Why should Solo Ad buyers use tracking links with funnels?
If you’re buying clicks from traffic providers and sending them directly to your FunnelMagick funnel, you should probably stop doing that and instead send all your clicks through a tracking link first. There are a number of good reasons for this “best practice.”
The most important reason is that by driving your clicks to a tracking link first, you have much more control over how your clicks are handled. For instance, you can geotarget the clicks, you can send them to different funnels if they are repeat clicks, you can handle mobile clicks differently than desktop clicks, and so on.
But when you send clicks directly to your FunnelMagick funnel, all clicks go to the same page regardless of what type they are.
In short, going through a tracking link gives you greater control over the clicks you’ve purchased.
In addition to that, there are several very practical reasons why you should always send traffic from click sellers through a tracking link:

1. |  | Public Share Stats Page. Every tracking link has a Public Stats page that you can find in the Edit menu to the right of the link. If you see any discrepancies in the number of clicks that you’ve received versus the number that you ordered, you can show this summary page to your click seller.
2. |  | Link Down Alerts. If you send clicks directly to your funnel and your website is down, your webserver will throw up some type of error page, but you won’t have any idea that something is wrong. With ClickMagick’s Link Monitoring feature, however, the URLs in your tracking links are checked constantly to verify that the pages they point to are alive and well. And if ClickMagick finds that your page is down, it will alert you via email or by text message. You can customize your alert settings in the Alerts & Monitoring section of your User Profile so that you’ll never waste clicks because you’re unaware that your website is down.
3. |  | Bad or Fake Traffic. Let’s face it, the click-selling world has some real scam artists. That’s not news to anybody who’s bought clicks only to discover that those clicks were all computer generated and not from real people at all. Or maybe you thought you were buying high-quality Tier-1 clicks, but instead mostly got Tier-3 clicks from countries that rarely produce any sales. With tracking links, ClickMagick can generate a Traffic Quality Score that instantly paints a picture of the traffic you’re getting and shows it to you graphically: You know exactly the number of and type of all the clicks you’re getting so you can immediately spot a scammer and stop wasting money. You can read more about the Traffic Quality Score here:
|  | How does ClickMagick monitor my traffic quality?

As a final note, whenever you drive clicks through a tracking link that points to a funnel, the stats between your tracking link and funnel are never likely to match exactly. To fully understand why this is true, we’ve put together an FAQ that covers all the possible reasons for this:

|  | Why don’t my tracking link and FunnelMagick stats match?