ClickMagick Review: Is It the No. 1 Tracking Software for Marketers?

In this blog post, let me present you the review of ClickMagick.

Making use of a good click tracking software is really crucial for scaling up your SEO business.

ClickMagick is one of the most popular click/link tracking softwares out there. I’ll be reviewing ClickMagick and also helping you decide whether ClickMagick is worth your money or not.

I’ll also be comparing ClickMagick to other click tracking softwares like Voluum and Clickmeter.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Comes with a really comprehensive and highly flexible features
• Link rotation helps you a lot in distributing traffic to different offers and also if you’re into click selling
• Cross-platform conversion tracking is quite advanced which many tools are lacking. FB ads have this, and it’s considered sneaky — but not for us, marketers.
• It has a funnel builder tool that lets you easily build links for your funnel
• ClickMagick has Postback URL functionality which lets you track conversions without pixels when dealing with affiliate offers
• ClickMagick comes with really good utilities like Click ID Lookup, IP lookup, Pixel Debugger, and many more
• It comes with a batch editor feature to edit ClickMagick links in bulk.
• ClickMagick has a “personalized” documentation feature (it also generates the personalized guidelines — first of its kind for me), that’s quite extensive and explained lucidly in an easy-to-scan manner.
• They’ve really come a long way when it comes to quality support. They have a 1-hour fast support system in place.

Cons

• ClickMagick’s pricing is on the higher side. But it’s still cheaper compared to other popular tools.
• UX/UI needs a bit of enhancement when it comes to ease of understanding of the features. If you are a newbie, you spend most of your time in their text documentations.

The need for ClickMagick

If you are a seasoned affiliate marketer, you already know the importance of attributing your affiliate conversions to the clicks. Knowing what traffic source is converting better when it comes to your funnel and also affiliate offers is crucial.

Let me give you an example.

Suppose you have a funnel, and you drive traffic to it through blog posts, YouTube, Social Media, FB ads, Google Ads, and many more. How do you know which traffic source is converting better?

Knowing these things will help you focus on the right things following the 80–20 rule. Or else, it would be like mindlessly driving traffic from different sources, without prioritizing, and hoping people will convert.

Click tracking tools like ClickMagick helps you determine which traffic sources are leading to more conversions, thus helping you double down on them.

ClickMagick also comes with advanced tracking features like postback URL, query strings, and also makes use of Javascript and cookies to track the user behavior all through the funnel and giving you an accurate picture of the visitor’s journey in your funnel.

It also comes with various CRO features like link rotation, A/B testing to further enhance your affiliate results.

Setting up ClickMagick

Set up your own domain/subdomain

ClickMagick allows you to cloak your long ugly affiliate URL to something neat and branded.

Suppose your domain name is example.com, you can have your ClickMagick URLs serve under tracking.example.com.

For that, first, you need to head over to Tools -> Domain Manager.

Here, you can enter your domain or subdomain name. In the next step, you need to add CNAME records to your domain registrar.

Depending on your plan, you can add 2, 10, or unlimited custom domain names under Domain Manager.

I highly recommend you to use custom domains/subdomains.

Because unfortunately, you can’t use generic clkmg.com or clkmr.com tracking domains in emails or when posting on social media. You need to set up a Custom Tracking Domain for that.

Create a link

For creating a new link, you need to head over to Links -> Create a New Link.

Here you need to enter in the link name, select the tracking link, and the primary URL.

As you can see above, for every link you create you have many options like:

• Basic: In here you can enter in the link name, slug, select the custom domain, and the destination URL
• Cloak: ClickMagick allows you to truly cloak your links. This is especially helpful when your affiliate links are being blacklisted by your email marketing software or Facebook.
• Pixels: Here you can add the tracking or conversion pixels that need to be triggered when people click on the link. You also have options to add dynamic affiliate links along with tracking pixels which I’ll discuss later on.
• Funnel: Here you can mark a link as the entry of the funnel and select the conversion attribution. This is quite an important feature as ClickMagick tracks the entire journey of a person throughout the funnel.
• Cost: Here you can set the cost of your traffic so that ClickMagick effectively reports you the ROI and other performance metrics.
• URLs: Here you can set the backup URL (if the main URL is unavailable), mobile URL (suppose you have a separate landing page for mobile devices), and repeat URL (where people who made a second click on your link should land)
• Geo: Here you can enable/disable your link for different countries, say you may want to exclude the EU if you don’t have the GDPR system set in place.
• Filter: Here it enables you to effectively filter out traffic from bots, servers, spiders, etc. so that your reporting will be sane.
• Misc: In here you have the ability to set maximum clicks, passwords, etc.

