Do you use ClickMagick to track your clicks and data online? If you’re not, you should start. That’s because without tracking your data, you have no idea what’s working and what isn’t. By flying blind so to speak, you run the risk of putting too much of your most valuable asset, time, into something that isn’t working. In addition, you’re also taking time away from things that could be making you money.
There are many tools available to help you track your progress. In this article, I’m going to discuss how I feel about ClickMagick, a tool that’s pretty much the industry standard when it comes to tracking data and clicks. I’m going to list the things I like about it, as well as a few things that I don’t.
About ClickMagick
In general, ClickMagick is meant to help marketers & businesses of all types track their progress online. They allow you to track EVERYTHING! At a glance, you can see revenue, conversions, clicks, and even the results of a specific campaign. You can even go deeper and see which geographic areas, devices, and times of the day are performing.
Besides giving you access to a ton of information, ClickMagick is a very responsive company. They are always improving and listening to their community. On the home page, there is a listing of recent news and updates and it seems that no more than about 10 days pass between updates and improvements. Often, changes are made at the request of the community or a decision driven by Clickmagick’s own user analytics.
What I Like About ClickMagick
I’ve been a user of ClickMagick for about 2 years now. Here is a list of things I enjoy about them:
ClickMagick Has A Simple, Clean Interface
For being such a powerful tool that gives you access to very granular data (more on that later) ClickMagick makes things easy to work with. You’re first greeted with 5 large numbers showing your pertinent data upon login.
For me, I spend all my time in the “links” tab. Once you enter the links tab, you can see which links are performing the best right away if you have the data set to sort by recent clicks. All of this is laid out in an “easy on the eyes” green-on-white color scheme. The link name on the left along with the number of clicks is displayed clearly.
Clicking into the links themselves is also user friendly. You’re greeted by a series of tabs that allow you to adjust the link itself by changing the URL slug, destination URL, or how bots and abusers are handled.
By clicking on the actual number of clicks, ClickMagick breaks down the source of clicks in a simple to read chart assuming you’re using Sub-IDs correctly. They also give you a nice line graph to see day to day trends as well.
If you’re looking for even more reports and tools, you can access them by clicking the icons no the far right.
Custom Tracking Domains Are Nice To Have
While custom tracking domains are not really a “look at what I have” feature, they do allow you to keep everything on-brand. Many marketers start by using a free link tracker like Bitly and you’re not really able to customize the tracking link. By using custom domains with ClickMagick, your tracking links look just like regular domain links and the website visitor can’t tell the difference. I also like that ClickMagick allows you to set up 2 domains on the most basic plan, allowing you to work on multiple sites without stretching the budget.
Quick Dynamic Sub ID Creation
Perhaps my favorite feature of Clickmagick is the dynamic Sub-ID creation process. When you’re placing a tracking link, all that’s needed to create a Sub-ID is a slash followed by a word on the end. That’s it. You use the universal “www.trackingdomain.com” everywhere, but you would use “www.trackingdomain.com/Facebook” on Facebook and “www.trackingdomain.com/YouTube” on YouTube.
By doing that, ClickMagick will sort the clicks automatically and it will show up in your report. This really gets powerful because there is no limit on Sub-IDs (at least I haven’t found one) and you can get super granular in your data. For example, if you had multiple emails in a sequence promoting the same product, and had multiple links inside each email, you could give each individual link its own set of Sub-IDs without much hassle.
To do this, just keep adding slashes and words. Something like “www.trackingdomain.com/email/email3/bottom-link” will tell you that someone made it to your sales page by clicking on the bottom link in the third email in a sequence. It’s pretty powerful stuff when you have hundreds of clicks a day coming in. Instead of saying, “my email sequence is converting” you can say, “That email that goes out on Day 3 is crushing it. I know that people are reading the whole thing too because they’re clicking on the link I placed at the bottom.”
