ClickMeter Blog

So I opened my Google Analytics and found that we had a peak of visits. Ok, but, from where? Which source is bringing us such number of conversions? So I opened “Traffic Sources > Sources > All traffic” and I found that about 70% of the sources were from “(direct)/(none)”, about 25% from “google/organic”, and only 5% from specific sources such as Facebook, Twitter, our blog and some other website we are using to advertise our product.

That was not a great help, it did not explained me which marketing action is producing results.

Then I opened my ClickMeter account, I clicked the list of links and then I filtered by “last 7 days”. There it is, the list of all sources ordered by the most clicked, no doubt from where the conversions were coming: a tweet we made was posted many times and is leading visitors to an Interesting article we made on our blog. That encouraged me to create similar articles and to buy visibility on Twitter about some specific keywords.

Bingo! We have got another piece of validated learning and we will spend our (and our investors money) wisely.

I’m not saying ClickMeter is “magic” and Analytics is “junk”, they are both excellent products and they have been created for two different purposes using two different technologies.

GA help you understand what happens on your website (on-site analytic) it tells you how many visits, what time of the day, which browser they use and try to make you understand who is your average visitor. CM was specifically created to determine which source of traffic is most valuable for your business. GA track the users when they hit your website pages collecting data through javascripts and cookies. CM track clicks at the source level, by providing you with a tracking link that track the users before they arrive to your website.

Our clients choose ClickMeter for many reasons: Google Analytics is not that accurate, javascript has to be placed in your website and only provides aggregated reports.

1) Google Analytics is not that accurate. The data in Google Analytics is always less than the actual traffic numbers. But why?

To answer this, we need to talk tech for a moment:

A) Google analytics is a JavaScript snippet of code that is placed into your website. If the computer visiting your website is not accepting JavaScript, the visit will not be tracked. Also if the JavaScript has an error or does not load the visit will not be tracked.

B) Google Analytics places a cookie on the machine that visits the website, then Google Analytics reads the cookie information to determine the visitor. Therefore, if cookies are blocked, no tracking will occur.

ClickMeter tracking technology is based on link redirects and is 100% accurate with tracking the number of clicks from a specific marketing source. ClickMeter does not require any code to be installed.

2) Google Analytics code has to be placed in your site html. Unlike tools like Google Analytics, KissMetrics and Omniture, ClickMeter have always been a way to gather website metrics when you don’t control the website.

Want metrics for a message you wrote on Twitter or Pinterest? Use a tracking link. Want data from a blog post? From a product you are advertising like an affiliate? You can use a ClickMeter link for that, too.

3) Google Analytics provides ONLY aggregated reports. Sometimes is necessary to drill down to understand why something is really happening.

As an example: if you suspect to be the victim of click-fraud activities you need a detailed report showing each click by IP and timestamp to ask a refund for the “fake” visibility you paid for. You can find many other reasons you may need detailed reports. Unfortunately GA is only providing aggregated stats and there is no way to access to a click by click report like in ClickMeter.

The main reasons you should choose ClickMeter to track your marketing sources are:

ClickMeter tracking technology is based on link redirects and is 100% accurate with tracking the number of clicks (unique and non-unique) from a specific link or campaign.

ClickMeter does not require any code to be installed.

All reports are available in aggregated and detailed mode.

Read more in ClickMeter knowledge base: Should I use ClickMeter or Google Analytics?

So what is the difference between tracking with ClickMeter vs the data I receive from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics serves it’s purpose and is excellent for tracking time on site, new vs returning user, user’s device, language, browser, flash version and so many other areas entry and exit point on the website.

ClickMeter was built to be specific in one area: marketing sources analysis.

So what is different about ClickMeter and how is the tracking more precise? ClickMeter allows clients to setup campaigns for referral traffic. Each unique link is created and tracked in the easy to use client dashboard. The link is created by giving a final destination, and also labeling where this link will be placed in the marketing strategy. Once the link is created, our clients are able to place that link on an inbound marketing website and EVERY CLICK is counted.

This is done by using redirects. the following image show the tracking process:

More info here: How tracking links work?

Savvy internet marketing experts create success by tracking each dollar spent to each dollar return on the investment. Imagine that you have an awesome website where you sell a very good product and you are ready to drive more traffic to it. You have an advertising budget of $5000, and there are 3 sites ready to send traffic through banner ads.

Using Google Analytics alone, let’s say that 15% of the clicks are not accounted for, and 7% of the clicks are displayed as “blank” because GA do did not gather enough data. Then another 3% of the clicks say they are coming from generic “Organic” traffic (again no enough data), however the 3rd party site owner is claiming that you had more visits than your Analytics is reporting. Based off this simple hypothetical, 25% of your clicks are not properly tracked.

How do you make a decision on which site to discontinue your ad buy? ClickMeter will save you time and money in reporting 100% precise. And yes, ClickMeter also tracks conversions.

               Use Google Analytics and ClickMeter side-by-side on your next campaign (more info here: Can I see ClickMeter reports in Google Analytics ). This is probably the best way to take advantage of both analytic platforms. One to have generic, overall, info about your website audience and the other to get precise info about which marketing source is providing more and best leads to your business.

No website? No Problem! ClickMeter tracks the clicking activity without needing to add code to your website. ClickMeter will track activity sent to your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or any other web property where you are unable to place a Google Analytics pixel.