Funnel setup tool

With this tool, you can effectively create multiple links for different landing pages of your funnel.

You can assess this tool under Tools -> Funnel Setup.

Here as you can see, I have 5 pages in my webinar training funnel:

• Webinar registration page
• Webinar registration thank you page
• Webinar attended page
• Offer page
• Offer thank you page

Now, when I click create, it’ll auto-create the links under the group — “BloggingX Pro”.

This is a quick way to create links for your funnel.

Dynamic affiliate links

Note: This feature can lead to an affiliate ban as the misuse of this feature may be deemed as cookie stuffing. Use it for legit purposes.

With this tool, you can potentially redirect people to your own affiliate sales page (instead of the merchant’s affiliate page) but still, you can set that affiliate cookie and get a commission.

Suppose, you are promoting a Clickbank product. The original affiliate sales page of that product is really bad. Now you may feel that — “I can design a better sales page, and boost my conversions.”

In this case, dynamic affiliate links come to your rescue.

For this, first under “Create link”, you need to enter your own affiliate landing page as the destination URL.

Then, under the dynamic affiliate links section, you need to enter in the original raw affiliate URL of the merchant’s sales page.

With this, whenever people click on your link, they will intermittently be taken to the original affiliate URL (to drop the cookie) and then directed to your own landing page.

Then on the landing page, you need to have a button linked directly to the order form on the merchant’s site.

ClickMagick Batch Editor

Under Tools -> Batch Editor, you can edit the ClickMagick links in bulk.

This will save you a lot of time editing the common settings of the links you created.

Features for tracking conversions

Campaign builder

Creating UTM parameters by hand can be quite time-consuming and prone to typos.

With campaign builder, you can make sure that the UTM parameters you create will be consistent.

It also has ClickMagick-specific parameters that enable you to add additional advanced parameters and also override your default ClickMagick settings.

These parameters take your tracking and reporting to a whole new level.

Once you create all these parameters, if you feel that the resulting URL is very long, you can easily shorten it..

When you analyze your reports, it’ll be very easy for you to determine what sources, mediums, campaigns, ads, are performing better than others.

Using sub IDs for tracking

You can also make use of the sub-IDs for tracking your link clicks and actions.

Suppose, you have a ClickMagick link — example.com/my-affiliate-product/.

Now, you may want to promote this in various places like blog posts, YouTube videos, ads, etc.

You need to use the following links while promoting them in various places:

• Blog post 1 — example.com/my-affiliate-product/my-blog/post1
• Blog post 2 — example.com/my-affiliate-product/my-blog/post2
• YouTube video 1- example.com/my-affiliate-product/my-channel/video1
• FB ad 1 — example.com/my-affiliate-product/fb-ad/my-campaign/ad1
• Google ad 1 — example.com/my-affiliate-product/google-ad/my-campaign/ad1

Of course, you need to replace the above text with your identifiers.

Like this, you can add multiple sub-IDs next to each other separated by “/”.

With this, you’ll get an idea about what traffic sources are converting well. You’ll be able to systematically drill down the reports.

However, most of the people would be better off with Campaign Builder or UTM parameters. But for some others, this structure feels neat.

Postback URL

Sometimes, it’s quite difficult for you to map the user’s journey in your funnel just by making use of parameters, and other tracking methods.

Especially, when you don’t have control over your affiliate merchant’s landing page, you can’t paste in the pixel code in there, right?

In that case, many affiliate programs support postback URLs to report the conversions back to the ClickMagick servers.

You need to copy the postback URL that ClickMagick gives you, and paste it under the settings of your affiliate network. Whenever sales happen, your affiliate platform will send data to the ClickMagick postback URL.

Under Tools, you have “Postback URL builder”.

Here, you need to select your affiliate network.

Here, you’ll get the postback URL format for your affiliate network. You need to also enter your affiliate URL so that ClickMagick will generate you the postback compatible URL that you need to consider using. While doing this, you should not forget to pass the unique sub-ID provided by ClickMagick.

Pixel builder for tracking actions

Till now, you were knowing how to track visitor’s journey, how to use the postback URL to let your affiliate platform report the sale back to ClickMagick.

Now, let us know how to let ClickMagick track the various activities happening on your site — like sign-ups, visits, etc.

Under tools, you have the “Pixel Builder”.

This lets you create pixels either in the HTML (for sites that you don’t own) or JavaScript format.

