Promotion tool

ClickMagick link tracking

ClickMagick is a link tracker and split-test tool for pages you already own. It records a click on your page, it can rotate two or more of your own URLs, and it can take a conversion back when a network tells it that the click earned. It is a separate product from a separate company. Maxlead does not own ClickMagick, and ClickMagick does not replace the network. Maxlead is the CPA performance network. ClickMagick is the tool you put in front of a page you control. The button on that page still has to be the Maxlead tracking link. If the ClickMagick click id dies on the way to that button, the split test cannot tell which visit became an approved conversion.

This guide is the practical connection between the two. It covers what ClickMagick is doing, who should use it, how the Maxlead link and the click id share one hop, a worked campaign, the mistakes that throw the report off, and how to read EPC and CVR on Maxlead before you send more traffic to the winning page.

What ClickMagick is

ClickMagick sits on traffic you send to a URL you control. You create a tracked link for a page, or a rotator that splits visitors across pages you wrote. When someone opens that tracked link, ClickMagick stores a click id for the visit. Later, if you want a conversion on that same visit, the click id has to be present on the outbound link and it has to come back on a postback. Without that id, ClickMagick can tell you that a page was viewed. It cannot tell you that the view became an approved action on an offer.

The split test is a comparison of pages, not a comparison of networks. You might test two headlines on a review page, or a short page against a longer one. ClickMagick rotates the entry URL. Both destinations are yours. The advertiser page is not one of the variants. The advertiser page is what the visitor reaches only after they click the button, and only by passing through the tracking link Maxlead issued for your publisher account.

Maxlead has operated as a CPA performance network since 2015. You open a publisher account, the account is approved, and you run offers from that desk. Public offers can be taken once the account is approved. Other offers stay closed until you request them and an admin approves the request. The tracking link is issued on the offer. Your publisher id is already on it. You may add s1 through s8. Those values are stored on the click and returned on the conversion report and the performance report. A global postback covers the account. An offer postback covers one campaign and replaces the global URL for that offer. The postback is a GET request. It fires when a conversion is approved or rejected. A conversion that is still pending does not send one. Approved earnings are paid every week. Pending and rejected conversions are not paid as if they were approved.

ClickMagick never sees that payout logic unless you send it. The dashboard on Maxlead is the place that shows clicks, conversions, earnings, EPC, and CVR for the offer. Earnings are approved payout only. CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks. EPC is earnings per click. ClickMagick can help you see which of your pages produced the click. It is not the book of record for what Maxlead approved.

Who it is for

ClickMagick fits a publisher who owns the page. That is a review site, a comparison article, a presell page on a domain you control, or a simple bridge you host yourself. You already have the HTML. You do not need a landing-page builder to change a headline. You need a tracked entry URL, a way to split two versions, and a way to pass a click id into the button.

It is a weaker fit if you do not own any page. A media buyer who sends the ad straight to an offer, and who runs many traffic sources that each want their own postback, usually wants a campaign tracker built for that job. ClickMagick can still track a direct hop if you place its click id on the Maxlead link, but the product is aimed at pages and split tests, not at a stack of traffic-source postbacks. If the offer forbids a bridge page, do not add one just so you have something to split. Read the offer first.

It is also the wrong tool if you hoped it would approve you for offers. Offer access is an account decision on Maxlead. ClickMagick does not apply for you, and it does not change the country list, the allowed sources, or the action that counts. Those stay on the offer. Your account manager on Maxlead is the person to ask before you request a stack of campaigns you are not set up to run. One offer that matches the country and the source is enough to test the wiring.

How to use it with a CPA offer

Start on the offer, not in ClickMagick. Open the offer on Maxlead and read the countries, the allowed traffic, the action that counts, and whether you are approved to run it. If the offer requires approval, wait until the request is approved. The preview control opens the advertiser page so you can read it. Do not put that preview address on a button, in an ad, or in a ClickMagick rotator. A click that skips the tracking link is not your click. It has no publisher id, no sub ids, and no click id Maxlead can attach a conversion to.

Copy the tracking link from the offer. It already carries your publisher id. Add the sub ids you want before you paste it anywhere. A clean pattern is to keep your own labels on s1 and s2, and to reserve another sub id for the ClickMagick click id. s1 can name the source. s2 can name the page variant. s3 can hold the click id ClickMagick created, once that value exists. You have s1 through s8, so you do not need to overload one field with two meanings. If s3 is both “the page name” and “the click id”, the postback cannot return a clean id and the report cannot group the variant.