Link Categories & Sub-Categories
If you’ve been in the business for a while, you know that the links add up over time. I’ve got over 200 tracking links in my business and it would be almost impossible to keep them organized if not for categories. Clickmagick allows you to create Link categories along with Sub-Categories (1 level deep) to keep track of things. For example, I promote a lot of different companies that have a lot of different products available. To keep things clean, I link all my affiliate links together in the “Affiliate Links” category and then group by the company in a Subcategory. It looks like this:
This way, when I’m working on a blog post about a product, I can find all of my tracking links easily.
The Ivan Mana YouTube Channel
While this isn’t a part of ClickMagick proper, I’m certainly including it here. Ivan Mana is a ClickMagick guru who has created a 52-Video playlist explaining just about every single feature of Clickmagick. I don’t believe he works for Clickmagick, but that may have changed because I’ve actually started to see some of his videos show up directly on Clickmagick when I log in.
Ivan’s tutorials are top-notch and I actually refer to them more than I do Clickmagick’s own training material. He is to the point, shares his screen, and walks you through each feature while explaining how that feature can benefit you. Ivan has saved me a lot of time and stress.
Dynamic Links
Clickmagick has a little known feature where you can send new visitors and returning visitors to different places by using the same link. The same can be done if someone is on mobile or desktop. Inside of tracking links themselves, there is a tab called “URLs.” Inside of that tab, there are spots to put alternate URLs for different types of visitors. If those are left blank, every visitor will be sent to the default destination set up in the “basic” tab.
However, if they are filled in, the visitor will be sent to different URLs based on the situation. This is particularly helpful for retargeting warm leads. It allows you to create 2 different web pages with different copy and still use the same link. I like using it with video sales letters. If you want a first time visitor to watch all the way through, you can direct the default link to a page where the “opt-in” button is hidden behind a timer. When the person visits the page for the second time (assuming they didn’t buy the first time) you can send them to a page where the timer is non-existent or the video has a different message.
It also helps reduce the number of overall links that you have.
Things I Don’t Like About ClickMagick
While there is a lot to like about ClickMagick, there are a few things that I feel can be improved. Here they are:
Postback URL Training Is Awful
Postback URLs are the industry standard when it comes to tracking affiliate sales and paid traffic if there is no pixel present. While I’m not doubting ClickMagick’s ability to run postback URLs, I can’t find any good training on how to use them. Like, I see the tools in there, but the written ClickMagick instructions are not helpful and Ivan hasn’t made a video on it.
If you’re looking to use ClickMagick for postback URLs, make sure you have someone accessible you can talk to about it. You won’t find any good self-serve help.
The Written Guides Could Use Work
This kind of ties into the previous point. While Clickmagick has a written guide for just about every feature they have, those written guides could be written a little better. I often find myself searching for a video by Ivan when I have an issue before consulting ClickMagick’s own help section.
This is because they use a lot of jargon and the instructions include zero pictures most of the time. You also have to read 3-4 articles to fully understand what it is you’re trying to do.
It Gets Messy Quick If You’re Not Organized
Clickmagick provides a number of tools to help you stay organized within their system. The problem is, you have to use them. If you’re not using categories and subcategories, it’s almost impossible to find a specific link to use if you don’t have its name memorized. This can lead to a ton of duplicate links and messy URL slugs.
The same thing applies to Sub-IDs. Because it’s so easy to create new SUB-IDs, you can end up making 1000 random ones that you have a hard time remembering what they mean sometimes.
I see this happen with old blog posts. I started using ClickMagick pretty much from the beginning before I fully understood how it worked. Because of this, I’ll get a click from Sub-ID “5” out of nowhere and I have no idea where it came from because I forgot what “5” meant.
If there was a way to track what Sub-IDs were already in use along with notes on what they mean it would make things a LOT easier.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I feel that ClickMagick puts out a strong tracking software, but it takes a savvy user to get the most out of it. When I first started, I was only using about 1% of ClickMagick’s capabilities because I had no idea the other 99% existed. Now that I have an understanding of what it does, I can use more, but it takes a dedicated effort to get things working properly. I can’t just click around for a few minutes and figure stuff out.
In my opinion, ClickMagick is well worth the $27/mo that it costs, but only if you take the time to learn how to use it and use it properly.
