LinkTrackr vs ClickMagick – Which Is Better?

Online marketers are useless without link tracking.

If you want to increase your traffic, you need the proper tools to track and monitor your conversions and sales. There’s no way of running a campaign – or placing any type of advertisement – without being able to measure the quality and amount of traffic that your efforts generate.

That’s why we need link tracking.

If you find yourself spending too much on Google, Facebook, and other ads without making a profit or even breaking even, then you’re probably in need of some proper link tracking tools. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your money.

But fear not. There are a number of tools available to help you keep track of your traffic and make sure your money is being used in the best possible places.

Two of the most popular tools available right now are Clickmagick and Linktrackr. These are both affiliate tracking software applications that offer a number of robust and varied features.

What Is Affiliate Tracking?

I’ll keep this short, as many of you probably already know the basics.

But essentially, affiliate tracking is the process of managing and tracking marketing activities. This is usually accomplished with special software or various plugins installed onto affiliate websites.

As Techopedia explains:

“The sales, conversions and clicks from affiliate websites are being tracked in order to measure the performance of affiliates. This is to allow the owner of affiliate networks to track the performance of their affiliates in order to measure which ones are driving traffic and revenue and to be able to give proper compensation.”

“This allows the network owner as well as each affiliate to track and gain insight into which portions of the network receive the most visitors, conversions, traffic or clicks, and be able to see if a marketing campaign is working or not.”

ClickMagick and Linktrackr have two things in common: Their names are both difficult to spell for articles like this, and they both allow users to track links to help enhance their marketing efforts.

Image: ClickMagick

At their most basic, they allow you to create tracking links, which can be used to see who clicked on those links and which clicks resulted in sales.

Image: LinkTrackr

What Is LinkTrackr?

LinkTrackr is a cloud-based software that cloaks, optimizes, and monitors links for you. It was launched in 2010 by Gobala Krishnan to help affiliate marketers combat issues associated with tracking profitable affiliate links.

With LinkTrackr, you can identify the ads or links which help you to generate more leads and referrals.

In essence, LinkTrackr allows you to track ad campaigns from a variety of sources – including banner ads, blog posts, email campaigns, and online ad swaps.

What Is ClickMagick?

ClickMagick is a cloud-based affiliate link tracking solution that enables users to identify the most profitable traffic sources and ensure that advertising campaigns generate maximum profits.

ClickMagick offers a variety of features, including traffic quality scoring, conversion tracking, link cloaking, split testing, and custom redirects.

Businesses can use ClickMagick to track clicks, conversions, and sales, thereby allowing them to optimize their online marketing campaigns.

ClickMagick also provides customizable reports and real-time analytics that help businesses monitor traffic in aggregate or individually.

Let’s begin by diving a little deeper into what makes these tools unique.

LinkTrackr Features

This tool provides online marketers with a number of additional features to help them make the best of their advertising budget.

Let’s look at a few of them:

Conversion Tracking

Image: LinkTrackr

With this service, you can track exactly where your sales and leads are being generated from. You simply place a simple Javascript tracking code onto your website.

LinkTrackr also provides support for server postback conversion tracking. This means you don’t actually need to add any code to a website in order to track a link.

Image: LinkTrackr

Or, if you’re a marketer who is more concerned with performance, you can opt for the Sub ID conversion tracking option.

Advanced Conversion Tracking

Obviously, tracking your conversions is important. But for it to work properly, you need to put a piece of conversion code onto the “thank you” page.

Image: LinkTrackr

This becomes an issue though if you’re an affiliate who is promoting other people’s products. You would need to gain access to their thank you pages. Sometimes this is impossible to obtain.

Fortunately, LinkTrackr has come up with a solution using a combination of three different tracking methods: Postback/Callback URL tracking, TID tracking, and Pixel tracking.

URL Rotator

This is likely to be a popular feature for anyone looking to dig into the analytics of their conversions.

Image: LinkTrackr

Put simply, this feature splits incoming traffic to different URLs.

Say you’re in charge of promotions and advertisement for a group of people, this link rotator is an ingenious way to split high-quality traffic amongst each member of the group.

LinkTrackr includes this as part of its split testing software. So, if you’re in the midst of a lead generation campaign for members of a downline organization, where each has a replicated website or agent portal, you can easily bolster the entire organization with this tool.

Link Cloaking

Image: Blogger Ideas

Link cloaking has proven to be a popular method for affiliate marketers to protect their links and secure their commissions.

This LinkTrackr feature allows you to shorten and cloak your link while redirecting visitors to the URL you actually want them to see.

WordPress Cloaking

One of the coolest features that LinkTrackr offers is the ability to automatically convert keywords into a tracking link or an affiliate link.

Image: LinkTrackr

You simply need to install the free LinkTracker “link cloaking & tracking” plugin on your WordPress site and you’ll be able to instantly convert specified keywords into affiliate links.

This is a great time saver because WordPress blogs can sometimes have hundreds of posts. So rather than adding links manually, this tool allows you to streamline the process.

