You’ve launched a website for your business, but how do you keep your traffic, and how do you get to know who your customers are?
Keeping tracking of your site’s traffic is one of the most important tasks once your website goes live. This is where link tracking software comes in handy, to help track your traffic while growing your online business or store.
ClickMagick and Bitly are among the best link tracking software on the market today, and this review looks at the features, how each works to track traffic and help you optimize your site for growth.
What Is ClickMagick?
ClickMagick is a powerful web-based marketing tool used by marketers for monitoring and optimizing marketing outreaches, including email campaigns and tracking page clicks for optimized conversions.
This is a web-based link tracking software that offers a suite of features that digital and affiliate marketers can use to optimize their online marketing efforts and make more money online.
It allows users to customize marketing metrics and automate repetitive tasks such as tracking conversion rates and ad optimization.
In essence, ClickMagick can be the magical touch you need as a marketer. Imagine having the ability to monitor and follow up on every click on your landing page and monitor your campaign performance. Think of the high conversion rate from such abilities; that’s what ClickMagic does to your business.
With ClickMagic, you can monitor every visitor to your page and know where your web traffic is coming from, whether they are human or bots, and what link they clicked. You can also monitor ads and campaigns and track clicks across multiple devices.
Overall, ClickMagick is an all-in-one, easy-to-use marketing solution targeted at boosting sales by monitoring ROIs from every campaign, ad, and link; thereby providing you with key metrics for making informed marketing decisions.
ClickMagick Features
Link cloaking
Before sharing links, you can beautify them to make them look professional and less spammy. This is especially so if you do marketing that requires users to type your links in a search bar to find it. Ugly, long URLs can be converted into easier to type, shorter ones so that users have a better experience.
Track traffic sources
With ClickMagick you can create unique tracking IDs that’ll help you know the source of your clicks. A good example is if you link your blog to affiliate products and use the same link all the time. The link can be plastered all over the site in different ways like in a popup, sidebar ads, or in the text of your posts.
Although this seems spammy and hurts the user’s experience, you get clicks to the same URL but you’re not sure of the source. All you know is if they came from multiple various calls to action on your website.
However, with unique links that have identifiers of where you post the link, you can see the ones that get clicks and conversions, like create a link for the sidebar or for the posts or popups. With this data, you can make adjustments that’ll increase and maximize conversions but also make your site less spammy.
Automatic bot filtering: Tracking quality and authenticity of traffic
If you buy paid traffic to your products or blog posts, you want to ensure the clicks are from real, actual people, because stuff like bot traffic is a culprit in such instances.
ClickMagick helps you verify your traffic is real, not from bots. It also helps you see the IP addresses of people clicking on your links. If you’re worried that your rival could be clicking your links to drain your daily budget faster, you can tell whether it’s the same IP and exact location it is from.
You can also run IPs with a suspicious number of clicks just to be sure your rival isn’t clicking your links to make sure your daily spend runs out. Google Ads is a good tool as well that allows you to add IP exclusions that ensure your ads won’t be seen where trolls or your competitors can see them.
Creating split tests
With ClickMagick, you can use one link and send users to different pages that are slightly different but the aim is to track changes, one at a time – for example headlines or buttons and more.
You can choose how to balance your traffic and ClickMagick will alert you automatically about the winning combination. You can discover which page converts best so you know where to spend more cash to send traffic to it.
Tracking conversion values or rates, and profitability
ClickMagick allows you to assign values for your costs and conversions for traffic to any link so you can get metrics in real time that show whether you’re making profits or losses.
24/7 Link uptime monitoring
Sometimes your pages may be offline, but if you have a link created in ClickMagick, you’ll be alerted when this happens. Most people may not notice this or may register it as a mild inconvenience, but it’s catastrophic to anyone spending money on paid traffic.
ClickMagick can warn you when a link is down and you can cut the traffic until the site is back up, otherwise you may lose a lot of money.
Track non-owned pages
You can track pages that you don’t own using ClickMagick and save time and hassle, while making more money. It allows you to know if your marketing efforts are profitable and if the sales you make are from ads or organic traffic sources.
This means you don’t spend blindly, and it’s as easy as adding a pixel to your pages and the lead or purchase is confirmed.
However, if you’re sending traffic to a different website you don’t own, you can’t add your own pixel, but ClickMagick creates a workaround that enables you to send traffic to third-party sites. Once users take the desired action, they’ll be redirected to a page with your pixel and instantly over to the next page without them noticing it.
Create and add custom tracking and retargeting pixels to links
ClickMagick also lets you add tracking pixels from third-party sites and retarget whoever clicks your links. It doesn’t limit you to people who click your paid ads or those landing on your blog.
It can be from emails, forums, social media, or anywhere else you can think of.
MagickPop: Add calls-to-action and countdowns to websites
ClickMagick offers five different popups including exit pops, on load or delayed, and exit redirects you can add to any website. You don’t need to own it, know the site’s owner, or even ask their permission.
