Clickmagick Review 2021 (Legit or Not?)

Clickmagick Review

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Clickmagick Review 2021 (Legit Or Not?)

Clickmagick Review

Published by Al Rose

Last Updated on April 26, 2022

I have been working with Clickmagick’s software for a while (late 2019). Before I found this software, I looked around the internet, and the information I found there was shallow and mostly outdated. So, I have decided to do an experience-based Clickmagick review for you, updated for 2021, to help you learn about this link tracking software so that you make an informed purchase decision.  

Clickmagick offers a 14-day free trial period, so in addition to reading my Clickmagick review, you will learn a lot more by signing up and testing it free for yourself.

Table of Contents

What Is Clickmagick and Who Is It Made For?

Clickmagick is a feature-packed link-tracking tool that facilitates tracking and optimization of paid ad links for all businesses: from a beginner marketer or business person who needs to only track one project, to a power user who works with multiple teams on multiple marketing campaigns or affiliate promotion projects per month.

Clickmagick applies three tracking modes – campaigns, rotators and tracking links – to track marketing campaign links and affiliate links.

Pros and Cons of Clickmagick

Below are the pros and cons of using Clickmagick:

Pros

  • It is reasonably priced
  • Offers a free trial
  • Its user interface is simple to navigate
  • It’s easy to set up and get started with Clickmagick
  • You can track paid and organic links
  • It has Clickshield, a feature that fights bot traffic to save you money
  • You can use Clickmagick to track offline conversions
  • Domain customization allows you to build link trust
  • Offers great customer support
  • Clickmagick notifies you in case your links aren’t set up well

Cons

  • To use Clickmagick, you need to have a website already set up to receive traffic
  • Its longest data retention period is 2 years. The data retention period for the starter plan is only 6 months.
  • Clickmagick only accepts credit and debit card payments

Key Features. What Does Clickmagick Do?

Clickmagick claims to be the “source of truth” when it comes to link tracking, and honestly, I’m inclined to agree with them. Their main aim is to ensure that you improve your marketing, and they do this with a bunch of proprietary tools that improve conversion attribution and data integrity.

Let’s look at how Clickmagick helps you improve your paid ad campaigns, and the features it uses to achieve your link tracking and campaign end goals.

Link Tracking Effectiveness

I suppose the first and most important question that you ask yourself when considering whether to buy a link tracking tool is, “how effective is this software at tracking links?”

Well, when it comes to Clickmagick, I’ll have to say “very effective”. Here’s why:  

Clickmagick uses postback URLs, sub-IDs and tracking links to track conversions. These three methods are “industry-approved” for all link tracking activity.

  • Tracking links work best if you are promoting web pages that you control
  • Postback URLs are most suited for affiliate promotion activity on networks that prohibit the use of post back URLs
  • Sub IDs should be used as a last resort, in case a network doesn’t support both postback URLs or tracking links

In other words, Clickmagick has built in tracking redundancies for you, ensuring that you can track your links even where ad networks impose restrictions.

But over and above that, Clickmagick has some neat tricks for enhancing link tracking:

  • When you track campaigns in Clickmagick campaigns mode, you can use UTM parameters to track an entire sales funnel. This allows you to collect data for different parameters throughout your funnel, such as source data and keyword data. When you have this level of information, you can understand the keywords that attract more clicks and the platforms that send you the most traffic. You can then optimize your campaigns for specific keywords or platforms.  
  • You can use Clickshield (more on this below), to detect and eliminate bot clicks and invalid clicks. By detecting and eliminating bot clicks, you spend less on advertising as bot clicks defraud you by making you pay for clicks that can never convert.
  • You can enable offline tracking so that you attribute any relevant offline sales to your campaigns. This gives you more accurate business insights to optimize future campaigns. Since you also feed offline sales data to your ad networks, those networks will also find customers for you more accurately.

Split Testing Links

You can put in time, money and energy in developing your campaign pages, but you cannot know how a page will perform. This is what makes split testing necessary. That is, you develop two versions of your page, and show both of them to different visitors. The page that performs best is the one you will keep showing to visitors.

