DPR Affiliate Marketing Blog

Posts Tagged ‘clickbank tracking’

To get started, I needed a WordPress theme that had extra page templates without sidebars. This was hard to track down and I have created themes in the past, but I didn’t feel like it this time. These special pages will be the landing pages for my PPC campaigns.

I found the Super Affiliate WordPress Theme from Profit Blogger. It takes some gymnastics to get it, but the theme saves you time and it’s free.

I will be using a page as my homepage on the blog, not the traditional home page. This way I have total control over where people go from the home page.

Clickbank is strange that way. Everyone else would have called it an API. But it seems now that you can have sales notifications sent to a url specified by you. It uses a POST function.

Here is how it works:

1. An action occurs in the ClickBank system (ex sale, rebill, refund, etc)
2. ClickBank posts FORM parameters to a URL you specify
3. ClickBank observes the server response
4. A program you build processes the variables

This works right into my idea for a tag based contextual Clickbank widget. It would have to adjust itself based on sales and click through rate. Instant sales notifications would make that possible.

When Clickbank added the feature of tracking ids to affiliate links, a lot of affiliates breathed a sigh of relief. I know I did. Up to that point, I had used used seperate affiliate accounts to track sales. One for advertising and one for natural search results. It was the only way to track the return on investment I was getting for the money I was throwing at pay per click advertising. Add this opened up the possibility of tracking hits down to the keyword to squeeze even more out the money I was spending.

Clickbank has made a lot of changes to their site lately. The claims that some of their affiliates and vendors have made about sales are true for most part. Clickbank has made millionaires. But the Clickbank site itself didn’t match the claims. The site was behind the times in looks and technology. But this is no longer true.

It is now possible for affiliates to add tracking codes to their hoplinks. Tracking Clickbank sales used to be a guessing game. If you spent money on PPC and used organic SEO to send visitors to the same page, it was very hard to calculate ROI on your advertising.