Track PPC Ads

Image: LinkTrackr

It’s common for many marketers to lose their money thanks to PPC Ads (Pay Per Click advertisements). These can include Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and many more.

This often happens because campaigns expire and your ads continue running, which just burns up your money.

Another reason you may want to track PPC ads is because you’re sending traffic to an advertiser landing page and have no access to their Google Analytics account.

Image: LinkTrackr

To combat this issue, LinkTracker developed a specific link format for you to use in every single ad that you create. All you need to do is modify a couple of parameters and you’ll be able to track your Pay-per-click ads.

Other

A few other LinkTrackr features include:

• Affiliate SubID Tracking
• A/B Split Testing
• Pixel Tracking
• PPC Tracking

ClickMagick Features

Organic Tracking

Image: App Bizz

Your website is given a code by ClickMagick, which is then used to monitor organic traffic. This is how users arrive at your page (through a Google search, for example). You’re also given a conversion tracking pixel code to track conversions as well.

It’s important to note that organic traffic coming from sites with the “https” address can’t be detected. That’s because they’re protected sites and are not allowed to pass along referrer details.

So if you have traffic coming in from Facebook, say, then it will all be reported anonymously under the heading “none.”

Rotators

Image: YouTube

Like Linktrackr, Clickmagick gives you the ability to rotate URLs. This tool allows you to place more than one location URL, which then rotates the destination.

So, if you’re managing traffic for two sites, each of them will give you a link URL. You set up both links under a rotator link URL that begins with http://www.clkmr.com/.

The rotator link is then published or distributed. It can be included on a mailing list, added to an Instagram campaign, or any number of other types of advertising. When people click on that link they will be directed to either of the two sites.

One cool aspect of this tool, specifically offered by ClickMagick, is that it offers four different modes of rotator URLs.

Fulfilment mode – allows you to send all traffic to the specific URL (that includes repeat clicks from the same user) until the URL has received the maximum number of clicks that it needs.

Sequential mode – creates a scenario where, if the user clicks a link, they’ll be directed to the first URL. If and when they click the same exact link, they’ll be directed to the second URL. Essentially, you’re rotating sequentially which page will receive traffic.

Spillover mode – is similar to Sequential mode but instead, you define the second URL you want to direct your users to after they’ve already clicked the link once. So, if they’ve already been through every URL in the rotation, they will be sent somewhere else.

Random mode – is quite simple – it distributes the clicks you receive in a completely random order.

MagickPops

Image: YouTube

ClickMagick offers four different types of popups:

On Load Popup – This appears the moment that a visitor lands on your page.

Delayed Popup – This shows up after a specified number of seconds have elapsed.

Exit Popup – If the user’s cursor leaves the window or is about to close it, they will be greeted by this message.

Redirect – This isn’t technically a popup window, but rather it redirects users to a different page when they try to exit your site.

ClickMagick provides a visual editor to help you create your popups. You can include images and tables, you can embed YouTube videos, you can play music by enabling sound, or you can even set a countdown timer.

You can also go the extra mile and include an opt-in form embedded into the HTML, so users can provide their information and you can gather new leads.

MagickBars

Image: YouTube

This is a bar that appears at either the top or bottom of your site that remains until the user takes an action to close it.

These can also be designed in ClickMagick’s visual editor. From there, you can add images, tables, embed YouTube videos, sound, change the background color, add speech bubbles, a countdown timer, and other neat accoutrements.

This can be used to invite visitors to one of your affiliate pages or another sales page. Or you can simply use it to advertise a new sale or other promotion.

Timers

Image: YouTube

Countdown timers are a great way to create a sense of urgency in your visitors.

ClickMagick is well aware of this, and as such has baked a countdown timer into many of the features of its tool.

These are painless to set up, and there are four different designs and two different types of timers – evergreen/cookie based timers, and date-based timers. You simply copy and paste the code anywhere on your site.

Quality Traffic

One of the best features of ClickMagick is that it not only tracks the traffic coming into your site, it also monitors the QUALITY of the traffic.

Indeed, ClickMagick can give you immediate insight into what kinds of people are using your links and whether they’re likely to buy.

Image: Smart Business Trends

ClickMagick creates a quality score based on several different factors. The most important of these is the “tier.”

Traffic from “Tier 1” is the most desirable, and it usually originates from one of the following countries:

• Canada
• Australia
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States

According to ClickMagick, a score of at least 55 is average while a score of 85 or higher is considered very good.

This is a useful tool when you’re buying traffic but can still give you a lot of insight into organic traffic as well.

Tracking Sites That Aren’t Yours

Like LinkTrackr, ClickMagic also offers you the ability to track links on sites that you don’t own.

Image: ClickMagick

Again, this is a very handy tool for anyone who is running an affiliate program or just trying to promote someone else’s product.

Unfortunately, the exact mechanics of the tool are a little too complicated to dig into here, but here you can check out ClickMagick’s handy guide to get you started.

