ClickBank - I Smell Something Fishy...

[jacstone193]

Originally Posted by affiliateppc

Hi Peter,

Cookie stuffing is when a website "drops" a cookie on your computer whithout you clicking on any links.

Here is the normal procudre to qualify fo affilaite comission:

1. Visitor lands on your page and starts browsing
2. Clicks on a link (your affiliate link) and gos to the merchant
3. On the merchant page he takes some sort of action (download, purchase, fill in form etc) and you are credited.

Cookie stuffers "preload" merchant pages into your cache before you even click on a link

An example of such a script (these are old, more advanced stuff is out there):

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--
// Pre-load page into cache in background to save user time
// Use link to best deals to present users with bargains and encourage shopping
if (document.cookie == null || document.cookie == "") {
document.cookie = "y";
wh = window.open('Affiliate Link Will Go Here','nwin');
wh.blur();
window.focus();
setTimeout("window.focu
82
s()",1000);
}

AffiliatePPC

Thanks for this I'm going checking on mine now

[koolwarrior]

LISTEN...

It's the recession. You really think people are buying Clickbank products like they used to?! They're not!

I've had a tremendous decline in sales...CB and non-CB over the past 365 days. Pulling thousands last January...

This January...HA! It's like a friggin' joke!

You just have to adjust your strategy. Maybe people are getting hip to the crap...or they're not into buying digital crap anymore.

How many marketers do you see now pumping out PHYSICAL PRODUCTS instead of the ebooks they used to shove down our throats?

Most of the crap on CB is digital...strictly digital. People just aren't beat anymore for giving up the last of their money that the recession hasn't sucked from them...especially on something they can't HOLD in their hand.

In these tough times, people aren't thinking as much about losing weight, or hypnotizing themselves. They're worried about SURVIVING. So yeah, I blame the recession...and I think it's this guy's problem, too.

No one is exempt from the trials and tribulations of life (including internet marketing).

And BTW...stop having the core of your affiliate business involved in obtaining new customers. Why not build a friggin' list, capture details, build a relationship with them, so that they can build their trust in you. THEN, you'll be able to finally convince them to come up off the cash for a digital piece of crap off of CB.

They're not gonna buy it from you up front, dawg. In these tough times, they're only going to get something they TRUST. And YOU have to be the one to build that TRUST in them.


And might I add...watch your refund rates, too, guys!


This economic crapola is making people gung-ho for refunds so they can hold on to what little cash they have left. So, even though your sales are dropping, also watch your refunds too. They add up...

[billromer]

I'm just getting back into CB/AdWords again myself, thanks to Frank Kern and Trey Smith, and just not getting conversions.

First, I thought it was iframes, which CB claims won't get credited.

Now, I'm worried about 3rd party cookies, which I have not seen discussed here. See CB's info on this:

14. What about people whose browsers are set to reject "3rd party" cookies?

Our hoplinks always open at the top level of the current browser window, and we issue all cookies during that redirect. These are called "1st party" cookies because the cookie is coming from the same domain name as the page itself.

In contrast, most affiliate systems set cookies by having users embed a reference to an outside image, script, or frame on their web page. These are called "3rd party" cookies because the domain names don't match. Such cookies are frequently blocked by privacy software.

This would seem to negate the redirect actions where you place a cookie before sending the visitor to the main merchant page (with no affiliate id tacked on the end)

Now, I notice that possibly IE7 is blocking 3rd party cookies, and possibly even cookies from Clickbank.net by DEFAULT?! Granted, this was a bit of an older thread that I saw.

Does anyone have any updates or recent hard data on this whole mess?

For now, I think I'll dump the old CB account and start over, although I can't imagine why that would make a difference.

Bill

[sylviad]

As KoolWarrior, I have seen a 1/3 reduction in CB sales over the past year. My sales were just starting to rise and I saw some promising numbers for a few months, and then New Year 2008 and my sales dropped - permanently. The sales have not increased since - despite putting more effort into my promotions. In fact, the opposite has happened.

