ClickMagick is the product we're using to track all our clicks. I am not interested in hosting my own link tracking script despite the fears some people have about trusting their links and techniques to third parties.
I tried other hosted link tracking solutions but none of them did the job quite as well. ClickMagick is owned by a team of dedicated and highly successful affiliate marketers. This is a huge bonus.
The ClickMagick team live and breathe affiliate marketing and do not class themselves as gurus. They're not interested in ripping newbies off with a half-baked course. On the contrary they specialise in deliverables - getting things done. Support to the user-base is stellar and new functionality is frequently added to ClickMagick based on user feedback.
I'll explain more about why ClickMagick is a great choice later in this article, but before I do, here is a list of the link trackers that I tried and in brief, the reasons why they were not perfect for me.
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Improvely
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This is a good product and Improvely felt like it ought to be the right product. But the infrequent communication from the developers on the Improvely blog was off-putting. I had no idea when new functionality was being added. The dates on their blog describing functionality updates went like this :
- Jul 03 2013
- Sep 30 2013
- Dec 05 2013
- Jan 24 2014
- Jul 07 2014
- Sep 04 2014
The period during my testing saw one post on their blog during the summer of 2014. That is not to say that the product isn't a good one - it just didn't suit me and it felt like you needed a dedicated link tracking team to set it up.
Yes - they have a clone link function, but I disliked the way link creation was presented. This is an interface issue rather than a functionality issue.
I don't want to be presented with this every time I make a new link. You can of course leave most of it blank but that leaves you with the feeling that you are not doing things properly.
Part of what Improvely do (which as far as I know is unique to them) is to allow for conversion reporting from affiliate networks such as ShareASale. ShareASale do not provide a tracking pixel option notifying affiliates of a conversion. To get the most out of what Improvely offer you have to regularly upload reports from your affiliate network into their system so that it can reconcile the two.
This concentrates your efforts on the process, rather than on improving the process. Creating am Improvely link always seemed to interrupt my flow when adding links to my pages. For me it was too complicated and too rigid. If I wanted to track links in emails all the way through a funnel, I had to integrate this with Google Analytics and use MailChimp. I don't use MailChimp.
If you decide not to use my preferred option, then Improvely is probably your best bet for an all-around link tracking solution. However, be prepared to spend some time figuring out how it will fit into your strategy and how you're going to integrate various services into it.
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Voluum
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This is an great product specifically for CPA affiliates. But Voluum is hopeless for a traditional affiliate marketer who might place links throughout a blog post or make a landing page with a comparison table on it, containing many links.
Unless all your affiliate marketing is geared towards landing pages or offer pages, and nothing else, this won't work for you. But it's perfect for CPA affiliates - which is its intended target market. Never mind how good it was, I wanted a tool that could be used for both types of affiliate marketing and general link management, so this wasn't it.
Voluum works on a different paradigm to many other hosted trackers. Everything is driven trough the concept of a lander, and the lander is so focussed that really, you'd only have a maximum of three or 4 links, all leading to the same place, on it. This makes it unsuitable for traditional blogger affiliate marketing where the selling tends not to be quite so focussed.
I think we can learn a lot from Voluum's tenacity and structure in traditional affiliate marketing. Everything should pass through a dedicated landing page. But I wanted a more general purpose tracker, that was more reasonably priced more flexible. This is especially applicable if you are just starting your affiliate marketing journey.
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ClickMeter
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Lovely graphs showing all your clicks but aside from admiring the beauty of it, I wasn't really sure how to have the product help make me a better affiliate. The interface was far too slow to refresh and when you are ploughing through your work, you need something that does not slow you down.
If you want to use your own domains (which you will), you have to spend at least $99 per month which allows for only 10 domains. On the lower cost plans you are limited to the strange looking domains supplied by ClickMeter. The interface is very clunky and I found that once again, the user interface was busy. The shortlinks included were unattractive (unless you paid quite a lot more in order to use your own domains).
Another issue I had was that once you made a link you could not change it. This was awkward if you decided half-way through set up to change your link naming convention.
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Linktrackr
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I didn't even get off the ground with LinkTracker. Their payment system didn't work. After I paid and signed up, I still only had a free account. So I emailed their support and asked them to fix it. I got a canned response back and that put me on a longer wait for an answer. I eventually asked for a refund.
While that was being processed, and all I had was a free account, (even though I'd paid for it), I set up my first link. But when I tested it, it went to a 404, page not found. I double checked that I'd set it up correctly. At this point I'd lost faith in their ability to run the system. That said I know a lot of people use LinkTrackr so maybe I was just unlucky. I also found waiting an age for their support to respond to be frustrating.
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Trackerly
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I used GoTryThis for a long time, and then it was changed, re-written and re-branded as Trackerly. The new Trackerly system was super confusing. This was what initially prompted me to go out and look for a new solution. Again, like other solutions mentioned here, setting up a link was just too much hard work. I think since I left Trackerly they have improved the link creation procedure.
