ClickBank Marketplace rankings. How trustworthy are they?
ClickBank Marketplace products are ranked by a productivity score that is a function of the money earned per sale, the percentage earned by the affiliate, the percentage of affiliate sales as opposed to natural sales, and the gravity, so it is a system that is heavily weighted in favour of affiliate sales.
Now, consider somebody who has a new product that is not in the ClickBank Marketplace. How does their product get into the marketplace? An affiliate sale has to be made before their product can get into the marketplace.
How many affiliate accounts can you have? As many as you like! Some people use this ability to have as many ClickBank affiliate accounts as you like to track advertising campaigns, by having one account per campaign, for example.
Now, let’s say you are a new product vendor with five ClickBank accounts. You can buy your own product from yourself four times through each of your other accounts, and you’ve got yourself into the marketplace without getting any affiliate to promote you, and probably at a fairly decent rank to boot! It’s not ethical, but there’s nothing stopping it from happening.
What about products targeted at Internet marketers? Most Internet marketers know all about ClickBank. If they buy a product, chances are good that they will buy that product through their own link. This has to be how many of the products attract such huge gravity figures; people are buying the product through their own affiliate links.
My advice is to keep this in mind whenever you look at ClickBank Marketplace rankings. They represent a system that can be easily subverted, so take them with a pinch of salt.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