I've believed ever since Jan 08 that something odd must be going on at CB and the more of these threads I see, the more convinced I get.

I do wonder, however, about cloaking affiliate links. I don't, because I read on the CB site that they do not guarantee you will get credit for sales if you cloak your links. They claim they cannot identify your affiliate link if it's cloaked. Yet I see people do cloak their links. Is it possible this is causing some of you a problem with CB?

It doesn't answer my problem, but...

Sylvia

[Angela Neo]

No wonder my CB sales on one of my more profitable niche has declined so much. It actually started late last year for me. I had no idea so many of you had the same issues too. Think I'll try to change the hoplink account and see how it goes.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Even as I sit here tonight, I'm having an issue some of their tracking....

One product is not updating its hops when the others do. It says I have 2 total hops for the day, when I know I have 100+ due to other tracking that I have in place.

Not sure what the answer is, but this is really starting to irritate me a bit.

[garyv]

Here's a wild theory - But there may be some adware sitting out there on people's computers, which works in conjunction with an online program. The program crawls the internet harvesting clickbank IDs from online hoplinks and then adds them to a database. The adware is constantly updated with this database of clickank ids. Then when the adware detects one of the ids from the database, it replaces it with one of it's own. Which would be why the numbers on an older account continually go down.

And by the way. I've noticed the same phenomenon in the past. It almost feels like playing the slot machines at a casino. They always put the higher paying slot machines near the door, to get you hooked.

[Charles Washington]

I dont know if this fits, but I am having problems with my tracking today. I just started a new article marketing campaign. I have ben getting about 30 HOPS per day for the past three days.

Today, I checked once and had 2 HOPS, I then checked a little later and had 0 HOPS. I then checked later and have 6 HOPS. So I went from 30 HOPS average to 6 - with some weird goings ons.

I had a lot of clickthroughs today, but none of those clicks are registering as HOPS 0 which is very odd.

[winebuddy]

I just had an affiliate send 1500 visitors to one of my sites and it resulted in about 40 sales.

Of those 40 sales, about 7 of the buyers put in their OWN affiliate ID to save some money.

The rest all came through as hops and purchases.

All I can say is it looked AOK to me.

[Darth Executor]

This isn't cookie stuffing. If it was cookie stuffing testers wouldn't get blank affiliate ID on the order page, they'd get someone else's affiliate ID.

[australianrealestate]

In response to aik77 who suggests shifting over to PayDotCom instead of clickbank...that's a very good idea and I would like to use paydotcom more.Their system is infinitely better, problem is they have a very much smaller range of products, lots of dead links etc. I guess there would also be chargeback issues with paypal which is why clickbank dont offer paypal payments I imagine.

Still in principle I prefer paydotcom, but It seems a very dead site, not being improved. Am I wrong about this?

[billromer]

I've noticed the hop count issue too!!

I just started a new CB account tonight and KNOW people have been to my affil link, but my hop count shows nothing.

Yesterday, I was being a bit of a stat-checking freak and saw times where the hop counts went from 60 to 120 and back to 60 again within a few minutes.

HERE'S ARE SOME SUGGESTIONS:

1. Capture the visitor's info before sending them to any CB sales page - a very simple squeeze page will do - I collected 25-30 names today already.

2. As someone mentioned earlier, don't switch to Paydotcom - switch to your own product, on your own domain, with money flowing directly to you a lot more quickly. Use a $7 script-like affiliate system to make all the frustrated CB affiliates extra happy with instant commissions and no cookie issues.

Just sayin'.

Bill

[tremayne]

Curious! Looks to me as if you were probably making the same number of sales all along but someone was hijacking them somehow.

Sydney

[ildarius]

Count me in:

Usually: 500-700 = one sale
Freak day 1: 2400 hops = one sale
Freak day 2: 1200 hops and 6 sales

[milla]

Yeah, some shady people are probably skimming a little off the top of everyones commissions. Completely undetected. They are raking in millions off this for years. Some small group in a Nigeria or something. Hardcore black hatters.