It now looks like this - just two steps to create a link, but still, what is First Use Type? There is first use type, type details for notes, and custom groups. There seemed to be too many ways to categorise or tag links. This leads to a cluttered interface with most of it left blank by most people, most of the time.
The developer is a super nice guy, but I found progress on the product is slow and news infrequent although recently there has been a new release recently. I like to see plenty of updates on the product's blog to make me feel things are always improving. So I went looking for something that would satisfy my need for product development.
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Pretty Link Pro
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I thought I'd include this in the list, as like many people this WordPress plugin is where I started. Pretty Link Pro is a plugin used by many marketers to mask links and keep simple stats. My issue with this method of tracking is that your data is spread across several websites and you can't see it all in one place. I don't want each of my websites to have a database filled with click data. That is database bloat where it is not required and gives you more to backup.
It's a great plugin, and works well. Although the plugin has a one-off price, if you want support past the first year understandably, you have to pay a small yearly fee for that. The problem I have with the plugin is that the developer seems to have lost interest. The plugin has not been updated since December 2013 which is over a year ago, at the time of publishing this post.
My Choice - ClickMagick
Unlike many other hosted services, ClickMagick don't concentrate their effort on providing pretty graphs - you will realise after some time that traffic graphs don't help you increase your conversions. They are a distraction.
If you want to see traffic graphs, they are available in any number of other locations such as Google Analytics, Clicky or even for a quick look, just inside WordPress.Com stats.
I suffered none of the problems highlighted above. ClickMagick worked straight out of the box. Their payment systems work, their support is lightning fast, and you don't have to view each tutorial 5 times to have it make sense - they make sense straight away.
There aren't a ton of boxes to either leave blank or struggle to complete every time you want to make a link. Creating a link is super fast so you will not disrupt your general workflow or concentration as you find you need a new tracking link.
You can also rename links without restriction. The software has been designed to not coincide the name you choose for a link to the system's internal name for the link.
And there are plenty of tutorials to help you.
What Are The Downsides?
PayPal
There are a couple of things I'd like to see at ClickMagick. One is that I wish they'd take PayPal. They don't, nor do they plan to, so you have to use your credit card. These guys are American and they may not realise how tricky credit cards can be for those in other countries.
PayPal make it easy to cancel a subscription from within PayPal. In the UK is it is IMPOSSIBLE to cancel a subscription yourself on a credit card which is why many of us buying IM products prefer to use PayPal. It puts us in control.
In the case where the vendor doesn't respond to you or does not provide a cancel button on the dashboard, the only reliable way I have found to cancel a credit card subscription is to pretend I've lost my card so it gets cancelled. Unfortunately this also cancels all the subscriptions I have that I DO want.
However in the case of ClickMagick, if you want to cancel you can do it from the dashboard at the click of a button. So in this case not taking PayPal is no problem.
Graphs
I can't think of a single reason why this would help, other than to have something pretty to look at, but I'd like to see a composite graph where you can see all the clicks you are getting from everywhere, on one page. So far they haven't done this and I don't know if there are plans to improve the interface in general.
So Why Use ClickMagick?
- You get to mix in the Facebook group awith people who earn very well online from affiliate marketing. Some of this rubs off on you.
- If you buy through a link on this site, when we bring out our DIYClickMaster plugin, you'll get access to that free. It is designed to work in conjunction with ClickMagick and will help you get even more out of the product. All you have to do is buy through my link. I'll know you did it as I am a ClickMagick licensee. When our plugin is ready, I'll email you and help you use it.
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Clickmagick is equally good for CPA affiliate marketing ads it is for traditional. It does not allow you to track conversions for links from say ShareASale where they don't provide a conversion pixel, but our plugin helps to make that less of an issue.
In general, ClickMagick does encourage you to have good habits to help with your tracking, (such as offering a bonus) which is ultimately more powerful as it plays into the hands of conversion, rather than climbing mountains to measure it.
- The team at ClickMagick are very hands-on when it comes to helping you. OK - you can't be a complete novice - they won't help you with code or build your site for you - you have to have some level of expertise, but when it comes to using their product, they are super helpful. Their customer service is ridiculously fast. I have never waited more than an hour.
- If you're at the point where you want to track your clicks, ClickMagick is the answer. There are a lot of solutions out there, but ClickMagick has many features and is very affordable. This makes it great for tracking and honing your skills.
- ClickMagick is ideal for new and established affiliate marketers, especially those who mix up their marketing with some traditional affiliate sales, some CPA and a mixture of traffic sources, including SEO.
- The team at ClickMagickare always updating the software and you will see on their home page once you are logged in that they show a diary listing of all developer activity. The frequency of these updates is impressive. On average around every 3 to 4 days.
- ClickMagick provides a range of tools that encourage you to think differently about how you plan and execute your marketing. The tool almost guide you to wards new habits as do the tutorials and the super fast support.