Here, you need to pay attention mainly to three things:

• Select the objective — action, engagements, and sales.
• Reference value — A small identifier text for the action
• Type of pixel — HTML or JavaScript

Now, you need to copy the resulting pixel code and paste it in the <head> section of your page (in the above screenshot’s case — the webinar thank you page).

You may also want to paste this in the “Pixels” section of the ClickMagick link if you want the pixel to be triggered the moment people click on your link vs landing on your page. But in the above case, no one will directly click a link to the thank you page. Right?

Cross-device conversion tracking

ClickMagick also comes with complete cross-device or platform conversion tracking across all it’s campaigns, link rotators and much more.

Consider the following scenario — a user clicks your Google or Facebook ad and opts-in to your list on their mobile device, then a week later they receive an email from you on their desktop computer, click a link in the email and make a purchase.

Without cross-device tracking, they would be treated as a new user, since they originally clicked your ad on their mobile device, and there would be no way to attribute that sale to the ad that generated the customer.

Cross-device tracking is available on the Standard and Pro plans, for Campaigns, Tracking Links and Rotators.

Features for boosting conversions

A/B testing

A/B testing allows you to assign multiple variations of the URL to a single ClickMagick link.

And also, allows you to set the traffic allocation.

Once the A/B testing starts, the ClickMagick link will start directing visitors to all the different links setup under variations and lets you know which variation is the winner.

This is a great way to test which of your landing pages perform well.

If you are already using tools like Google Optimize, VWO, or Optimizely for presenting different variations of the page under the same URL, this feature may not be useful for you.

Link rotation

With link rotation, you can have multiple URLs for a simple ClickMagick link and you can let ClickMagick direct the visitors to those URLs in a rotation fashion with various modes like:

1. Fulfillment: The Fulfillment Mode will send all traffic to the first active URL in the rotator — including repeat clicks from the same user — until that URL has received the maximum number of unique clicks (plus bonus) specified.
2. Spillover: The Spillover Mode will send traffic to each URL in the rotator, one after the other, as repeat users hit your rotator multiple times.
3. Random: The Random mode is just what it sounds like, and it will distribute your clicks in a completely random manner to all active URLs.
4. Sequential: The Sequential Mode will send incoming clicks to each rotator URL in order, then when it reaches the bottom it will simply start over again at the top.

It’s quite easy to confuse A/B testing with link rotation. Here are some pointers:

• When A/B testing, the visitor sees the exact page when he clicks on a link repeatedly. Because the results should not be skewed. On the other hand, with link rotation users can be redirected to different links based on the mode you set
• Link rotators have extra settings of click selling.
• Link rotators are more suitable if you are selling solo ads or managing ad co-ops.

If you want to know which URL converts well and want to decide the winner, use A/B testing. If you are distributing traffic to multiple different offers or selling clicks then use link rotation.

ClickMagick utilities (worth mentioning)

• Click ID lookup: You can make use of this tool to view click and conversion data for a specific Click ID.
• IP lookup: Here you can enter in any IP address and see its activity with your ClickMagick links (all data available) or across ALL ClickMagick links (the data will be hidden though for privacy)
• Pixel debugger: With this, you just need to enter your landing page URL and this tool will check if the ClickMagick pixel is present on that page.
• Pixel/Code editor: You can use this tool to quickly set or unset tracking pixels or other tracking codes for all your links, rotators and/or rotator URLs with one click
• Data importer/exporter: This will let you selectively or entirely export/import ClickMagick magic to/from different ClickMagick accounts

Pricing

Buy ClickMagick

If you are a seasoned affiliate marketer and want to track more than 10,000 clicks per month, then go with the standard plan. It also comes with cross-device tracking, 5 funnel tracking, and 1-year data retention, etc.

ClickMagick’s pricing is cheaper than other alternatives like Voluum, which starts at $69/month and comes with similar features. But, Voluum does not have as much flexibility as ClickMagick when it comes to link rotation and other features.

ClickMagick’s pricing is compared to Clickmeter. The beginner plans of both these tools almost cost you the same. With this plan, ClickMagick comes with 10,000 clicks monthly and on the other hand, Clickmeter comes with 25,000 events monthly. Events = Clicks + Views.

Verdict

Overall I would say, ClickMagick is the best all-in-one click tracking tool in the market. It’s priced well and offers extremely flexible features compared to its competitors.

If you want to know what aspects of your traffic generation you need to focus on, then using a good click tracking tool is crucial. And, I would say ClickMagick is the best tool.

Hope you guys loved this ClickMagick review. If you have any doubts, let me know in the comments section.

You can also watch the video of this review and setup. Click here