Clickmagick and Your WA Domain (Adding CNAME Record)
Introduction
If you use Clickmagick (or another tracking program) to track your links, this is a short post for how to do that.
Step 1 - Request a CNAME record to be added to your domain via support:
Here are the coordinates:
- Type Record: CNAME
- Record Name: link.digitooly.com (this is a sub-domain of your domain if you want to have a primary website AND tracking sub-domain. It can be any sub-domain name)
- TTL: 3600
- Address: www.clkmg.com (or whatever target domain is provided by your tracking program)
It takes about 24 hours to propagate the changes.
STEP 2 - Add the custom domain in Clickmagick
Go into your Clickmagick account and add the custom sub-domain under Tools, Domain manager:
Add the sub-domain in the first box. Don't change anything else. Add a backup URL in case the tracking link can't find your target URL and click Add Custom Domain.
That's it. Now you have the ability to track your links through a branded domain name.
NOTE: If you get an error message, this means that that changes by WA have not taken effect yet. Wait another 12 hours then try again.
Why Would You Do This?
A link tracker is an invaluable tool that allows you to see the source of your traffic, how well your traffic is converting and the ROI of your campaigns.
Tracking the Source of Your Traffic
Using something called sub-ids, you can have one tracking link for all of your traffic sources:
Here you can see the breakout for Facebook, Mailchimp, Wordpress, etc.
Tracking Your Conversions
You can also track conversions and ROI. The A column tells you when an action was taken, say for example, when someone clicked on a link or opted-in to your e-mail list.
The ACR column gives you the breakdown by percentage so you can track opt-in rate.
You can see that you also have an S column to track sales (which I did not use in the screen above). This allows you to track the ROI of your campaigns.
How much does $1 of advertising produce? If it's more than $1, you have a positive ROI campaign.
Conclusion
While this might seem a little advanced, if you can get past the technical hurdle, tracking your links will provide tons of useful information for your business.
Reach out if you need more clarification.
Here's to your success,
Gustavo
Recent Comments
6
Gustavo, thank you for explaining how to get a CNAME record added. It's just what I needed!
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When you set this up, did they make your point to another server? The reason I ask is, I was asked to change server, which caused me to lose access to my email. Now I'm having a hard time explaining to WA support what I'm trying to do.
Hey there,
When I set this up, all was working dandy with Clickmagick and WA.
Not sure what happened over the last few months but I started getting Privacy Errors. So I checked in with Clickmagick. They told me to use Cloudflare, point my servers through them, and it fixed the privacy issue.
But now my e-mail stopped working as well.
I finally grew tired of the whole thing and just purchased another domain (.net) and I'm running all of my tracking links through that domain.
I have reset my WA domain to point back to the WA servers.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how Cloudflare works to speak to support about it.
Sorry.
Thank you for your reply. I'm having to do the same. I would have never known that it was not working because I received no warning. There is no telling how long people have been getting the warning page. But glad to be getting it fixed.
Same here. Who knows how many visitors I scared away. Glad it worked out for you.