How ClickBank Grew SQL Volume by 2X and Reduced Cost Per Lead by 50 Percent With Databox

From ecommerce to affiliate promotion, there’s a huge opportunity online in connecting merchants with the customers they need and customers with the products they’re looking for. 

As a global ecommerce retailer and affiliate marketing company, that’s the role ClickBank fills—working with more than 200 million customers and 6 million entrepreneurs—across 200 countries.

We talked with Spencer (Spud) Rule, Director of Marketing for ClickBank, about how they use Databox to spend less time on reports, stay on top of their quarterly goals, and keep track of that unique funnel.

The Challenge

ClickBank’s business model is unlike many other similar businesses. They bring together product owners, affiliates and consumers to sell innovative products around the world. As such, they serve several different customer bases and their marketing funnel is unconventional, to say the least.

That business model and funnel require ClickBank to find a solution for their data that’s flexible enough to meet their needs, while reducing the manual aspects of reporting.

That’s where Databox comes in.

Here are the challenges ClickBank faced before Databox:

• Spend less time on manual reports: Before turning to Databox, the ClickBank team was manually compiling data from across nearly a dozen different sources. Their previous solution, Google Data Studio, simply wasn’t up to the task of eliminating that manual work.

“They were doing this monthly marketing report that we shared with key stakeholders in the company as well as our board. It was actually a giant lift for the team that I inherited. It was really manually aggregated—they were using Google Data Studio at the time and it was a lot of manual updates with an inefficient format.”

• Track an unconventional funnel: ClickBank’s less-than-conventional business model meant they needed a reporting solution flexible enough to capture their unique marketing funnel in a useful way.

“Our main funnel happens after someone creates an account with us—when someone creates an account, that’s the start of a new funnel. We love how Databox gives us the percentage of drop-off and completion in each stage, as well as a full-funnel conversion that we’ve been able to track month-to-month.”

• Stay on top of quarterly Goals: Without an efficient way to track progress toward longer-term goals, the ClickBank team couldn’t anticipate when they might fall short and adapt, before it was too late.

“Before Databox, we would say, ‘Here’s our quarterly goals,’ and we’d check in and look at the data together very sparsely and sporadically.”

The Solution

After using Databox in several previous roles, Spud introduced the tool to the ClickBank team—and it only grew from there. Now, Databox is their primary reporting, Dashboard, and goal-setting solution.

“We have a weekly snapshot of our team’s quarterly dashboard,” Spud explained. “We have Databox synced up with lists inside HubSpot to gauge how we’re doing with our MQL, SQL, and pipeline goals. We also look at organic search snapshots and how we’re growing there. Social performance is another big focus for us as far as engagement, referral traffic, and account creations from social, as well.”Spud and team use Databox for reporting across the full marketing gamut. They connected all their key data sources including: Google Search Console, Instagram Business, Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, Google Sheets, Google Ads, YouTube, Twitter, HubSpot Marketing, Google Analytics.

ClickBank’s Top Integrations

Here are the solutions ClickBank implemented with Databox:

• Spend less time on manual reports: No longer jumping around between more than 10 data sources, Spud and team are able to spend less time on reporting and more time digging into the underlying why of their data.

“The reason I originally went to Databox is because I was jumping around to so many tools, over 10 different platforms sometimes, for just a simple weekly report. That’s insane—it’s not sustainable. Having the ability to have all our data in one place and just share things out is enormously time-saving.”

• Track an unconventional funnel: With Databox, the ClickBank team is able to map out their unconventional funnel and easily see how each stage of the funnel performs. Thanks to that visibility, they can more effectively gauge the success of their efforts and emulate campaigns that perform.

“It’s been cool to see certain events inside Databox where we can really key in on what happened there. Where we’ve seen obvious changes in subscription numbers week-to-week or day-to-day, Databox allows us to go back and say, ‘Hey, that worked. Let’s do more of that.’”

• Stay on top of quarterly goals: Spud and team use a simple goals databoard with 8 gauges to stay on top of their progress toward quarterly goals. A quick look at that board helps them monitor longer-term goals on a weekly basis.

“Goals have been huge for us. The quarterly databoard that we use for our team is all goal-based. We love the simplicity—it’s the simplest databoard ever, but it’s the most effective thing that brings our team together on a weekly basis. It tells us exactly whether we’re on track toward the goal.”

The Results

Databox saves us around 5-10 hours every month of looking at and gathering data.

Since implementing Databox as their primary reporting software, the ClickBank team has seen huge improvements across a wide array of metrics and goals—and they spend a lot less time manually compiling reports.

According to Spud, “Our number one favorite thing about Databox is combining all the Data Sources together—that’s a given.”

“Number two,” Spud added, “is the goal feature for sure. It’s the most useful for us to say, ‘Hey, here’s a live feed of this data and here’s the goal that we’re trying to get to.’ Extremely cleanly displaying that helps to bring an entire team together.”

Here are ClickBank’s Databox results:

• Spend less time on manual reports: Since setting up their Databox dashboards, Spud tells us the team saves around 5-10 hours every month—hours that were previously spent manually pulling data from individual sources.

“We have a URL that we share for anyone who wants to have visibility into what’s going on with marketing. We embed a few key databoards and provide a little bit of context. If anyone on the team wants to share something, they can just shoot that URL out to someone and it’s all compiled there—versus manually pulling reports for people and sharing them.”

• Track an unconventional funnel: The clearer, more useful view into their unique funnel has allowed Spud and team to grow each stage of that funnel, improving nearly all their key conversion and cost metrics.

“One month, we even saw 100% month-over-month improvement on SQL volume. On our cost per lead, we’ve seen a 100% decrease over the last 6 months—from $8 to $4.”

• Stay on top of quarterly goals: With the increased visibility into their quarterly goals, the team can now adapt their efforts more effectively and earlier on. That enables them to ensure, by the end of the quarter, those goals are met or exceeded.

“Just tracking goals has proven to help us reach them. When we see one falling behind, it allows us to make adjustments much sooner instead of playing catch up halfway through the quarter. We’ve closely tracked all of our ROAS and ROI metrics—whether it be cost per lead, cost per MQL, cost per SQL—and it’s improved every month.”