High Gravity on clickbank, is it a good thing?

Thanks for your quick response Alexa.

Yes i'm sure gravity indicates more than popularity, and as with many things in IM has many layers of complexity.

I have read the other thread and made some notes, this point raised an issue that intrested me, so I thought i'd make a new question to find perspectives just on this issue and not hijack the other discussion.

People do, Chris. :rolleyes:

People imagine that there's some kind of correlation between gravity and "number of sales".

Or they imagine that there's some kind of correlation between gravity and "conversion rates".

My top-selling, top-converting product (out of the nearly 20 I'm currently promoting) has a gravity of 5. Its vendor has another, different product with a gravity of about 135. The low gravity product has a far better conversion-rate (across the board, not just my traffic) than the high gravity one. It also sells far more copies. This is normal, not exceptional. "But you try telling that to the young generation of today and they just won't believe you"!!

That doesn't set an affiliate cookie on your prospective customers' computers, Nate. It typically loses a huge proportion of the sales. And (for understandable reasons) you have to have the vendor's express permission to do it, anyway.

This is mistaken, I'm afraid. It looks that way, and it sounds logical (well - kind of) but it isn't actually true.

Contrary to superficial appearances (which "can be deceptive", as the saying goes), doing that doesn't actually tell you what you need to know, to learn what you're trying to find out. For all the many reasons explained at such length and in such detail in this thread.

I think it's often that.

And some (the newer ones) are just bad products with poor sales pages that have had their gravity figure "inflated" by any one of the various questionable/nefarious means that vendors (who want to) can very easily use to achieve that result.

It's self-perpetuating: as long as there's a huge pool of affiliates who imagine that "high gravity is an indication that the product's selling well", vendors will continue to do that, because they want to attract as many affiliates as possible. Gravity attracts affiliates, and affiliates create gravity - self-perpetuation.

Many of those vendors don't quite appreciate that the affiliates they're attracting that way are drawn from the pool of the 90% of Clickbank affiliates who collectively produce only 10% of the affiliate-referred sales, but that's another story altogether.

I've found great products with low gravities and terrible products with high gravities. A lot of has to do with what joint venture partnerships the product owner has setup.

I look at the sales page to make sure it's compelling, then have a look on the search engines to see what kind of competition is out there for the product.

Some of my biggest winners have been with lower gravity products.

Andrew

They don't add an additional 1.0 in respect of that same affiliate.

No affiliate's "component" in the product's total gravity score can ever be more than 1.0. Not even if they sell 10,000 copies.

Please excuse me: I appreciate entirely that you understand "how it works" and am posting only because some people will otherwise read your wording above and misunderstand you, imagining from your wording that if an affiliate makes a sale every day, the gravity score will increase by 1.0 point per day, which isn't true at all, as you and I both know. (I know this will happen because I've been misunderstood on this very point myself, in the past, when I've used very similar wording to you: you can't be too careful around here!).