[Jakehyten]

omg! I am freakin out cause its the same for me. I've made 1 sale in 3 days. and all traffic and hopws are the same!

[crystalq]

Do you cloak your links? Maybe you should.

[milla]

Holy crap people, how many times do I have to post this for you?

Clickbank Parasites and Adware

This is like the 8th time in a year!

It's too bad he doesn't show a solution to the problem. I don't even know if there is a way to fix that problem is there? Will stuffing your own cookies fix that?


.

[chihoon]

I have a similar situation right now.

Whenever I start a new campaign promoting Clickbank products, I usually generate sales on the first day. Then, I'll go a few days with no sales at all. I pause my campaign for a day and then resume my campaign in Adwords. Again, I start generating sales almost immediately. Then, a few days with no sales at all. I've done this a few times, and every time I pause and restart my Adwords campaign, I seem to get sales.

By the way, I use domain forwarding in Adwords. My clickbank affiliate link is not used a destination URL.

If I use domain forwarding, will it protect me from the affiliate hijacking?
What I mean by domain forwarding is, my domain name is holding my affiliate link and then redirects to the merchant site.

How should I fix this?

[Brad Callen]

Why is it that many IMers always think so "negative"? If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say something in the IM community was fishy, was spam, was a scam, was unethical, felt cheated, blah blah... and it actually wasn't at all. I'd be...

Clickbank has been around for ages. I've personally used Clickbank to sell ALOT of product. I won't give exact numbers, but it's enough to know they're a solid company and are not doing anything "fishy". I'm personally getting very tired of hearing so many IMers thinking the worst of things. My advice is don't waste your time complaining and spend your time marketing and paying attention to things YOU have control of.

3-4 years ago, our community was nowhere near as negative as it it now. Marketing online, for me, was a heck of a lot more fun then. Most looked for opportunity and expected the best, not the worst. And if you recall, that's when ALOT of the "big name gurus" got started. Call it coincidence, but I think not.

I think it's time the IM community become alot more positive and uplifting again. Who knows, it might just make the difference in your business.

Brad

[LB]

Originally Posted by Brad Callen

Why is it that many IMers always think so "negative"? If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say something in the IM community was fishy, was spam, was a scam, was unethical, felt cheated, blah blah... and it actually wasn't at all. I'd be...

Clickbank has been around for ages. I've personally used Clickbank to sell ALOT of product. I won't give exact numbers, but it's enough to know they're a solid company and are not doing anything "fishy". I'm personally getting very tired of hearing so many IMers thinking the worst of things. My advice is don't waste your time complaining and spend your time marketing and paying attention to things YOU have control of.

3-4 years ago, our community was nowhere near as negative as it it now. Marketing online, for me, was a heck of a lot more fun then. Most looked for opportunity and expected the best, not the worst. And if you recall, that's when ALOT of the "big name gurus" got started. Call it coincidence, but I think not.

I think it's time the IM community become alot more positive and uplifting again. Who knows, it might just make the difference in your business.

Brad

I couldn't agree more.

I use CB as both an affiliate and vendor. I see normal fluctuations like in my non-CB businesses.

As a vendor it is always frustrating and a little puzzling when an affiliate contacts me and asks what I'VE done to ruin their sales.

This almost always comes from people who don't track clicks, split-test or otherwise keep tabs on what's working for them.

CB does have billing and reporting issues from time to time. Typically, they are transparent about these things and post the details on their site.

I'm not naive enough to say that they're perfect...but they're the best I've dealt with and I've had accounts since around 2000.

[sjessica]

have recently heard about some weird happenings regarding clickbank recently...

wondering what they do intend to have all these

[CmdrStidd]

I am a software developer and I think I have found the answer to the cookie stuffing issues you might be having with your sites. PM me and send me copies of your website code to examine. Zip it up if necessary. If I can help you, I will PM back with a bid on the work. If I do not believe I can help you then I will PM back stating the same.