It lets you promote related offers, collect leads, share video reviews, offer bonuses, and even add a countdown timer to motivate your traffic to opt-in to your list and buy your promoted products.
MagickBar
This tool allows you to deliver your message through a notification bar on any website, with any content type you want, like countdown timers, opt-in forms, and more.
It’s like getting an extra, free page view with each click.
Export/Import data
With ClickMagick’s import tool, you can upload all of your links fast, and save on time and effort. The export tool also lets you export data that you can share with others, like customers or your team, which is better than sending screengrabs or sharing your username and password.
Automatic traffic quality analysis
ClickMagick assigns a unique traffic quality score to all of your links automatically so you know the kind of traffic you’re getting. It also notifies you when the quality is low, while watching your traffic 24/7.
Content locking
You can supercharge your list building by getting visitors to complete actions like sharing, or opting in, to get access to your content. For easy profits, you can combine this with relevant lead-based CPA offers.
Geo and mobile targeting
Send visitors dynamically to different pages based on geo-locations or send mobile clicks automatically to different links, other than desktop ones.
These features help you optimize all traffic and guarantee higher conversions and profits.
ClickMagick Pricing
ClickMagick has different pricing tiers such as:
- Starter plan, for $37 per month offering up to 10,000 clicks per month and all core features, 4-hour support, funnel tracking for 1 funnel, 6-months data retention, and 2 custom tracking domains.
- Standard plan for $77 per month offering up to 100,000 clicks per month, all core features, 1-hour support, funnel tracking for 5 funnels, 1 year data retention, and 10 custom tracking domains
- Pro plan for $197 per month offering up to one million clicks per month, all core features, 1-hour support, unlimited funnel tracking, unlimited custom domains, and two year data retention
ClickMagick also has a free trial that’s simple and straightforward. Just create your free account and for 14 full days you can use all its profit-boosting features for free. If you don’t like the software, cancel anytime online, via email, or ClickMagick’s help desk.
The free trial has no limits on clicks, but after the trial, if you exceed the plan limit by over 10 percent, you’ll be automatically upgraded to the next highest plan that can accommodate your actual usage.
There aren’t any signup or cancellation fees, minimum terms, or contracts. If you want to keep using it, you can do so for as short or long as you want, upgrade/downgrade, and cancel anytime. A no-question asked 30-day money-back refund is also available anytime.
ClickMagick Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy and fast setup
- Pixel builder tracks entire sales funnels
- Split-testing support
- Quality scoring and traffic analysis
- Fast support and helpful resources
- Affordable pricing
- Thorough reporting
- Free trial available
- Works anywhere you advertise
- Link monitoring
- Tracks links you can’t reach with organic tracking
Cons
- Learning curve not easy for newbies
- No live chat support
- Potential conflicts when setting up custom domains
What Is Bitly?
Bitly is the largest and oldest link management tool for organizing links and optimizing conversion rates from links. With Bitly, you can shorten, share, analyze, and manage links on your page.
Links created with Bitly are easy to read, memorize, and monitor; you can know the time and location from which your links are clicked, making it easy to monitor links with the highest conversion rates.
In essence, Bitly is not only for shortening URLs; you can use Bitly to brand and customize your links, monitor page clicks, know the location of your web visitors and referrers, and also integrate Bitly into your business.
Bitly helps your business to build and maintain brand consistency through link customization. This can go a long way in helping you collect valuable data from audiences, analyze data traffic, monitor and measure your campaign performances for increased conversion.
This is a link management platform that allows you to leverage the power of links by letting you shorten, share, manage, and analyze links. Once you optimize your links with Bitly, you can measure each touchpoint from one place so you can easily build it for your users and teams’ needs.
The simple online service lets you shorten long and ugly or complex URLs, so your users can simply save, copy, and share the links in different channels like social media, email, and more.
It is regarded as the largest URL shortener in the world as it replaces long complex links with a series of letters and numbers, and shortens them into an easy to use and copy URL.
Bitly Features
Custom links
You can make links into powerful marketing assets by replacing bit.ly links with your chosen domain name, and make them recognizable consistently across channels.
Link management
Bitly helps your business shine by transforming your links into powerful tools that customer support and marketing teams can use in their outreach efforts.
Real-time analytics
Maximize your performance from an informed point as Bitly lets you understand the content that resonates most with your audience.
Its comprehensive metrics from each link or campaign like geographic data, clicks, and top referring channels, take out the guesswork from your link performance so you can share only what they want.
Its interactive, real-time dashboard offers a full view of metrics like store visits or app opens across each channel or device whether it’s SMS, social media, or even email. You can see what works and where or how customers are engaging.
Seamless integrations
Bitly integrates seamlessly with the tools you love like social media and digital marketing tools, which saves you effort and time. If you want to create links at scale, whether they’re 100 or 100,000 links, the Bitly API is open and flexible and it makes the process seamless and simple.
It integrates into your workflow and tech stack, creating mobile deep links from the tools you use already like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast, and many more.
