Here is what “hops” signify on your Clickbank stats reporting dashboard, what can they tell you, how they can turn into “initial impressions”, and how they can be maximized and turned to sales and earnings with the right affiliate strategy. Let’s get into the topic!
- So, What Are Hops In Your Clickbank Dashboard?
- Hops And Initial Impressions
- How Many Hops Per Day Is a Good Amount?
- Hops But No Sales? – Try This!
So, What Are Hops In Your Clickbank Dashboard?
Hops signify the number of times your affiliate links have been clicked. In the Clickbank sales analytics dashboard you’re able to see the number of hops for each of your promoted affiliate products.
In Digistore24, which is another popular affiliate platform, hops are called “promoclicks”. In some other affiliate marketing dashboards you might find some other names for them, the most common one simply being “clicks”. All these terms ultimately mean the same thing – one person clicking your affiliate link and getting to the product page.
In general, the more hops you’re able to get in your affiliate campaign, the higher the chance of getting a conversion. Keep in mind that the people clicking your links should be interested in purchasing the product you’re advertising. Otherwise, you might get a lot of hops, but little to no “initial impressions” as Clickbank calls them, which are arguably even more important!
Let’s quickly get into what the “initial impressions” counter tells you.
Hops And Initial Impressions
So, what are initial impressions then? Initial impressions essentially show how many unique users have not only clicked your affiliate link, but also followed through to the product order form. In other affiliate platforms they might also be called “cart visits”.
An initial impression doesn’t signify if the user has or has not followed through with a purchase, it simply shows if the order form / cart has been visited after the user visited the affiliate landing page.
The number of initial impressions can be a really important sign, that can tell you for instance if your audience is interested in the product you’re advertising, but the price of the product is too high.
If you’re getting a lot of hops, but not a lot of initial impressions, this might suggest that the people you’re targeting for your affiliate campaign might have found that they don’t need the product you’re advertising after visiting the sales page, or might not be interested in the particular product at all to begin with.
How Many Hops Per Day Is a Good Amount?
While many people would say that there is no right answer to that question, I think quite the opposite. In general, supposing the product you’re advertising is in demand in your niche, and your affiliate campaign traffic is optimized with anywhere from around 10 to 50 clicks/hops a day you can expect a first sale after a few days to a week. However.
I’ve had multiple highly optimized affiliate campaigns that were receiving a really small amount of 4-8 clicks/hops a day and they were successful making a few monthly sales bringing in considerable profits.
To satisfy your curiosity, these successful campaigns were based around a niche product that was advertised on a Guide/How To blog article on one of my websites, which had the affiliate links embedded in CTA buttons in a few places in the post. The traffic directed to the page was ~90% keyword-targeted Google Search Ads paid traffic.
Remember that with affiliate link clicks two things matter the most: first – the quality of the traffic (so, whether the people who click the links are actually interested in the product), and only then, the amount of clicks per day.
You can get hundreds of free traffic sourced clicks which will not convert to sales simply because the real people that stand behind the hops are not interested in what you have to offer. Keep that in mind!
Hops But No Sales? – Try This!
If you’re getting a lot of hops and no sales in your newly setup Clickbank affiliate campaign, this may be caused by a plenty of different factors. Don’t fear however, as generally there are a few things that can be done in this kind of situation.
- Try to find out if the people you’re sending to your affiliate links really are actually interested in the product you’re advertising – this has to do with choosing an appropriate traffic source for your campaign, and using appropriate copy on your landing page (and in your ads if you run any).
- Remember that if your traffic is too low, there simply won’t be many chances for you to make a sale. Having less than 50-100 clicks/hops during the first week of the campaign can be too little to see whether or not the campaign can be successful in the long run. Get some considerable momentum with the right traffic, and only then, after a larger amount of hops flows in analyze your data including the ratio of clicks to initial impressions and the conversion rate once the sales start to trickle in.
- If you have hundreds of hops but no sales, and you’re positive that your traffic is optimized for your campaign (the targeted people are people who are interested in the advertised product and can and want to purchase it right away), you can consider moving onto other, entirely different product and test the waters once again in a different campaign.
These are the steps of troubleshooting affiliate campaigns that get a large number of clicks/hops/impressions/promoclicks, but don’t lead to any sales. I’ve used them to optimize my affiliate campaigns both on Clickbank and on Digistore24, and they have worked out for me pretty well!
Hope you got the gist of how hops work in Clickbank. Until next time when we discuss more of affiliate marketing basics!