How To Do Your Own X-Ray Domination Using ClickBank Tracking IDs
Today the Rich Jerk is releasing his X-Ray Domination product today. If you're on a few mailing lists, it's hard not to know this, because almost all the Internet marketers with substantial lists are trying to outdo each other with “extra value” bonuses offered to anyone who purchases X-Ray Domination (XRD). It's understandable, because XRD has a list price of $997, which means each person an affiliate signs up is going to make that affiliate several hundred dollars in commission.
What follows is a discussion of what XRD is really about and how you (possibly with help from a geek friend) can do the same thing with a bit of programming. Although I've not seen or used XRD myself, I've gleaned enough information about it to be pretty sure about what I'm discussing here.
X-Ray Domination Is All About Tracking
The Rich Jerk is known for his controversial tactics, and he's used them to the hilt in promoting this one. I'm not sure what most people think they're buying when they buy X-Ray Domination, but it's probably not what they think it is. The truth is that at its heart, XRD is all about affiliate tracking.
Any good marketer — online or offline — knows how useful it is to have concrete data about which advertising campaigns are working — and, more importantly, why they're working. But that data is hard to get. Many marketing tactics in the offline world have no measurable stats. In most cases, you can't definitively say that “this promotion sold N copies” of our product.
Online promotions, though, are often measurable. When someone clicks an ad, you can capture information about that click — which ad was clicked on, the referring page, the IP address of the computer, etc. — and you can use cookies and session IDs to track a user's progress from ad click to conversion. (A “conversion” could be a sale, an email address, a phone number — something that directly or indirectly makes you money.)
Tracking things on your own systems is easy to do. Tracking things across systems that don't belong to you is harder. That's the situation affiliates find themselves in, because once they refer a potential customer to the vendor's site, they lose the ability to track what happens to the customer unless the vendor gives them a way to do the tracking. If they don't know which keywords on their pay-per-click campaigns (or other traffic sources) are actually converting, affiliates are at a disadvantage. They'll be spending money that would be better spent elsewhere.
ClickBank Hoplinks
Most infoproducts are sold through ClickBank. Up until recently there was no way to track affiliate sales via ClickBank because of its hoplink system. A hoplink is a special URL that combines the ClickBank IDs of the affiliate and the vendor to create a referral link. Here's an example of a hoplink:
http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net
This hoplink combines my ClickBank affiliate ID (”egiguere”) with the ClickBank vendor ID (”uavol1″) for Uncommon AdSense. If you click on http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net then you get redirected to the UncommonAdSense.com site, but only after first going through ClickBank's systems. ClickBank sets a cookie that stores the ID of the referring affiliate. If you click the order button on the vendor's site, ClickBank uses that cookie to track which affiliate made the sale. But that doesn't tell the affiliate how the sale was made. All they'll know is that they made a sale, somehow.
ClickBank Tracking IDs
Recently, however, ClickBank added an option that lets affiliates track the sales they make. They did this through the addition of a tracking ID (TID for short) to the standard ClickBank hoplink. All you do is append a query parameter “TID” to the standard hoplink:
http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=MEMWG
The tracking ID can be any combination of numbers and uppercase letters (lowercase letters get converted to uppercase) up to 8 characters long. The TID is stored in the cookie with the affiliate ID and passed through to the ClickBank order form. It then shows up in the affiliate's ClickBank reports. If you click http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=MEMWG and buy Uncommon AdSense, I'll see a sale in my affiliate report marked with the TID “MEMWG”. Consistent use of tracking IDs allows a ClickBank affiliate to see precisely where conversions are coming from.
The X-Ray Domination Method
Now we get to the meat of the X-Ray Domination method. Although the details here are specific to ClickBank, you could apply the same ideas to any affiliate system that supports tracking of affiliate referrals.
Let's look again at the format of a ClickBank tracking ID. For each character in the TID there are 36 possible values (the numbers 0 to 9 and the English letters A to Z). This means that there are 36^8 = 2,821,109,907,456 possible 8-character tracking IDs. That's a huge number, and it's not even the total number of tracking IDs possible, because in fact you'd need to add 36^8 + 36^7 + 36^6 + …. + 36 to count all possible 1- to 8-character tracking IDs. Let's just stick with 8-character IDs, though.
So here's what you do to apply the X-Ray Domination method to ClickBank affiliate referrals:
- Instead of using a ClickBank hoplink, all your referrals should be to a site you own. Your AdWords ads, for example, would all use your site as the destination URL. The destination URL would include at a minimum this information: the ClickBank vendor ID and the keyword that triggered the ad.
- On that site you have a PHP script that interfaces with a MySQL database. Each referral gets directed to this script.
- Each time the script is accessed, it stores information in the database: which IP address the click came from, the ClickBank vendor ID, the ad keyword, etc.
- The script then generates a new, unique ClickBank tracking ID for the referral. The simplest system is to start with 00000000, 00000001, 00000002, …, 00000009, 0000000A, 0000000B, …, 0000000Y, 0000000Z, 00000010, 00000011, …., etc. But you could use other schemes, such as using the first character to distinguish the traffic source (AdWords, article, blog, etc.). Whatever works for you.
- The script redirects the browser to the vendor's site using a hoplink and the unique tracking ID. For example, http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=0000002M.
- When a sale occurs, use the TID to pull out the information associated with the sale to figure out when and where the referral came from.
That's it. Funnel all your ClickBank referrals through this system and start to collect valuable information about what's working and what's not. Use the information to increase your ad spending in key areas, write articles triggering the right keywords, etc.
Such a system is simple for an experienced PHP, JSP or ASP programmer to develop. Trust me on that. It could potentially require a lot of database space to run such a system for a long time if you have a lot of traffic, but the kind of system available in a standard hosting package will easily handle the traffic that most affiliates would generate at the start of this process.
From what I gather, X-Ray Domination gives you more than just a script that does what I've outlined above, but I have no specific details about what's included. I think, though, that if you have some programming ability — or known someone who does — you can develop your own script for a lot less than $997.
Update: The XRD site's live now, and it looks like there's more stuff than just the tracking script,
which is good. Still seems pricey to me, though. If you buy it, please do yourself a favor and use the product.
So many of these things get sold and the buyers never actually do anything with them.
Sponsored Link: Learn how to get AdWords clicks for less than one cent using the simple technique
described in AdWords180.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
 |
Enjoyed this post? Get free updates by mail or by RSS! |
Socialize This Post (Please!)
Tags
Comments
One Response to “How To Do Your Own X-Ray Domination Using ClickBank Tracking IDs”
I offer a service that does exactly what you explained in this article.