Build the entry in ClickMagick as a tracked link to the page you own, or as a rotator between two pages you own. The ad, the email, or the menu on your site points at that ClickMagick URL. It does not point at the advertiser. On the first page, ClickMagick must be allowed to record the visit and to expose the click id to the page. Their setup for pages you control uses a script on the page so the token becomes a real id instead of the literal placeholder text. Follow the method in their current documentation. The principle does not change when the button labels change: the id has to be a real value by the time the visitor leaves your page.

The button target is the Maxlead tracking link, with your publisher id, with s1 and s2 set to the labels for this campaign, and with the ClickMagick click id written into the sub id you reserved. If the page is the first page in the path, the outbound link is where that id must appear. If you have a second page you also own, pass the same id through the link between your pages, then into the button on the last page. The id has to survive every hop you control. The last hop you control is the button. After that, Maxlead creates its own click id, stores your sub ids, and sends the visitor to the advertiser.

Those are two different click ids. The ClickMagick click id was born on your page. The Maxlead click id is born when the tracking link is opened. ClickMagick can only match a conversion to its visit if you stored its id on the Maxlead click and sent that value back. Maxlead matches the conversion to its own click id automatically. You do not type the Maxlead click id by hand. You can still include {click_id} on the postback if you want it in the receiving tool. The value ClickMagick needs for attribution is the id you placed in the sub id, returned with the matching token, such as {sub3} when you stored it on s3.

Put the postback on Maxlead, not the other way around. Open Postback. Use the global URL if every offer should report to the same ClickMagick project. Use an offer postback if this campaign should report somewhere else. The offer URL replaces the global one for that offer only. The address you paste is the postback address ClickMagick shows for the project. Where they ask for the click id, place the token for the sub id that holds it. Also place {status}. The postback fires for approved and for rejected. Credit the row in ClickMagick only when status is approved. Do not credit rejected. A pending conversion has not fired this URL yet, so do not invent a conversion in ClickMagick while Maxlead still shows the click as open.

Test with one visit before you buy traffic. Open the ClickMagick entry URL yourself from a country the offer allows. A click from a country the offer does not accept is not saved on that offer. Click the button. In Activity on Maxlead, find the click. You should see the country, the device, the offer, and the sub ids. s1 and s2 should be your labels. The sub id you reserved for ClickMagick should be a real id, not the characters of an unreplaced token, and not empty. If the token text is sitting in the field, the script never wrote the value, and the click id did not survive. Fix the page before you spend.

When a conversion is approved, the postback should hit ClickMagick with that same id and with status approved. When a conversion is rejected, the postback should still arrive, and you should not pay yourself inside ClickMagick for it. The weekly payout on Maxlead will include the approved earnings only. Looking at a ClickMagick conversion total that still contains rejected rows will make you scale a page the network is not paying.

A worked example

A publisher owns a review page about a consumer offer and wants to know whether a shorter headline converts better than the page they already run. The offer on Maxlead accepts the United Kingdom. Search traffic is allowed. The account is approved, and this offer is approved for the account. The action that counts is the action written on the offer. The publisher does not add a second action, a bonus, or a promise the advertiser page does not make.

They build two versions of the review on their own domain. Page A is the current headline. Page B is the shorter one. The body of both pages describes the same action the offer asks for. In ClickMagick they create a split that sends visitors to page A or page B. The search ad does not point at either page directly, and it does not point at the advertiser. The ad points at the ClickMagick split URL.

On both pages the button uses the Maxlead tracking link. The publisher id is on the link. sub1 is uk-search, because the source is United Kingdom search. sub2 is page-a on the first page and page-b on the second, so the variant is visible on Maxlead even if the publisher later stops using ClickMagick. The ClickMagick click id is written into s3 by the pass-through on the page they own. A visitor who lands on page B and clicks the button produces one Maxlead click with s1 equal to uk-search, s2 equal to page-b, and s3 equal to that visit’s ClickMagick id.

The offer postback for this campaign points at the ClickMagick project. It returns s3 where ClickMagick expects its click id, and it returns status. During the test, Activity shows United Kingdom clicks on both sub2 values. Some clicks stay open. Some become approved conversions. One is rejected. The rejected row fires a postback with status rejected, and the publisher does not count it as a win for page B. Approved earnings for the approved rows are what the weekly payout can include. Page B is not “the winner” because ClickMagick rotated more people onto it. It is the winner only if, on Maxlead, the page-b row has the better EPC and CVR on approved conversions, with the country and the source held the same.