All information sent to me is considered Proprietary and is owned by you. I give my word that I will not use any of the information that I get for personal use. I also will not make changes without your express written permission first.

[LB]

A little off-topic...I love the tags on this thread.

"clickbank fishy smell"

LOL

[Amfire]

Solution, use PPV,

Originally Posted by milla

It's too bad he doesn't show a solution to the problem. I don't even know if there is a way to fix that problem is there? Will stuffing your own cookies fix that?


.

[JayXtreme]

Originally Posted by Brad Callen

Why is it that many IMers always think so "negative"? If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say something in the IM community was fishy, was spam, was a scam, was unethical, felt cheated, blah blah... and it actually wasn't at all. I'd be...

Clickbank has been around for ages. I've personally used Clickbank to sell ALOT of product. I won't give exact numbers, but it's enough to know they're a solid company and are not doing anything "fishy". I'm personally getting very tired of hearing so many IMers thinking the worst of things. My advice is don't waste your time complaining and spend your time marketing and paying attention to things YOU have control of.

3-4 years ago, our community was nowhere near as negative as it it now. Marketing online, for me, was a heck of a lot more fun then. Most looked for opportunity and expected the best, not the worst. And if you recall, that's when ALOT of the "big name gurus" got started. Call it coincidence, but I think not.

I think it's time the IM community become alot more positive and uplifting again. Who knows, it might just make the difference in your business.

Brad

Hi Brad..

I appreciate what you are saying..

I agree with you for the most part, but I have to say that I am one of the most pro-active people I know when it comes to this.. when I first saw these issues with Clickbank..I spent weeks testing and tracking..

Believe me when I say... I have registered thousands of hops on a test domain in all manner of settings and scenarios.. and there is DEFINITELY something wrong with the tracking at Clickbank..

It's not right across the board and seems to be in isolated spots.. but there IS an issue, that I am sure of.

2 years ago, I was on the sidelines jeering at the CB "sky is falling" crowd... but right now, my testing shows me a picture that I don't like.

I'm not the type to sit on a forum complaining about it, I diversified my business away from being reliant on clickbank many years ago, I'm just sharing with you so you might see that not all people who see these issues is being negative.. Personally, I LOVE clickbank, they still give me a big chunk of change every fortnight..... but for sure I won't ever put one of my products in that marketplace...

Jus Sayin'

Peace

Jay

p.s. I am constantly testing the tracking issues, each week we have someone follow our test method for this, and last week I predicted CB complaints 24 hours in advance of them appearing here on the forum... my testing allowed me to see it earlier than most.

[Bryan Zimmerman]

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say something in the IM community was fishy, was spam, was a scam, was unethical, felt cheated, blah blah... and it actually wasn't at all. I'd be...

Clickbank has had it's problems and thats a fact. Here's a thread where they went a WHOLE DAY without tracking sales properly. Check your affiliate link if you are promoting Strip The Fat

It was proven by numerous people around the country who all came up with the same [affiliate=none] tag on the sales page.

There was some pretty strange things going on wednesday and thursday as well in this thread wtf is going on with clickbank?

When a good number of people who make consistant sales start having the same problems then it's hard to deny something is not going on. JayXtreme even talked about the cookies not setting properly on twitter.

I agree with having a positive additude but when something is wrong, it's wrong. No change in attitude is going to change that.

[Aaron Moser]

I don't know why some of you think cookie stuffing is the main culprit here? If you click the merchant's order button and it says affiliate= none. That's not cookie stuffing!!

On the other hand I don't think clickbank is skimming profits either. It all boils down to a flawed tracking system. And when those servers start getting overloaded waiting to process orders they start dumping cache along with your affiliate ID (possibly). I think the problem is more to do with the actual tracking though and the affiliate=none issue.

For what it's worth I've never bought a CB product through my own affiliate link that I didn't get credit for. But I have seen the affiliate=none when clicking my own links to the order page. I don't think this has anything to do with cookie blockers like anti-spyware software either. Since it works sometimes and not others.

