How do I track a funnel using Tracking Links?

Tracking an entire sales funnel using tracking links—starting with the opt-in all the way through upsells and downsells on the back end—is easy. Just use the “Entry Link” and “Attribute” settings in the advanced settings of your tracking links.

We have a quick video tutorial to get you started, and you can read through the more advanced features in the steps below. For a good overview, first watch the video tutorial:
 
How To Track An Entire Sales Funnel
 
Note: The “Entry Link” feature used to be called the “Front End” feature.
 
Caution: To use the “Entry Link” and “Attribute” settings, you must use tracking pixels to record your Actions, Engagements, and Sales. You cannot use Postback URLs with the “Entry Link” and “Attribute” settings—they are incompatible.

ClickBank’s Instant Notification Service also uses a Postback URL so you can’t use that setup with the “Entry Link” and “Attribute” settings. To set up tracking pixels with ClickBank, please read their help document on this topic:
 
  How to set up tracking pixels with ClickBank


Step-By-Step Guide

Step 1: To track an entire funnel, you need to create a link group that will contain all of the tracking links that you’ll be using in your funnel. To create a new link group, use the Group Manager, which you can find in the Tools menu:



After creating the group, you can go back to your tracking links and switch into the new link group by selecting it from the drop-down menu at the top of the Links page …



... and then complete the rest of the steps below …


Step 2: Create your first and primary tracking link that you’ll use to promote your funnel. This will lead to the first page in your funnel, normally a landing page or opt-in page.

The key here is that for this tracking link, and this tracking link only, you need to select “Yes” for the “Entry Link” setting which you can find in the Advanced Settings for any link.



If you need to create multiple entry links for different traffic sources, follow the instructions here:
 
   How do I track different traffic sources to a funnel?


Step 3: Create any other tracking links you may need for your funnel, such as a “one time offer”, an upsell, a downsell, or anything else.

Be sure to put these additional links in the same link group along with the entry link you created in step 2 above.

All new links that you create will have the correct Entry Link settings so, as long as you don’t change the settings, your links will work properly. If you run into any trouble, you can always double-check that your links have the correct settings:




Step 4: Add tracking pixels wherever necessary.

To create tracking pixels for your funnel pages, use the Pixel Builder in the Tracking Pixels section of the Tools menu.

Make sure you use the “Action” tracking pixel to track the opt-in, and then use the “Sales” tracking pixel on all your other “thank you” pages for each product.

The key here is you MUST provide a unique “Reference” value for each of the pixels to identify the action that occurred. Just enter the “Ref” value in this box in the Pixel Builder:



With your “Action” tracking pixel you’ll want to use a “Ref” value like the word “optin”, and then in your various sales tracking pixels you’ll use “Ref” values that remind you what happened. You’ll see the “Ref” values that you enter in the ref= section of the actual tracking pixels you create:

((img ... &amt=0.00&ref=coreoffer" height="1" width="1" /))
((img ... &amt=0.00&ref=upsell1" height="1" width="1" /))
((img ... &amt=0.00&ref=upsell2" height="1" width="1" /))
((img ... &amt=0.00&ref=downsell1" height="1" width="1" /))


etc.

You can also use product names or identifiers, or anything else you want for the “Ref” values.

That’s really all there is to it!

By grouping all the links together in the same link group and identifying the “Entry Link” that starts the funnel, ClickMagick can track everything and provide you with both overall stats for your entire funnel, and individual stats for each of your products, upsells, and so on.


Adding Pixels to Links vs. Adding Pixels to Pages, or
How to prevent a Thank You page from recording a conversion


If you have a more complicated funnel with multiple upsells or downsells, you may have a situation where users end up on the same “thank you” pages whether or not they’ve purchased the previous offer.

In a case like this, if you simply put a tracking pixel on the “thank you” page, it will always record a conversion even when the user didn’t buy anything. So that won’t work.

To handle this situation properly—where you have more than one link to your “thank you” page and not all of them are because of a conversion—you’ll need to put your tracking pixel in the converting links themselves rather than on the “thank you” page.

Here’s how ...

ClickMagick allows you to embed tracking pixels in tracking links, so in this case, you would create a tracking link that points to your “thank you” page and insert your tracking pixel in the Pixel/Code field of the advanced settings of that tracking link.

Next, you would use this new tracking link whenever you wanted to redirect to your “thank you” page and record a conversion. You would then use a simple (non-tracking) link to point to the “thank you” page for cases where you don’t want to record conversions. 

With this setup, a conversion is only recorded if the user actually purchases that particular upsell or downsell and is redirected to your “thank you” page through the tracking link with the embedded pixel.

For more information on ClickMagick’s Pixel/Code feature, you can read this FAQ:
 
   Using the Pixel/Code Feature of Tracking Links
 
 
Note: #1: Make sure that your conversion attribution setting is set to “Last Click” for all of the tracking pixels you create. This is the default setting—just don’t change it.
 
Note: #2: If you have any links in your funnel group that you do NOT want to attribute conversions to your Entry Link, be sure to select “this link only” for the Attribute Conversions option under Advanced Settings.



The default is to automatically attribute conversions to your Entry Link, but you may need to change this if you’re using conversion tracking in a non-traditional way—for example, if you’re using the Engagement tracking pixel in a Pixel/Code setting to count clicks, rather than on a web page to track conversions, etc.

If you discover that you have a tracking link that is attributing conversions to your Entry Link when you don’t want it to, you can change this option at any time and it will remove any conversions that were undesirably attributed to the Entry Link.