Mistakes

The most expensive mistake is the preview URL on the button. The page looks finished. ClickMagick counts the visit. The visitor reaches the advertiser. Maxlead has no click, because the hop never carried a publisher id. There is nothing to approve, nothing to post back, and nothing in the weekly payout. The fix is dull and absolute: the button href is the tracking link from the offer.

The second mistake is a click id that does not survive. The button is the right Maxlead link, but s3 still contains the placeholder, or the button was pasted as a static URL with no slot for the id. ClickMagick then shows visits and no conversions, while Maxlead may show conversions that cannot be tied back to a variant inside ClickMagick. You can still read s2 on Maxlead if you set it, which is why the variant label belongs on a sub id and not only inside the other tool. You still fix the pass-through, because the split tool is useless if it cannot close the loop.

A third mistake is splitting the wrong thing. Changing the headline is a page test. Changing the country, the source, and the headline in the same rotation is not a page test. You will not know which change moved EPC. Keep the offer, the country, and the source fixed. Let s2 be the only difference you are trying to read. If you also change the button text so that it hides the real action, you are not testing a headline. You are sending a different promise, and the advertiser can reject the conversions.

Do not send the ClickMagick link to a country the offer does not list. Those visits are not stored as clicks on the offer, so both tools will disagree with the ad account for a reason that has nothing to do with the headline. Do not reuse one sub id for two campaigns that run in the same week. If uk-search is also pasted onto an email campaign, the row mixes two sources and the split result is fiction. Do not turn the global postback into a URL that drops {status}, then treat every fire as money. Rejected fires are real HTTP calls. They are not approved earnings.

Do not judge the test on the first hour. A rotator is not a fair comparison until both pages have been served under the same conditions. And do not “fix” a quiet page by editing it while the old s2 is still in use. If you change page B’s headline halfway through, the page-b row now describes two pages. Add a new sub2 value for the new version, or stop the test and start a clean one.

How to read EPC and CVR before you scale

Scaling means sending more of the same traffic to the page that earned, not sending more traffic to the page that was clicked. On Maxlead, open the dashboard and the performance report for the date range of the test. Filter to this offer. Read the rows by sub id. You want the pair you set: source on sub1, variant on sub2.

CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks. A row with many clicks and no approved conversions has a CVR of zero. A row with a tiny number of clicks and one approval can show a high CVR that will not hold. The column is arithmetic, not a promise and not a benchmark the network publishes for your niche. Read it next to the click count. If one variant has been shown far more often than the other, do not crown a winner yet. The rotator, the ad schedule, and the time of day can pile clicks onto one page.

EPC is earnings per click, and earnings are approved payout only. Pending conversions are not in that earnings figure. Rejected conversions are not in it either. A page can look busy in ClickMagick and still show a weak EPC on Maxlead because the approvals are not there. Compare EPC on page-a and page-b over the same dates, the same country, and the same sub1. The page with the higher EPC on a click count you are willing to trust is the page you scale. If the two EPCs are close and the click counts are still thin, keep the test running. Raising spend to break a tie only spends faster.

Use the conversion report to see the approved rows and the sub ids on them. Use Activity if you need the Maxlead click id that matches a postback. The performance report can group by day or by country. If United Kingdom search is the only traffic you meant to judge, do not let another country’s clicks sit inside the same sub1. Fix the label, or the EPC you scale on is a blend.

Before you raise the budget, check three gates. The offer is still approved for your account. The click id is still landing in the reserved sub id, which you can see on a fresh test click. The postback still returns status, and you are not counting rejected rows as revenue inside ClickMagick. Then raise traffic on the winning s2 only. Leave the losing page in the report so you can see the cost of going back. Approved earnings from the winner are paid on the weekly cycle. They are not paid early because a split test looked finished.

Where to start

ClickMagick is useful when the page is yours and you want a fair rotation plus a click id you can get back. It does not choose the offer, it does not approve the conversion, and it does not pay you. Maxlead does that part: the tracking link with your publisher id, s1 through s8, a global or offer postback, EPC and CVR on approved results, and a weekly payout of approved earnings only.

Set the button to the tracking link, make the ClickMagick click id survive into a sub id, and read the variant on Maxlead before you scale. When you are ready to take the link from a live offer, start at the Maxlead homepage and open the publisher account.