I just wish CB would just step up and address this issue to all of us instead of pretending nothing is wrong on their end.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Just this past Friday, I talked to about 10 different affiliates who did not register a sale on a particular clickbank product. Together we collectively had over 1,600 hops with no sales when the product normally converts at 1:50.

You are right Brad, It must just be our negative vibes scaring the sales away....

or

Clickbank could have an issue with tracking.

[Stallion]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Kelsall

Just this past Friday, I talked to about 10 different affiliates who did not register a sale on a particular clickbank product. Together we collectively had over 1,600 hops with no sales when the product normally converts at 1:50.

You are right Brad, It must just be our negative vibes scaring the sales away....

or

Clickbank could have an issue with tracking.

It's Clickbank. You don't go from good weeks, to a week of complete zeros. complain and sales start again.

They're retarded.

[nuz]

WOWW! i am new to this cb market as well and just got my site running. that 1000:1 ratio is SCAAAREEYYYY. 1000 visits? i'm only at... like..25, lol

[CmdrStidd]

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!! I never expected this many of you would want me to look over your sites code! Because of the super response to my offer, I must note here that I will go through these as best and as quickly as I can but it will take time so please, PLEASE bear with me. (At this rate I might have to hire another coder to assist me)

[jcisme]

This is a very worrisome thread as I'm just now developing a product for click bank. Of course I don't understand more than half the terms discussed here so will have to spend some time googling them. The posts that are most disturbing are the ones about hackers as I didn't think about the fact that everything and anything can be hacked.

Thenk, just today I got a strange email from ebay telling me that an order is being shipped to me except I haven't ordered anything from them.
Even stranger is a promoters email that's included into a response to a response for a support ticket. Strange going ons in cyber land.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

I think that Clickbank is a valuable tool for anyone that wants to do affiliate marketing. This is true even with the "hiccups" that they seem to be having...

With that said, I just wish that they would come out and admit that their tracking is screwed up -- although, I understand why they would never do that.

[warriorjohn1444]

This have been happening to me for some time too until i eventually began to switching my hoplinks to another account, and things improved again. Its saddening.

[Rebtl]

With this, and many many discussions just like this I have seen, I long ago decided to quit using Clickbank at all. They are just simply not trustworthy and certainly not out to help the marketers IMO.

That being said I have a problem.

I have 278 dollars sitting in my clickbank account, and since I never did enough sales to get my 5 credit cards to overcome their "security system" (most of those were paypal sales, I think I have 3 real credit cards) They will not give me my money.

Does anybody know of a way I could get them to pay me that money?

Thanks

Rebtl

[The 13th Warrior]

Isn't Harvey Segal the ClickBank expert?

Maybe someone should corral him over to here to do some due diligence or problem solving for a fee or create a product solution if he can get to the bottom of this and/or create a near fail-safe solution.

Now theres a product waiting to be invented.

The 13 th Warrior

[Nathan Hangen]

So can we verify that creating a new account fixes the problem?

[Brad Callen]

Originally Posted by jcisme

This is a very worrisome thread as I'm just now developing a product for click bank. Of course I don't understand more than half the terms discussed here so will have to spend some time googling them. The posts that are most disturbing are the ones about hackers as I didn't think about the fact that everything and anything can be hacked.

Thenk, just today I got a strange email from ebay telling me that an order is being shipped to me except I haven't ordered anything from them.
Even stranger is a promoters email that's included into a response to a response for a support ticket. Strange going ons in cyber land.

Exactly my point. Don't waste your time googling this. It's not important. CB is very easy to use. Is a quality service. If you're new, you'll end up going in circles, getting your own merchant account, and making 1 tenth the sales you could be making if you ignored this thread and just got a Clickbank account and started selling.

Brad

[freedomguy]

Hi Dr Julie

Brad's right, don't let this thread (or any other) scramble your brain! Just stay focussed on the launch and stay positive. After all, this thread is about affiliates getting stuffed, NOT merchants!

