Click Bank - Do I Still Get Commission in This situation?

7 replies
You refer a customer to a cb product and the customer doesn't buy but he does opt in to the merchant's email to get free X and then after a few follow up from merchant the customer decides to buy the product, does the affiliate still get the commission? What if it's a recurring bill, does the affiliate get commission for the life subscription of the customer?
#bank #click #commission #situation
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Originally Posted by vuedoolor View Post

    You refer a customer to a cb product and the customer doesn't buy but he does opt in to the merchant's email to get free X and then after a few follow up from merchant the customer decides to buy the product, does the affiliate still get the commission? What if it's a recurring bill, does the affiliate get commission for the life subscription of the customer?
    In a perfect world, yes, you would still get a commission if the sale happened while your cookie was live.

    And there's the rub...

    The longer the period between when your cookie gets dropped and the sale happens, the more things that can go wrong.

    > The cookie can be erased from the buyer's computer.
    > The buyer could buy from another computer.
    > The buyer could revisit the sales page and pick up another affiliate's cookie.
    > In some cases, the follow-up email contains links designed to overwrite your cookie with the seller's.
    > I've even heard of crooked affiliates using exit pops to drop cookies.

    In all but one of those scenarios, the seller is innocent and likely thinks he's helping his affiliates. But the end result is the same - you get hosed.
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    • Profile picture of the author jorgesil
      Personally I don't promote products with an optin box on it, or
      any other leaks in the sales page.

      You expend your money sending trafic to the vendor sales page
      and could't receive any comissions.
      Its to risky.

      Jorge
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by vuedoolor View Post

    You refer a customer to a cb product and the customer doesn't buy but he does opt in to the merchant's email to get free X and then after a few follow up from merchant the customer decides to buy the product, does the affiliate still get the commission?
    It depends.

    On quite a few things, actually.

    This subject comes up very regularly indeed, and the last few threads answering the question may interest you?

    This thread started off with exactly the same question (and had a lot of answers!) ...

    This thread contains much relevant information ...

    This thread is a little longer but contains a very full and detailed range of perspectives on your question.

    Happy reading!
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    • Profile picture of the author vuedoolor
      Thanks Alexa! I've been reading a lot of your posts lately

      How do you find these threads so quickly? I always do a quick search before posting a question but maybe I need to work on my filtering to get the right information I'm looking for.

      Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

      It depends.

      On quite a few things, actually.

      This subject comes up very regularly indeed, and the last few threads answering the question may interest you?

      This thread started off with exactly the same question (and had a lot of answers!) ...

      This thread contains much relevant information ...

      This thread is a little longer but contains a very full and detailed range of perspectives on your question.

      Happy reading!
      Signature
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by Caleb Spilchen View Post

        why do so many of the top CB products like truthaboutabs, have an opt-in box on the page...
        I believe that one does actually have a version of the sales-page without the opt-in, too?

        But in general, I think it's a mixture of reasons, Caleb:-

        (i) Vendors know that they make far more sales if they follow up the leads than if nobody does (and are right about that, of course), in other words they're falling into the trap of comparing "opt-in with no opt-in" rather than making the more valid comparison of "vendor's opt-in with affiliate's opt-in" which they could easily also make if they simply provided two versions of their sales page, with and without the opt-in;

        (ii) Most Clickbank affiliates don't have their own opt-in anyway (bear in mind that fewer than 10% of Clickbank affiliates ever earn anything worth talking about and fewer than 1% ever make a living from it - those are Clickbank's guesses, not mine);

        (iii) Some successful vendors - although of course they know that 10% of their affiliates produce 90% of the affiliate-referred sales - don't quite appreciate that the small number of potential affiliates they're losing by not offering an opt-in-free version of the sales page are the very ones who would make so many sales for them;

        (iv) Some vendors are dishonest and want to steal a percentage of their affiliates' leads (they can easily skim 20%/25% of them without people realising, if the conversion-rate's decent, and doing so can easily double their income, if they're paying a high commission - and the theory - sometimes advanced here - that "risking doing this would lose them a lot of affiliates" is simply nonsense) ... traditionally, whenever I make this point here, two or three angry vendors post after me saying that that's "very rare" (don't ask them how they "know", though!!) and that most vendors are honest, but that doesn't change the fact that in my - admittedly limited - research of late 2008/early 2009, 85% of them were taking a proportion of their distributors' leads and commissions by hoplink-substitution. People alleging dismissively that these vendors are some sort of "low-life exceptions" simply don't know what they're talking about and/or are living on a different planet;

        (v) Some vendors don't know or don't want to know that they can easily have a sales page with an opt-in and one without it, and/or are frightened of giving their affiliates the choice;

        (vi) The opted-in leads have a higher value to vendors than some affiliates appreciate. Not only because of the obvious point that one sale through their own affiliate-link (at 75% commission) is worth the same to them as 4 sales through any other affiliate, but also because of all the potential for additional upsells, and so on;

        (vii) The system isn't "policed" at all (for which I don't blame Clickbank in the slightest: it wouldn't be possible for them to enforce any policies in this area other than the one they have, which is that they don't want to know about it and that once a potetial customer has opted in, they're regarded as "belonging" to the vendor);

        (viii) There's a way of using a vendor's opt-in box to boost the gravity, and unscrupulous vendors, knowing that some inexperienced affiliates are naive enough to imagine that there's some sort of correlation between high gravity and numbers of sales and/or conversion-rates (which of course there isn't at all) will use this trick to "create a high-gravity product" knowing that, in a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy for the gullible, gravity produces affiliates just as much as affiliates produce gravity (this is a complicated reason, but it's among the many reasons why some very high gravity products in fact have particularly low conversion rates, because the sustained high gravity figure is actually evidence simply of affiliate turnover, rather than sales numbers).

        Originally Posted by vuedoolor View Post

        Thanks Alexa! I've been reading a lot of your posts lately
        We all have occasional problems getting to sleep ...

        Originally Posted by vuedoolor View Post

        How do you find these threads so quickly?
        I have a little trick: I remember one searchable word I've used in a post in the thread. For example, on the subject of Clickbank product-selection, I know that I used the word "gimmicks" (comparatively unusual word) in a post on the subject, so I do a quick search for my own posts containing the word "gimmicks" and that takes me straight to the thread. Mind you, now that I've used that word here as well, I've muddied the waters a bit ...
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  • Profile picture of the author Caleb Spilchen
    Alexa

    This thread started off with exactly the same question (and had a lot of answers!) ...

    This thread contains much relevant information ...

    This thread is a little longer but contains a very full and detailed range of perspectives on your question.
    Thank you for those links... Will have a look... My question in this case would be, why do so many of the top CB products like truthaboutabs, have an opt-in box on the page...

    Caleb
    Signature

    Canadian Expat Living in Medellin, Colombia

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    • Profile picture of the author CMartin
      Originally Posted by Caleb Spilchen View Post

      My question in this case would be, why do so many of the top CB products like truthaboutabs, have an opt-in box on the page...
      Caleb,

      If you use the ClickBank affiliate link for the truthaboutabs product
      http://xxxxx.mikegeary1.hop.clickbank.net

      you will be redirected to a page without an opt-in box
      http://www.truthaboutabs.com/ab/


      The website's main page at
      http://www.truthaboutabs.com
      has an opt-in box, but this is not the page that visitors get when they click a CB hop link - it's the other one above without the opt-in.


      Carlos
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