Amazon orders dropped to 0.... What happened!?!?!?

[Joshuamcd22]

Alright, so I have a minorly successful Amazon affiliate site, that I normally get a least a few orders from a day. This month however they have dropped down to zero. On June 30th I moved my site over to a new host, but I'm still getting clicks, so I don't think that has anything to do with it, my clicks so far this month from July 1st- 10th are: 1329

That number is a bit odd in itself, that's considerably more clicks then I normally get, but no orders.... The niche I am in is for a high value low volume product, so I normally would expect to have about 200 clicks by now, and a dozen orders or so...

Any idea what could be going on??? I am at a complete loss to what I could be!

Thanks,
Josh

 

[HoneyHelper]

May be because the product you are promoting got any good substitute.
I think you should wait for 1 more month!
If the results don't change; shift your time to something else!

 

[Joshuamcd22]

May be because the product you are promoting got any good substitute.
I think you should wait for 1 more month!
If the results don't change; shift your time to something else!

I'm promoting a category, not a product. I've been making consistent money, for a while now, but just since July 1st, my clicks have skyrocketed, and my orders have dropped to 0...

The specific category, is a very stale line of products, that gets consistent sales, on the same products.

With the number of clicks I have, I should have gotten some unrelated sales by now anyways. There is something else going on.....

 

[cloudyquasar]

Quick things to check:

1: What does your webmaster tools say about your impressions/clicks ? I know you said the clicks on still there so i'm assuming that these are your amazon link clicks but it is good to check how you are fairing on wmt to take bot clicks out of equation
2: Assuming your Amazon account is not banned (if you were u cant miss a massive red statement on your amazon account page), what usually was your epc?
3: Have you checked historic trends for the same month last year? is it seasonal?
4: Has there been just drop in sales, if so although coming down to 0 is very extreme, have you not had any cookie based sales at all?
5: How does clicks compare when you do trend report for last 7 or 30 days?
6:Have you clicked on your own link and checked if the product is still on market?
7: how does your competitor look in the competitor analysis tools like semrush? has he had the same drop?

 

[bahus]

To add to what's already been said, I suggest that you contact amazon as well because that's really odd.

 

[Joshuamcd22]

Quick things to check:

1: What does your webmaster tools say about your impressions/clicks ? I know you said the clicks on still there so i'm assuming that these are your amazon link clicks but it is good to check how you are fairing on wmt to take bot clicks out of equation

Well, according to analytics, my traffic is nearly identical to the previous period, its up over all by around 20%, but its the same kind of traffic. I dont know why amazon would show so many more clicks then the last period, with only 20% more traffic.... Something isn't right there...

As for bots, google bots are excluded, and traffic from other bots is minimal.

2: Assuming your Amazon account is not banned (if you were u cant miss a massive red statement on your amazon account page), what usually was your epc?

Nope, my account is not banned. My sites all rank naturally, and are within amazons affiliate TOS.

With my usual epc, I should have some $$ by now...

3: Have you checked historic trends for the same month last year? is it seasonal?

It's not seasonal, this product stays relatively stable all year round, not fluctuating more then 30%.

4: Has there been just drop in sales, if so although coming down to 0 is very extreme, have you not had any cookie based sales at all?

Thats correct, NO sales whatsoever in July so far... Thats after selling a few products every day for the last many months before.

5: How does clicks compare when you do trend report for last 7 or 30 days?

Clicks WAY up in July, I'd say 5X higher then normal. I normally have a very small amount of highly targeted traffic, that gets a great conversion rate.

6:Have you clicked on your own link and checked if the product is still on market?

There is no issue with the links, I have a module in WP that reports any dead links, and I have manually checked a selection of my more popular links, and there are no issues.

7: how does your competitor look in the competitor analysis tools like semrush? has he had the same drop?

The niech I am in actually doesn't currently have any competitor's, sites with the same or similar products that are not affiliate sites, have not seen any kind of drop.


The only thing that changed at all is that I transfered my website over to a new host, nothing else changed. I am assuming that this spike in clicks, and total stop on orders must have been somewhat caused by this change, as it started on the same day....

 

[ja1myn]

The only thing that changed at all is that I transfered my website over to a new host

Do you track your organic rankings? Sometimes when you change hosts your rankings drop temporarily. This has happened to me in the past a couple of times. Although I don't think this is the case since you stated click volume and traffic is regular/up.

Have you seen a change in the general structure of the SERPs you're ranking in? Like are there more PPC ads at the top and side of the pages?

 

[Windmill]

Alright, so I have a minorly successful Amazon affiliate site, that I normally get a least a few orders from a day. This month however they have dropped down to zero. On June 30th I moved my site over to a new host, but I'm still getting clicks, so I don't think that has anything to do with it, my clicks so far this month from July 1st- 10th are: 1329

That number is a bit odd in itself, that's considerably more clicks then I normally get, but no orders.... The niche I am in is for a high value low volume product, so I normally would expect to have about 200 clicks by now, and a dozen orders or so...

Any idea what could be going on??? I am at a complete loss to what I could be!

Thanks,
Josh

That is very odd that it has been consistently bad over this many days, but this is also a harsh lesson to learn about affiliate marketing.

There is an ebb and flow to it. You will have huge sale spikes that will send you on massive highs. Nothing can get you down on days like that! But then you'll have days where you aren't making sales despite huge numbers of hops and your mood plummets.

You have to have faith that the numbers will even out. Have you had this website for over a year? Does it see a drop around this time? Because this time of year, sales are at their lowest for the majority of affiliates. Summer and all that. No one is buying things. Come December and January, and we're all going to be riding our massive highs.

But for you, it sounds like that maybe those clicks aren't legit and your traffic may not be legit/real right now.

 

[quietlearner]

but just since July 1st, my clicks have skyrocketed, and my orders have dropped to 0...

If there was a sudden jump in clicks, it's most likely due to bots clicking your clicks. On one of my sites I have multiple bots that have hit my links thousands of times in the last few months with one bot that hits at the exact same minute every hour, every day.

Instead of blocking them, I redirect all clicks from those IPs to various 5GB to 10GB files used for speed tests hoping their hosts notice the huge bandwidth usage.

If you're linking directly to Amazon, consider implementing a link redirect so that you can control who makes it to Amazon. For example instead of linking directly to Amazon, your links would look like this:

/gotoamzn/ABCD12345

Then you have full control and can easily filter out the bot clicks. With my system I perform the following checks:

* If it's a bad bot, redirect to a 10GB speedtest file.
* If it's a good bot, like Google or Facebook, 301 redirect to my product page.
* If the user is in a different country, such as France, forward the user to amazon.fr with the appropriate tag.
* If it's a normal visitor, forward to Amazon

 

[ttmschine]

You've just moved your site - have the affiliate links become malformed during the move so that Amazon isn't crediting you for any sales?

It is possible in Google Analytics to wrap a code around a link so that you can see how many times it is clicked - might be worth doing that?