flash so this data may not
be 100% accurate.
- Graphs. Last but not least these are by far the most valuabe pieces of information on the page. By default each graph has a timespan
of 90 days or the age of the product whichever is least. Gravity graph shows if affiliates are flocking or ditching the product. Because of it's
nature gravity will not fall to zero even if all affiliates quit promoting the product. Instead it will decline in a smooth
parabolic slope. EPS graph may have 3 data series is the product has recurring payments. Red is total EPS, green - initial and blue is rebill.
Ineterpreting these graphs is worth a complete article so I'll not go into more details here.
Clickbank product search
You can do text search of the products based on their ID, title and description. If your query exactly matches product id you'll
be taken to product page directly. Otherwise pageable result list is presented. You can sort the list by gravity, gravity delta,
eps, total rebill, PageRank, monthly traffic and SEO indexes. Sorting menu will pop-up when you hover mouse over current sorting parameter.
By default most product lists are sorted by declining gravity.
Searches can be augmented by parametric operators that will rule out products that don't match all of the specified criterias. You can
select only products that have recurring billing or those that do not, fall within some gravity band, etc. You can add operators to your
query by either filling values into edit-boxes that pop-up once you hover mouse over the search area or by typing them directly into the query string.
You can combine multiple operators.
Here are some examples:
- r:yes - show only products with recurring payments
- test r:no e:20 - show only products that contain word "test", have no recurring payments and have eps of more than $20.00
- test g:10:30 - show only products that contain word "test" and have gravity between 10 and 30
- test g::30 - show only products that contain word "test" and have gravity no more than 30
In any product list you can add a product to "favorites" by clicking on the star button in the upper-right corner of the product block. This can only be done if you've
entered your affiliate id in the personalization section ("log in" button in the top right of the page). All your favorite products will be
shown in your "personalize page". Products can be removed from there by clicking on the red star button in the upper-right.
Please note that this infromation is stored in cookies and product list will not follow you from computer to computer. You'll have to
recereate it on each computer you use for now. Although this information is stored in cookies it is never logged, collected or transeffed to any third parties.
For more details see privacy policy.
Clicking on the arrow button in the lower-right section of the product block will expand section containing four product graphs. Pressing
the arrow for the second time will collapse it.
Browsing products
You can browse all clickbank products based on category, their parameter like gravity or eps and date when they apperated on the marketplace. This is done by selecting
one of the items in the top menu.
Categories allows you to browse products by the category they belong to. List of categories is presented as pop-up menu under the header.
Lists can be sorted by any parameter
Top products shows all active products sorted by one of the parameters. By default this is gravity.
New products shows products that were launched on a certain day. By default the last day data was updated is used. It is also possible
to select "all days" in the day pop-up menu to see all products thet were launched in a given month. You can subscribe to this page
using your favorite RSS reader and stay up-to-date with daily udpates of Clickbank new products.
|
