One of the things that successful affiliates all do is to track, analyze, and optimize all of their links.
As an affilaite, content and SEO brings you traffic and promotional links generate your income.
Link management is a top priority.
Link tracking and management tools help you understand which offers resonate with your audience and will help fine-tune your content and funnels. By using a link management tool you are also seperating your affiliate link details from the content. If an affiliant link needs to change you do it in the linking tool, not the copy.
Link Tracking
Tracking Tools
ClickMagic
ClickMeter
Improvely
Linktrackr
Trck.me
Voluum
WordPress Tools
Easy Affiliate Links
PrettyLinks
Thirsty Affiliates
There are lots of things you can do with these link tracking tools.
- Centrally manage links — not in content
- Track prospect through funnel
- Create a redirected shortened link for each of your offers.
- Cloak affiliate links
- Analyze the success of the links throughout the sales process
- Run a solo ads business.
- A/B test different link placement and Calls to Action (CTA)
- Slow-down scrapers
- Monitor click fraud
Linking tools are available as both SaaS services and as plugins for your WordPress site. They range from simple tools to cloak and shorten links, to sophisticated tools that can track links through your entire sales process.
Remember links are your products. Optimize them and track them for the most profit.
SaaS Link Management Tools
More than just link cloaking and WordPress click-tracking, these SaaS tools are built for professional online marketers to manage, track and optimize there sales.
By using an online service to manage all of your links you can offload the technology integration with your web server and network. These tools are priced on a monthly fee basis, typically with gates for the number of items tracked and/or the number of monthly clicks managed.
SaaS linking tools have a number of benefits …
- Track all steps in your sales funnel.
- Provide for A/B testing. For instance you can track email links.
- Click-fraud detection
- Track Commission Sources
Click Magic
Focus: Complete sales-cycle link management
Best Feature: Well known for solo ad marketer tools
Pricing: $27-$97 based on number of links tracked.
Clickmagick is an awesome tool. They are particularly well known by solo ad sellers who use the tool to manage their email links and when to rotate them. Clickmagick has a number of features that are valuable to most affiliate marketers …
- Custom Tracking Domains
- Automatic split-testing
- Automatic Bot Filtering
- Link Rotators
- Real-Time statistics
Clickmagic can track all the steps in your sales process. They have a unique Funnel Builder Tool that aids you in telling Clickmagick about all the steps in your funnel to track.
ClickMeter
Focus: Link, conversion, and affiliate tracking
Best Feature: Strong sales conversion tracking
Pricing: $29 – $349 based on the number of events and datapoints
Clickmeter is a strong contender in the link tracking market. It is a Saas tool that will let you target, track, monitor and share your affiliate and other links.
Their service is hosted on Amazon’s AWS so you know up time and performance will be great. Clickmeter has very strong A/B testing capabilities with multiple destination URLs so you can find the best messaging for conversions.
Improvely
Focus: Link Tracking, Testing and Optimization
Best Feature: Protects your campaigns from theft and snooping by competition
Pricing: $29 – $299 based on tracked items
Improvely has some strong features for affiliate marketers …
- Shows which ads, landing pages and keywords are making money
- Advanced cloaking controls what URL is displayed in the address bar and what text is in the title bar
- Works with 95% of affiliate programs (those that supports tracking pixels or subid parameters)
Improvely can act as your affiliate dashboard. It is really handy as you get bigger to have all of your campaigns, links, A/B testing etc. in one place.
Linktrackr
Focus: Link tracking and Cloaking
Best Feature: Low entry price
Pricing: $7 – $47
Though Linktrackr may lack some of the most sphisticated tools of some of the other products they are a great value. The main features of LinkTrackr are …
- Conversion tracking
- Postback tracking
- Pixel Tracking
- SubID Tracking
- A/B Split Testing
- Rotating URLS
For affiliates starting out with link tracking, Linktrackr is a low-cost way to get your feet wet.
Trck.me
Focus: Campaigns, Social Media, and Affiliate Links
Best Feature: Customized branded domains for links
Pricing: $29 – $79 Unlimited Events and Datapoints
The main features of LinkTrackr are …
- Dashboard filters
- Automatic tagging
- Custom Branding
- Multi-channel tracking
I really like that Trck.me uses a monthly fee with no limits on events or items being tracked.
Voluum
Focus: Ad and affiliate link performance
Best Feature: Push alerts of performance changes
Pricing: $69 -$999 based on features and events
Voluum is definately one of the top products. They create industrial strength software with a rich feature set …
- Automatic Campaign Optimization
- Fraud Detection
- Impression tracking
- Listicle Tracking
- Push notification alerts
- Mobile App
Voluum is a great tool for super-affiliates particularly those with an ad-focused traffic model. It may be overkill and too pricey for smaller affiliates. The basic package does not include A/B testing if that is a requirement you will need the $149/mo version.
WordPress Link Management Tools
Many affiliates and marketers will use plugins to shorten, redirect, cloak and manage their links. With these products, you create an alias for the affiliate link that you use in the content. These types of linking tools are the minimum any serious affiliate should use.
The features and benefits of these tools include …
- Short, clear names for your visitors
- Central management of your affiliate links
- Logging of clicks to your links
- Easy no_follow and other attribute settings
Most of the tools below use the freemium model with pricing typically based on a perpetual license with updates and support for 1 year. Support and updates can be renewed every year.
Easy Affiliate Links
Focus: Manage affilaite links
Best Feature: Broken link checker with email notification (pro version)
Pricing: Free — Pro version is $30
Easy Affiliate Links has a deep feature set ….
- Works with both the Classic Editor and Gutenberg Editor
- Link categories
- Use shortlinks to cloak
- Uncloaked for Amazon compatibility
- Tracking of monthly and lifetime clicks
- Import and export affiliate links (XML and CSV)
Pretty Links
Focus: Link redirection and cloaking
Best Feature: Many link types for redirect
Pricing: Free Premium is $49 – $149 based on number of sites
Pretty links is one of the most popular redirection and cloaking tool for WordPress. They support many different link types when you redirect …
- 307
- 302
- 301
- Pretty bar
- Cloaked
- Pixel
- Meta Rfresh
- Javascript
Thirsty Affiliates
Focus: Cloaking and redirecting of links
Best Feature:Smart Uncloaking
Pricing: $49 - $149 based on number of websites
Thirsty Affilaites is very similar to Prettylinks. They both do a good job at cloaking and redirecting your affiliate links. One nice feature of the pro version of thirsty affiliates is the automtic uncloaking of Amazon links. This keeps you in compliance withyour Amazon Associate's TOC.
Wrapping Up
If you are serious about your affiliate business you need some sort of link tracking. It is critical that you know how many people are clicking on your promotional links and how many are converting to sales. Basic WordPress linking tools are fine and very useful when you are starting out. As your business grows you may find you want the added features (and hopefully sales) that you get from the SaaS products.