Split testing should be a continuous exercise. Even after an optin page or landing page wins, you should still continue to tweak it and test versions of it.

Split Testing Links

Clickmagick conducts continuous automatic split testing, saving you time and increasing the accuracy of your tests. It then redirects all traffic to the winning page. This process ensures that you are budget better by directing it to a page that converts.  

One downside here is that you cannot use Clickmagick’s tracking links with the split testing enabled on ad networks like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. This is because these three networks have strict controls for where ad clicks land. Typically, with tracking links, duplicating a page will create two different URLs.

Therefore, to split test on Facebook, Microsoft or Google, you need to use the Ads rotation feature built into those platforms.

Retargeting Feature Functionality

Retargeting is one of those features without which online selling would be very difficult. Without retargeting, people would just land on your website, and then leave, and that’s probably the last interaction you’ll ever have with them. But not when you use retargeting pixels.

Let’s assume that a visitor interacts with your ad but doesn’t convert. If you are using retargeting pixels, that doesn’t have to be the end of your interaction with that visitor, because the pixel will drop a browser cookie on their activity so that when they leave the website, you can show them the same or similar ads just to remind them to come back to your website.

Retargeting is nothing new; but it’s how Clickmagick does retargeting that makes it stand out. Normally, you can only add a retargeting pixel to a site you control. But with Clickmagick retargeting, you can use any number of retargeting pixels on whichever tracking links you choose, and what’s more, you don’t even need to own the website that the link directs to.

The benefits of this kind of retargeting is that by not being limited in how or where you use retargeting pixels, you increase the likelihood of converting people who didn’t checkout, because your ads are always reminding them to come back.

That’s how powerful the retargeting feature is!

In addition, Clickmagick’s retargeting feature works with multiple retargeting networks.

ClickMagick Audience Optimization (Sending Accurate Data to Advertisers)

Your advertisements should be generating more sales, but you cannot do this without accurate data to help you optimize your marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, AI algorithms used by ad networks such as Facebook and Google aren’t always accurate in their attribution, often causing you to misunderstand the role of every media channel and touchpoint in driving conversions.

For example, if an algorithm doesn’t support cross-device tracking, every device that a visitor uses to access your link will be tracked as the source device. Similarly, if a platform doesn’t track a visitor’s browsing activity across platforms, every activity regarding the same link will be logged as a separate incident. This will result in double reporting, higher customer acquisition cost and poor ROI, because you just cannot run an effective campaign with inaccurate data.

Clickmagick’s solution to this problem is ClickMagick Audience Optimization™, a process that allows you to send actual data by uploading it to Facebook, google, and Microsoft ad platforms.

ClickMagick Audience Optimization

Armed with this accurate data, ad platforms can target audiences better, and keep your ad spend at a reasonable level.

Note: you’ll need to enable some settings in google ads, Microsoft ads and Facebook ads for audience optimization to work. For example, in google ads, you need to enable data import from CRM. All the steps for doing the set up are available in video format in the knowledge base, but here’s one of the steps in google ads.

conversions to track

Clickshield (Blocking Useless Ad Clicks)

Online clicks don’t only come from visitors with a real interest in your offer. They also come from bots (robots), created for this very purpose. Unfortunately, bot clicks can increase your costs because the more impressions your ads get, the more you pay. What’s worse, you won’t get any revenue from those clicks!

Enter Clickshield – Clickmagick’s bot filtering solution. With Clickshield, you can set up rules to filter out bot traffic from human traffic. For example, you could set a rule that limits the number of clicks from an IP address.

click shield rules

Bot traffic usually exhibits some patterns that are very different from human traffic. This is what makes rule setting very effective.

For Clickshield to work, you simply need to create a custom audience in any of your advertising networks, and then apply rules to exclude that custom audience. Google, Microsoft and Facebook all have guidelines for how to create custom audiences. You can find the instructions in ClickMagick’s knowledge base.

Tracking Offline Conversions

Tracking offline conversions attributed to your online ads is just as important as tracking online conversions, because it gives you a holistic picture of your ad campaign performance. This then gives you more accurate performance analysis and business insights to work with.

Traditionally, tracking offline conversions has always been quite challenging. But Clickmagick makes this possible by allowing you to upload conversions that you have captured in your CRM or autoresponder.

