Clickbank Experiment-Can you trust the Product gravity score?

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

With respect, the logic is faulty, here. Partly for the reason Steven mentions above, of course, but also partly because there's a whole variety of other reasons why high gravity products can have particularly low conversion-rates. Personally, I stay away from high gravity products because (as Clickbank now advise affiliates openly on their site) the one thing you know for sure about a high gravity product is that it's going to be competitive to sell. Here's a little example to mull over:-

Clickbank Product A
- Sales-page conversion-rate 2.8%
- Solid product from well-known marketer
- Product has almost no refund requests
- He has 20 affiliates of whom 10 are superaffiliates who sell huge numbers of the product
- Product is easy to promote and sell
- Sales numbers are therefore very high, but the gravity figure is obviously very low (maybe around 10)

Clickbank Product B
- Sales-page conversion-rate 0.2%
- Crappy product from scammy marketer
- Refund request-rate is higher, of course
- Product had a "professional launch" with 100 "temporary affiliates" (accounts used once each to buy one product, privately refunded, and/or the figures were massaged in one of the other "customary ways")
- Product is obviously a complete and utter nightmare to promote and sell because the sales-page doesn't convert well
- Gravity figure starts out at about 110, and rapidly rises to 150/200 because gullible affiliates are attracted by the gravity figure, believing wrongly that it "validates the fact that the product is selling very well", and they all struggle and waste time/money, but eventually they obviously make 1 or 2 sales each anyway, and for this reason the gravity figure rises still further to 250/300 as the inevitable consequence of its self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obviously enough, product "B" is the high gravity product. Obviously enough, product "A" is the one for which I want to be an affiliate. These examples are in no way contrived - they're realistic and common.

A high gravity figure, in short, is surprisingly often a sign of a very high turnover of affiliates, each attracted by the high gravity figure, struggling, and eventually making one sale which boosts the gravity figure even more. It doesn't necessarily mean that anyone can realistically or profitably sell the product at all!

So, the answer to your question is "yes". You can trust the gravity figure to measure what gravity figures measure. But not to tell you how that came about, and definitely not to imply that any affiliates at all are successfully promoting the product! :p

I promote 13 products at the moment - soon to be 14 - and my two best-converting products, by far, out of all those, both have single-figure gravities. Some people think that's a "coincidence".

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

- Product had a "professional launch" with 100 "temporary affiliates" (accounts used once each to buy one product, privately refunded, and/or the figures were massaged in one of the other "customary ways")