What Happened To My Product Stats?
This is one of those posts where somebody is going to have to slap me upside the head and tell me what I did wrong because I’m clueless. My tale involves selecting a product with good stats and finding not two weeks later those stats have drastically changed.
It Looked Like A Good Offer
I was looking for a product to shore up one of my affiliate sites and because of its niche I had to go through a few affiliate networks before I found a product that was of good quality and had good gravity and payout stats on Clickbank. I found one, emailed the author for a review copy of it and set up a sidebar custom ad. I generally like to let the ad itself run to see if there’s any interest via clicks before I write the review.
For the next couple of weeks, the offer continued to get clicks. Nothing astronomical but it was a new and untested ad. So a few clicks a day was sufficient for me as long as it started converting. Two weeks and no conversions later, I revisited the Clickbank offer only to find the stats I had used had dramatically changed. For instance, the gravity had gone from 138 to 3! You read that right. 138 to 3! I knew because I record all affiliate stats when I pick them to see how they do versus my experience with them. If the offer gains gravity while I’m not having any luck with it, I need to look at my campaign again. New graphic, text etc.
What Did I Do Wrong?
Is it possible for a marginal product that sells nothing to gain significant gravity by selling one unit only to lose it after that reporting period closes? In other words, was I just unlucky enough to view it on its peak upswing? My understanding of the CB stats is that it’s an average computed over the life of the offer and not a slice in time.
Am I all wet? Has anybody else had this happen to them anywhere near as dramatically as I just did? I’m the first person to admit making an error but I can assure you I NEVER would have built a custom banner for a product with a gravity of 3.
Help me out here and leave a comment if you have any insight into this. I need to know how not to repeat this in the future.
UPDATE:
My theory was correct. After corresponding with the Clickbank people I’ve learned it is possible for a product that has marginal sales to undergo a brief surge in gravity rankings. So it is possible that if you look at the product at the wrong time that the stats will be skewed positively.
The best solution to this is to select products from those that have a merchant profile on the account. This way, you can look at historical data and see how the sales have done in the past. Obviously, not all merchants have this.
The other thing I highly recommend you do is talk to your online entrepreneur friends to see if they have any experience with the offer you’re considering.
BTW, the offer that prompted this article has been removed from my site because it did have lackluster conversions just as its 3 gravity would suggest.
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