... and if I work in an Agency? Serve your customer with better reports! ClickMeter is also popular with Ad operations teams who track hundreds of inbound marketing campaigns at once, and produce reports to track response rate of each campaign. And if you represent a web-marketing agency or a publisher all reports can be shared in read-only mode with a simple 2-minute setup.

Google also says: "301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances ... People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways - for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com - it's a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL"

In fact a 301 redirect and a link pass the same amount of PageRank. There is no more dilution of PageRank with a 301 redirect when compared to using a normal link

ClickMeter, from beginning (2008), offers you the possibility to create tracking links that redirects through 301. That is why many expert SEO marketers use our tracking service.

B) In order to insert the tracking pixel, the signature area should be HTML enabled. In our case, Gmail does not directly support HTML signatures. But you can make use of this userscript to enable the HTML compatibility.

C) Once you have successfully installed this easy to use script, you will be able to configure your HTML signature [watch the video].

D) You can now place your tracking pixel in the signature. When you compose a new mail, Gmail will automatically place the HTML signature in the mail area.

E) That's it! Your tracking pixel will now be send along with every email you make. 

If you are using any other email client, you can have a look at this post and can find out how this works for your email client. 

An email signature is a block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an e-mail message. This has the effect of "signing off" the message and in a reply message of indicating that no more response follows. [source: Wikipedia]  

ClickMeter logo 

  Compared to our old logo, we made some serious changes to the color and the logo elements. We had 5 bars which indicate a chart and currently reduced the number to 4. They are placed in alignment with the other elements in the logo to give a fresh look and feel to our identity. We changed the green (#6bb533) and blue (#0f7ab3) as the basic color to represent ClickMeter. 

Apart from the normal logo, we are releasing a vertical logo which contains ClickMeter's trade mark symbols (4 bars and the hand icon) and the text CM which represents ClickMeter. 

ClickMeter avatar

We made some cool changes to our avatar which is currently displayed in ClickMeter twitter, blog and other supporting pages. The avatar contains our trade mark elements in the blue background. 

ClickMeter favicon

Some restyle to our favicon: as part of some future changes, we made the rounded rectangular corner radius to be 3px. Also, increased the width of the bars in the favicon. 

ClickMeter special pages

We also made some creative changes to the ClickMeter pages like 404 error, over capacity, under maintenance, technical error, spam notification, etc...  to ad a little fun.

You can also add multiple parameters to the tracking link by separating them with a "comma". Here is an example:

Destination URL:  www.yoursite.com?myparam1={id1}, myparam2={id2} Tracking link: www.go.clickmeter.com/38w2?id1=123, id2=abc After click:  www.yoursite.com?myparam1=123, myparam2=abc

URL (Uniform resource locator) is a set of strings to define a location in the World Wide Web (www). It can also be used to pass information to the destination. Any word after the question mark (?) in a URL is considered to be a parameter which can hold values. The value for the corresponding parameter is given after the symbol "equals" (=). Multiple parameters can be passed through the URL by separating them with "commas". Read more about passing parameter through URL.

Note: This option is well suited for the advanced users who are dealing with complex application websites and links interacting with databases.

Some examples of QR codes used in commercials for offline marketing:

With ClickMeter you can generate as many tracking pixels as you want. Thus you can track visits on how many websites you want, track as email opens as you want, etc...

Tracking pixels can also be used to track conversions. You will able to know which user, from which page of your site, or from which email or blog lead to a conversion, also if he just visited the page and did not click on your tracking link.

Some of our customers are using the tracking pixel in many different ways. Many of them publish the code on blog post to know how many time their post has been viewed. Some add it to the signature of their email to know if their email reach the final user or (as an example) goes in junk. We encourage any of you to suggest different ways to use the tracking pixel ([email protected])

Related articles: - Edit HTML email source in Thunderbird - Edit the HTML Source Code while composing a Message MS-Outlook

 Uniques:
 "Made from a real users" - these clicks represents the number of visitors who clicked on a tracking link or visited a webpage. We check that the IP from where the click came from is unique within last 30 minutes (this default time can be changed in the setting page).

 Spiders: "Not human clicks" - these are coming from robots or web-spiders (such as search engines crawlers, rss feed generators, validators, etc...).

 Conversions: "Goal !!!" - is when that click lead to the conversion. Someone clicked that link or visited that page and then purchased or subscribed.

 Non uniques:
 "Multiple clicks" - All other clicks. Practically are all the clicks made from the same person after the first click.

• CreateGuest Creates a new guest user. • GetGuest Retrieve an instance of a guest user by a specified id. • AddGuestPermission Creates permission for a specified campaign to a specified guest user. • RemoveGuestPermission Removes permission to a campaign for a specified user.

This will help all customers that need to integrate reports in their applications/websites and want to show results in real-time to their users.

ClickMeter API documentation can be found here: www.clickmeter.com/api

To make a live-test:

a) change the parameter to this URL, copy and paste in your browser: http://go.clickmeter.com/link001?myparameter

b) watch the results here: Demo results for parameters Click on the "Campaigns" and then on "Top parameters"

This is still a beta feature...

...we are planning new development on this base like: - URL build creation - filter results based on parameters - auto-create parameters with API

Any idea to improve is welcome: [email protected]