The upload file is in .csv format, and contains 5 columns of data namely:

  • Visitor ID. This is a unique ID for every transaction. To get this ID, you need to set up cross-device tracking. You also need to create a custom form field in your autoresponder so that you can capture this information.
  • Conversion type. This is represented by 3 different initials “a” for action, “s” for sales, and “e” for engagement.
  • Amount. If the conversion is a sale, you should enter a numerical value for that sale.
  • Reference. This is a description, e.g., offer, optin or checkout
  • Timestamp. This is the time the conversion was captured.

Note that although you can track offline sales for Clickmagick campaigns, rotators and tracking links, it works best on Clickmagick campaigns.

Reporting Capabilities

Clickmagick’s employs a combination of tabular reports, graphs and a dashboard, to give you deep insights on ad performance.

Below are just a few points that demonstrate the extent of ClickMagick’s reporting capabilities:

  • A reporting dashboard that shows you summary performance for over 20 data points per funnel. You can graph each of these data points on the dashboard. Just click on a data point and you will see its performance over time.
  • A powerful UTM performance report that allows you to view your data for different UTM parameters: term, campaign, source and content.
  • View stats by “term”. This shows you the list of the keywords you have used in your ads and how each of those terms is performing. By knowing keyword performance, you can decide on which keywords to focus your budget on.
  • View reports by traffic sources. See the ad spend, revenue, profit and return on ad spend (ROAS) per traffic source.
  • View data for any date range, and by day, week, or month.
  • A detailed, funnel steps report that shows you visitor progress through your funnel. You can use this report to optimize your funnel.
  • Downloadable raw data

The UTM parameters report is the highlight of Clickmagick’s reporting capabilities. This is because this detailed, sortable report gives you important insights that you can use to optimize your campaigns. It’s quite possible that your competitors don’t have the level of granular data that you get with Clickmagick’s UTM report.

Integration With Other Tools

Clickmagick integrates with other tools and platforms, allowing you to serve or optimize ads on those platforms. For example:

  • Integrating with Facebook API allows Clickmagick to send conversion data in real time to Facebook
  • When you want to increase email sign ups, you can integrate Clickmagick with your autoresponder allows

What’s interesting about Clickmagick’s integration is that when you want to use a tool or ad network, you simply select it from Clickmagick. Apart from a few instances, there is very little set up needed to use any tools and networks that Clickmagick integrates with.

Affiliate Program

The Clickmagick affiliate program feature was built to manage all paid ad link tracking, including tracking affiliate links.

How Clickmagick manages affiliate tracking is quite unique, and perhaps this uniqueness stems from the fact that it (Clickmagick), was built by a veteran affiliate marketer. Some of the unique things you can do with Clickmagick’s affiliate management feature include:

  • Promote using dynamic affiliate links. These powerful links give you control over sales even when you don’t have direct control over an affiliate offer
  • Automate A/B testing. This allows you to optimize landing pages and promotions without any effort.
  • Automate buildup of post-back URLs. This allows for faster campaign buildup and deployment, integration with more affiliate networks, and more accurate tracking

Use tracking pixels. Some campaigns don’t support postback URLs, and in those cases, you can use tracking links.

If using post back URLs, you will add them to the pages you are tracking. But if you are using tracking pixels, add them to your offer from the affiliate site.

Ease of Use

Clickmagick has three modes that you can use for running ads: ClickMagick campaigns, tracking links and rotators.

Clickmagick campaigns is intentionally designed to make setting up and running ads simpler. This is because it eliminates the need for setting up tracking links, and instead sends traffic directly to your website. It also eliminates the problem of ads getting disapproved, which often happens when dealing with tracking links.

Other than that, Clickmagick’s interface is itself quite navigable and makes setting up your campaigns quite easy.

For example. This is the campaign manager view. If you navigate to the tools menu, you can carry out specific tasks such as: organize your links with the url manager, build custom audiences using Clickshield, and even create new campaigns by going to “website code”. You can do all these things without leaving your campaigns view.

