How to Select Highly Profitable Clickbank Products For Your PPC Campaigns

Clickbank is often considered as an ideal entry point for affiliate marketers. And it's true, it has some very interesting advantages over other affiliate networks. However, you should also be aware that there are quite a lot of products on Clickbank that will only cost you money when promoted via pay-per-click search engines. With these kinds of products it is simply impossible to make any profit, no matter how advanced your PPC marketing skills are.

Now, the big question is: By which criteria should you select Clickbank products to assure a maximum profit potential? Here is a short summary of what I believe are to most important criteria to choose successful Clickbank products:

* In general, the top 10 products in most categories convert fairly well. However, for a newbie it's not the best idea to pick the highest selling products, because they are also very competitive. They get promoted by the most skilled marketers and if you are just getting started, you will probably loose your shirt against them.

* Keep your eyes open for offers that allow the prospect to download and/or use a part of the product for free. This could be a free software trial download, a few sample chapters of an ebook, an instructional video or something similar. These kind of products usually convert much better than other products that don't allow the prospect to have a taste of what to expect from the complete package.

* Before setting up a campaign for a particular product, contact the merchant and ask if he/she agrees to put your Google AdWords tracking code on the product thank you page. This is very important, because if you can't track your sales you won't be able to evaluate which of your keywords make you money and which ones loose you money and it will be impossible to properly optimize your campaign.

* Have a close look at the product sales page and make sure it has the potential to convert sufficiently well to make you a profit. The site should have a professional look and feel, several strong calls to action, a benefits laden headline, enticing copy, a good offer and guarantee and customer testimonials.

And finally, take a look at the following parameters, they are displayed with each product listed on Clickbank:

* Grav: This is the gravity parameter and it reflects how many affiliates are making money with this product. The higher this figure, the better. However, a very high figure also indicates that you are facing a lot of competition and that you will have to bid relatively high just to show up on the first page of Google's search engine results. If you are relatively new to this game, I recommend you select products with a gravity parameter between 50 and 200.

* %refd: This parameter indicates the percentage of total sales that come from affiliates. Again, the higher this parameter is, the better. I recommend you consider only products with a %refd of 50% or higher.

* % / sale: This parameter indicates the percentage of your sales commission. The maximum on Clickbank is 75%. I recommend, you select only products with a sales commission of 55% or higher.

* $ / sale: This indicates the average commission payout (after refund). The conversion rate for Clickbank is rather low compared to other affiliate networks (usually ~ 1%), so you should make sure that you earn at least $15-$20 per sale.


Most people who fail in promoting Clickbank products via Google AdWords or other PPC search engines do so, because they use the wrong criteria (or no criteria at all) to chose their products. Also, don't give up too early, it might take several weeks of optimization until your campaign becomes profitable.

If you follow the points listed above, I'm pretty sure that you will be able to find several products on Clickbank with an excellent profit potential.