John

[Rebtl]

Originally Posted by The 13 th Warrior

Isn't Harvey Segal the ClickBank expert?

Maybe someone should corral him over to here to do some due diligence or problem solving for a fee or create a product solution if he can get to the bottom of this and/or create a near fail-safe solution.

Now theres a product waiting to be invented.

The 13 th Warrior

No sooner had you said that than he PM'd me with a suggestion for my problem.

I'll let him discuss it with you all if he sees fit

Rebtl

[Chris Lockwood]

Originally Posted by Hamida Harland

There's NO comparison between Clickbank and Paydotcom - I couldn't even find similar products to those I promote at Clickbank. They definitely don't have the same products and you don't get paid instantly.

You don't get paid instantly with either one.

Some products are at both places, like some of mine, but since they are different companies, I'm not sure why you would expect all the same products to be at both places.


As for the original post, that is weird. If Clickbank was intentionally doing something fishy (which I highly doubt), why wouldn't they do it across the board? Why would they make it so you could use a different account and get different conversion rates?

[Harvey Segal]

Originally Posted by Rebtl

No sooner had you said that than he PM'd me with a suggestion for my problem.

I'll let him discuss it with you all if he sees fit

Just to clarify I was responding to this problem

Originally Posted by Rebtl

I have 278 dollars sitting in my clickbank account, and since I never did enough sales to get my 5 credit cards to overcome their "security system" (most of those were paypal sales, I think I have 3 real credit cards) They will not give me my money.

Does anybody know of a way I could get them to pay me that money?

If you have a similar problem please PM me.


Harvey

[sladezer0]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Kelsall

Contacting them won't do much good, I'd imagine.

They would never admit to anything being "wrong" lol

I know I'll be switching my affiliate links up every now and again...Looks like I'll just be getting more checks from clickbank lol

When it comes to understanding your online profits better - don't throw out at least contacting them!

[IMChick]

So where is the incentive to fix the tracking issue on CB's part? If affilate=none, then the full commission (or the affiliate part of it anyway) gets paid out where? To the product creator's main sales page/site? or to CB? How do they identify the problem?

[Alex Lin]

No wonder why my sales drop. I use to have more than 1 sales each day but since February my conversion rate is 1:4 days. So the issue is behind CB tracking system.

I do not cloak my link. I put my direct affiliate link on the page.

[jms.mrtn]

Wow this has never happened to me... dun dun dun...

But, I haven't checked... wow, thanks for this post very very interesting... This is going to have me checking and watching just a little bit closer to my campaigns

[Daniel Scott]

As a vendor, I'd like to put in my two cents...

The economy is a bitch right now, and sales have dropped dramatically. It does depend on your niche how much (and possibly some niches are still going strong) but as a general rule ebook sales are converting much lower. Maybe all online "infoproducts" are. I don't know. I just sell ebooks.

As a vendor I have about a 10% CTR rate through to the order page, but conversions are abysmal. I'm not exactly sure WHY this is, maybe people don't understand that they're trying to buy something, or whatever. But I know before this recession things were a LOT better than that.

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom here, just saying that there may be more to this than just CB not processing stuff correctly.

-Dan

[essmeier]

The most recent version of Spybot blocks Clickbank cookies. If your "cookied" customer is running Spybot and has immunized their system, you won't get credit for the sale.

Kinda crummy, but that's how it is.

Charlie

[Janet Sawyer]

Originally Posted by Simon_Sezs

Geesh...you people just don't understand.

There is another option though and one that most people haven't considered...the creator of the page could become an affiliate and then write code that overwrites the affiliate's link that is driving traffic to the site. He/she would then place the code on his site and rotate it so that it only stuffs randomly, like 1 out of 20 people. I have seen it done before. And without outing anyone, someone who has done this is a warrior.

No theres a thought!

Thanks for that....

Oh and before anyone thinks it - I don't sell through clickbank, so it wasn't me.