This is what I mean.

campaigns website code

You can see your campaign view in the background as you set up a new campaign. You will also notice that you can set up the click tracking code and campaign tracking code without leaving the “website code” set up.

campaigns website code2

In addition, whatever you choose in the goal section will appear in the campaign view when you launch that campaign.

This all goes to show how tied together the workflow is in Clickmagick. Other areas may work differently from this example, but the point is, you never veer off too far from your main view, and, every task takes very few steps to set up.

Customer Support

I have tested dozens of software out there, and I have to say: Clickmagick probably has some the best customer support I have ever encountered. Their claim of providing “fanatical support” is not at all exaggerated.

Even the basic online support that they give on the starter plan is not that bad; I mean, 8-10 hours turnaround time for a problem is not bad at all for an entry-level subscription.

Not to mention, a lot of times, you won’t need to contact customer support because Clickmagick’s knowledgebase has content to help you with any issue you encounter. They even have guides for doing your setups in google ads, Facebook ads, Microsoft ads and some of the affiliate networks.

And just in case you are stuck, you can still get additional help through the following support channels (note that these are only available for the standard and pro plans):

  • One-on-one onboarding call
  • “I’m stuck” phone support
  • “Done for you” support (only on the pro plan)

I think one of the best part of Clickmagick’s customer support is that once you are on the standard and pro plans, they will provide you with extensive paid ads training on every advertising channel available: from Native ads, to Facebook ads, google ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, YouTube ads and Instagram ads.

Clickmagick Pricing

Clickmagick is a budget-friendly product. The starter package costs $37, the standard plan $77, and the pro plan costs $197. We provide greater detail on each pricing plan in our Clickmagick pricing article.

This starter package allows you to get started with link promotion and scale at a comfortable pace. If you sign up for the starter package, you can add 2 custom domains to your account, track 1 funnel and up to 10,000 clicks per month. You also get 6-month data retention, online support, and core tracking features (e.g fraud protection, notifications and alerts, unlimited optins), and all this goes for only $37.

The Standard package increases click tracking limit to 100,000, 10 custom domains and funnel tracking for 5 projects. It also comes with incremental features such as cross-device tracking, Clickshield, audience optimization, offline tracking, one-on-one onboarding and more dedicated customer support.

Once you graduate to the Pro package, you will get all the features in the standard package, plus, you can track unlimited funnels, work with unlimited team members and have unlimited domains in your account. You also get done-for-you support, and a 2-year data retention period.

Is Clickmagick Worth It?

Considering all the features we have discussed above, I’d say that Clickmagick is worth every dollar you spend on it.

At a starting price of $37, Clickmagick is your best choice if you want to dip your toe in the world of paid advertising. Considering the kind of quality tracking, analytics and optimization features that Clickmagick puts at your disposal, you will recoup your investment and scale your advertising in no time at all – that’s assuming you use Clickmagick right and are consistent.

Clickmagick is quite easy to set up and use. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial it offers and try out its features!

Alternatives to Clickmagick

Not sure Clickmagick is the tool for you? Consider these other Clickmagick alternatives:

Voluum. Despite its steeper pricing ($89 for its starter package), Voluum is a link tracking tool made for anyone who is heavy into affiliate marketing. You can track paid and organic traffic with Voluum. Learn more in our Clickmagick vs Voluum article.

Clickmeter. Clickmeter is a great link tracking tool for a beginner. Its pricing plans start off at $19, but only allow you to track 5000 events and create up to 500 links. Each pricing plan has an upper limit for events and data points, giving you the choice of increasing your limits on your package for an additional fee instead of migrating to the next plan. We go into more detail in our Clickmagick vs Clickmeter comparison.

Bemob. Bemob is a link tracking tool of German origin. It markets itself for its ability to “track your Facebook, Google Ads, Bing campaigns, when a campaign link is not accepted”. Bemob offers a very generous free package that tracks up to 100,000 events per month.

Any events over the limit cost $0.06 per month, which translates to $1 more for roughly every 15,000 events. If you reach the 1,000,000-mark for events tracked, you graduate to the professional package which costs $49 per month.

I highly recommend trying Bemob, as the free package allows you to test the tool and get the proof you need that it can do what it claims.