Wtf, clickbank?

JFoulds

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A long time ago I purchased quite a large 'fitness' male oriented forum on Flippa. Opting to continue the 'free to use' model operated by the previous owner, I did not want to charge subscription fees or place adverts so instead I set up some fairly basic email marketing using ClickBank fitness products.

When I first started promoting these offers (over a year ago) on the emails, my EPC was sitting around $0.4 average, with weekly blasts to new members getting around 500 clicks, so $200 per week - not bad at all for the price I paid for the forum. However, over the past year the EPC on the ClickBank fitness product I have been promoting has just been dropping, steadily. I did not realise how much of an issue this was until I looked at my historial data and realised my old EPC was around $0.4 average - and yes people, I mean a moving point average of multiple weeks at a time, I'm not new to ClickBank, I know you have 'good days' and 'bad days'.

My EPC for the same product, same landing page, same quality users, same email template is now around $0.07.
Yeah.

It's fucking atrocious. I've dropped from making $200 per week to $35 from this web property.

Now, although I initially split-tested various ClickBank offers to see which garnered the highest EPC and this product came out top, I am happy to switch it around with some split testing but that's not really my question. I literally do not understand how the hell my EPC could have dropped this low over the course of a year.

These are people who are registering on a fitness forum oriented for men and clicking on an advert for a male fitness program in an email they get sent. I don't understand how they COULD be any more targeted. The quality of the traffic has not changed (I only send the email blast to active new members on the forum), the template for the email has not changed, as far as I can remember the landing page for the product is the same but even if it was that which was killing my conversions surely this would be affecting every other publisher of the product and therefore absolutely tanking the vendors conversion rates as well?

Now I know, there are times in the year where sales dip and raise, but this has been an almost steady decline in EPC since I started promoting the product.

I just wanted to know if anyone else has experienced something like this, any ideas why, and what the fuck to do?
 
stop waisting time/traffic on that offer, choose another one which performs better and don't forget to monitor your EPC more closely this time
if an offer converts well at first, it doesn't mean that it will for the time being
it's just speculation, but maybe somebody is sending huge amount of low quality traffic to that offer and the advertiser/vendor decided to lower the EPC drastically not just for the one who's doing it, but for all pubs

you can always try CPA instead of CB
 
t's just speculation, but maybe somebody is sending huge amount of low quality traffic to that offer and the advertiser/vendor decided to lower the EPC drastically not just for the one who's doing it, but for all pubs

That's what I don't understand though, from ClickBank you're paid a percentage commission from people who buy a product, if the advertiser/vendor is 'lowering the EPC' that means they are intentionally not paying me commissions I have generated...
 
promote something on the forum directly by making a banner ad at top or some sticky thread
 
promote something on the forum directly by making a banner ad at top or some sticky thread
That's another issue, the fitness forum has a lot of active people who are professional personal trainers etc, the reason it's still active and growing is because they see it as a good forum without any of these 'broscience' fitness programs advertised on. By blasting the offers to new members I ensure I don't alienate my existing userbase, something I'm fairly certain would happen if I introduced banners... :\
 
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