Link security
Bitly also ensures links are reliable and safe as it encrypts each link with HTTPS for maximum protection against tampering by third parties or eavesdropping. Your content is therefore safe from the bad guys.
Customer support
This link tracking software is intuitive and easy to use, and you can rely on its robust knowledge base when you need support. Enterprise customers have the advantage of being paired up with customer success managers for further support.
Deep links
With its mobile deep links, Bitly lets you route users to the right place directly in your app or the app store to download your app. These links create seamless transitions to mobile, while driving app engagement and encouraging app installs.
Bitly Pricing
Bitly’s pricing plans let you track and optimize each touchpoint with your audiences regardless of reach or size. It has four different pricing plans: Free, Basic, Premium, and Enterprise plans.
- Free plan that’s great for personal users who want to start tracking and measuring audience interactions. It supports 50 Bitly links per month.
- Basic plan for $35 per month when billed monthly, or $29 per month when billed annually. It is ideal for personal users or self-employed people who need branding and are considering analytics. This provides 1,500 branded links, 1 custom domain, and 1 user seat.
- Premium plan for $300 per month when billed monthly, or $199 per month when billed annually. It is ideal for influencers or small businesses seeking to build their brands and dive deeper into performance analytics. It provides 3,000 branded links, 1 custom domain, and 1 user seat.
- Enterprise plan with custom pricing and is for growing and established brands that want to drive brand loyalty, collaborate across teams, and scale multichannel campaigns. It offers 10,000 branded links, 1+ custom domains, and 1+ user seats. Contact sales for more on this plan.
Bitly Pros and Cons
Pros
- Free service
- Custom URLs for personalized appeal
- Analytics page for each link to access metrics
- Filters stories by topic, language, area, and social platform
- Value for money
- Easy to use and customize
- Widely trusted and reliable
- Protection from malicious sites
- Can log in with Facebook or Twitter
- Chrome extension
- Well-designed dashboard
- Includes timeline with daily link traffic
- Supports API integration
Cons
- Can’t go back and edit old short link target URLs
- Free version doesn’t allow for custom branding
- Paid version is fairly expensive
- Limited clicks for free users
- Deletes analytics after 30 days
- Link data is public data
- Can result in duplicate links
Bitly vs ClickMagick: Similarities And Differences
Similarities
- Both ClickMagick and Bitly are easy to use
- They are both link management and optimization tools
- Both tools have link tracker functionality that monitors the time and location of clicks
- Both tools are marketing solutions for boosting conversions from marketing outreaches
- Both Bitly and ClickMagick are campaign management and data analytics tools
- With either Bitly or ClickMagick, you are provided with APIs for custom integration
- Both tools offer stats reports in real-time
- You can use either ClickMagick or Bitly for A/B split testing
Differences
- ClickMagick tracks sales funnels while Bitly focuses on link customization and conversion.
- ClickMagick focuses on monitoring and optimizing other aspects of marketing, including link tracking, sales funnel data tracking, ads, and campaign monitoring. On the other hand, Bitly focuses on business link branding and customization.
- You cannot use ClickMagick to create QR codes, unlike Bitly, which is used to create and manage QR codes.
- ClickMagick offers a 14-day trial, while Bitly offers a free version with limited features.
- Unlike Bitly, ClickMagick offers more features for digital marketers
- ClickMagick offers superior customer support service when compared with Bitly.
- ClickMagick offers you location information, while Bitly offers both location and device-specific information.
- You can use ClickMagic to create pop-ups on your pages; however, Bitly does not offer such a feature.
Conclusion
Both link tracking tools have similar purposes in terms of tracking links and delivering analytics, but ClickMagick seems to go steps further and does a lot more than Bitly, which is why it comes out on top.
As much as Bitly offers security for shortened or customized links, and it’s free and easy to use, ClickMagick allows you to track your links and optimize your site based on a variety of touchpoints.
ClickMagick also monitors the uptime of your links, lets you add tracking pixels, and even allows you to add different tracking tools like countdown timers or notification bars on sites that aren’t your own. It also wins in its pricing, compared to Bitly, whose Basic plan is almost twice the cost of ClickMagick’s Starter plan and offers a lot less features.
When it comes down to it, Bitly allows you to start for free with link shortening and analytics, showing you details of the location and channel. ClickMagick meanwhile gives you geo and mobile targeting, pixel retargeting, and automatic bot filtering.
On top of that, the features that gave ClickMagick the round victory for link tracking software requires an expensive Bitly pro subscription.
The long answer to the question of ClickMagick or Bitly is pretty much the same as the short: it depends. ClickMagick wins based on features and affordability, but Bitly wins in usability for newbies, reliability, and its security on links.
Elsie started off as a freelance business and tech journalist. Having written for publications like Lifewire, and WindowsReport, she has garnered immense exposure over the years. She is a certified social media expert with deep interest in internet marketing, ecommerce and information technology.