Make Money The Honest Way

To date, there has still been no word from Clickbank regarding the problem of lost affiliate commissions due to their tracking cookies being blocked by anti-spyware programs running on people’s PC’s.

That means that the problem hasn’t gone away, despite a lot less noise being made about it by affiliate marketers. Maybe some of them are still making so many sales that it doesn’t affect them, but for the average affiliate marketer (like me) it makes a big difference. I know so, because I see my site stats every day and can see that I’m sending x-amount of visitors to the sales pages of products that I promote and I am not seeing the number of sales that those numbers should be converting into.

It’s not just products from Clickbank, either. Products I promote from several different affiliate sources have all continued to underperform so it’s a problem that really needs to be worked out. I get the impression that the affiliate companies themselves are not doing all they can to resolve this by finding a more reliable method of tracking affiliate links when cookies are clearly outdated and failing the affiliate marketers.

If only there were a really clever developer out there that could come up with the solution - imagine the size of the crowd (open cheque-books in hand) beating a path to that person’s door!

In the meantime, we will all just have to promote harder and work off reduced conversion rates to make money at this game. Fun, fun, fun!

One note of good news - for me anyway - and that’s this blog’s Alexa rank has gone up to 116,648.

That’s pretty good going and thanks to all of you for visiting here and reading my ramblings! I’ll keep my end of the bargain by continuing to post interesting and (I like to think) very readable posts. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them for me. I do respond to them all!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

This is something that has been bugging me for a while now.

A few months ago, there was a big hoo-ha concerning Clickbank affiliates not being paid for sales they generated because some of the buyers had anti-spyware running on their computers that blocked the cookie needed to register the affiliate id.

To date, as far as I know, this has not been satisfactorily resolved although Clickbank are actively working on a solution to the problem.

But wait… think about it.

The problem may not just be with Clickbank. How many other affiliate programs are out there that also rely on setting cookies on buyers’ computers to track the affiliates’ ids in order to pay them their commission for generating the sale in the first place?

Uh oh, this is not good.

I, like the majority of online affiliate marketers, take the time to track which links are being clicked on from my sites, so I have a fairly good idea of how many visitors I’m sending to sales pages for the affiliate products I promote. When I compare these figures to actual sales, it simply does not compute. Even taking into account the tyre kickers, hesitant potential buyers and I’ll-be-back’s and a fairly pessimistic conversion rate I should be seeing many more sales than I’m actually getting.

So where do all these people go?

Are they buying the products after following my affiliate links, only for those links to be non-tracked by the hosting sites or companies, meaning I don’t get credited with the sales? Could be. Are they all cutting and pasting my affiliate links and removing my affiliate id out of malice, boredom or mischief? Maybe.

Or is the sales copy so awful on the landing pages that they are simply not converting into sales?

I don’t think so!

The only serious answer is that the affiliate id isn’t being tracked, most probably because the tracking cookie is being blocked by the customer’s own software without them even realising it’s happening.

I don’t want to go into specifics here, but as an example, I am actively promoting a new program at the moment. My stats show that since I started promoting it, I’ve generated in excess of 100 click-outs on my affiliate link. That means over 100 people have gone to the landing page of that product.

Guess what?

In my affiliate account over there, it shows ZERO sign-ups!

The product owner cites a 13% conversion rate from visitors to that landing page, which means I should see at least 13 sign-ups in my account. If it was half that, I should still be seeing some. So where’d they all go?

This is not the only example that bothers me. I have even been told by people I know that they clicked on my affiliate link to sign-up with something or other - but when I check my accounts with these companies that I know these people have signed up with, there is no record of them signing up with my affiliate link.

Is this happening to you?

Does anyone out there know of any solutions to this very serious problem?

Please leave me a comment if you know something I don’t… or if you are experiencing similar problems and you think you are losing out on some of your commissions. I’ve started a thread on my forum about this same problem here:

http://thehonestway.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1001#1001

Feel free to look in at that thread and if you want to join in, please sign-up with the forum and add your voice to this! Maybe if lots of us can get together on this we can figure a way around it.

Thanks,

Terry Didcott

THE HONEST WAY