Other helpful ClickMagick features include:

Data Importer/Exporter

Your various link data can be exported to third party applications. Similarly, data from other tracking tools can be sent to ClickMagick using a CSV file.

IP Manager

You can filter and even block specific IP addresses or IP ranges. You simply need to manually input them into the system.

IP Lookup

This shows you the history and activity of a particular IP address. It shows you clicks, sales, opt-ins, and more, all combined with a timestamp for every event. This is handy when you’re looking into suspicious or strange clicks.

Batch Editor

This gives you the ability to edit, reset, or erase links, rotators, and rotator URLs in chunks, rather than editing each link individually.

Linktrackr vs ClickMagick: Pricing

When it comes to pricing, it’s important to note that both companies offer a free trial. That means that you can play around with both before making your final decision.

With that said, let’s dive a little deeper into what each company offers as far as cost.

LinkTrackr Pricing

If you’re not sold on LinkTrackr after 15 days, you can simply downgrade or cancel your subscription and receive your money back.

That said, LinkTrackr is a relatively affordable option. The lowest tier starts at just $17 per month for the Basic Plan.

For that price, users get 100 tracking links and a total of 10,000 clicks per month. They also receive cloaking and branded domains. That may not seem like a lot for some users, but for smaller businesses, it may be just right.

If you’re looking for more features though, the Pro Plan at $27 per month provides you with 500 links, 50,000 clicks, and the same features listed above. On top of that, you get conversion tracking – an essential for most online marketers.

After that is the Hyper Plan at $47 per month plan, which includes 1,000 links and 100-thousand clicks each month. It also adds the split testing feature.

The highest plan is the Extreme Plan at $77 per month, which gives you 5,000 links and half a million clicks.

Note: For tracking over half a million clicks, LinkTrackr offers agency pricing as well.

ClickMagick Pricing

ClickMagick offers three different pricing scales. Each comes with its own array of features. After the obligatory 14-day trial period, users are able to cancel if they aren’t pleased. Just like other ClickMagick alternatives, their pricing plan is based on a monthly subscription.

With ClickMagick’s $37 per month Starter Plan, you can track up to 10,000 clicks each month, one Funnel for FunnelMagick, organic tracking for a single site, and the ability to monitor two custom-made domains. All of that comes with six months of data retention.

The Standard Plan is $77 per month and offers 100,000 clicks tracking each month, five Funnels for FunnelMagick, organic tracking, ten custom-made domains, and one year of data retention.

The Pro Plan comes in at $197 per month and includes 1 million clicks per month, unlimited Funnels, and organic tracking for unlimited sites. You can also track unlimited custom domains and you’re given two years of data retention.

ClickMagick vs LinkTrackr: Pros And Cons

LinkTrackr Pros

• It has a user-friendly dashboard, which makes it ideal for both newbies and experienced users
• It has affordable pricing plans starting from just $17 per month
• You can generate customizable reports based on preference
• Quick data import and export functionality
• LinkTrackr seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook, CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, JVZoo, etc.
• It has a 15-day free trial version

LinkTrackr Cons

• Standard customer service
• Limited learning resources

ClickMagick Pros

• It has a user-friendly interface
• Robust affiliate link tracking features
• It is mobile friendly
• Real-time tracking
• Automatic bot filtering
• Customizable report generation
• Third-party integrations with several traffic sources and affiliate networks
• Several customer support and resources
• 14-day free trial version

ClickMagick Cons

• It is not ideal to deploy ClickMagick as an SEO tool
• It has a steep learning curve for non-tech-savvy users

LinkTrackr vs ClickMagick: Similarities And Differences

Similarities

• Both LinkTrackr and ClickMagick do not have an API; however, ClickMagick has indicated they will launch their public API soon.
• Both platforms are available as cloud hosted affiliate software
• Both ClickMagick and LinkTrackr do not have official desktop and mobile apps
• With either ClickMagick or LinkTrackr, a premium subscription is required
• They both facilitate custom report generation
• Both tools seamlessly integrate with Google Analytics
• Interestingly, they both have affiliate programs

Differences

• In terms of pricing, LinkTrackr is more affordable than ClickMagick.
• Unlike LinkTrackr, ClickMagick has a more advanced bot click detection mechanism.
• ClickMagick has a dependable knowledge base that consists of FAQs and helpful guides, unlike LinkTrackr.
• ClickMagick is superior to LinkTrackr in terms of customer support.

Conclusion – ClickMagick vs LinkTrackr

Both of these options are powerful and effective tools that will improve your marketing abilities exponentially.

After all, without the ability to monitor how well our various campaigns behave, we’re simply throwing money into the darkness and hoping we succeed.

LinkTrackr and ClickMagick go a long way to shedding a little light on our efforts.

As we said, both of these offer a free trial period of at least two weeks. So there really is no harm in trying both of them out and seeing which one is the best fit for you.

However, if you’re looking at the middle tier pricing options or higher, ClickMagick seems to offer more for less.

At the end of the day, the decision will be yours. But you should definitely take your time to dig through both of these products and find the one that can help you the best.