When you click on the “preview” link when editing a tracking or rotator link, ClickMagick will display a web page based on the settings for that particular tracking link or rotator link.

Note though, that showing the web page may or may not affect your statistics. Here’s why…

The normal behavior for the preview link is to simply go through your tracking link or rotator link, and because the clicks are going through your actual link, stats will be recorded exactly as though you had entered the link in a browser window.

The exception to this behavior is if you have a split-test set up for a tracking link.

In the case of a split test, if ClickMagick were to go through the tracking link, you would see one of the pages in your split test, and after that, you would continue to see the same page no matter how many times you clicked on the preview link. This is because returning visitors (you in this case) are always shown the same page in the case of a split test so that your split-test statistics are as accurate as possible. This is explained in more detail here:
   

In practice, we found that when users repeatedly clicked on the preview link of a split-test, they expected to see all the variations in their split test, and when they didn’t, they thought something was wrong when in fact everything was working perfectly.

For this reason, we changed ClickMagick’s behavior so that clicking on the preview link of a split test no longer goes through the tracking link, and instead randomly displays one of your split-test variations. And because ClickMagick doesn’t go through the tracking link, no clicks are recorded and your stats aren’t affected.

Bottom line: Clicking on the preview link for split tests will not affect your stats. Clicking on the preview link for all other setups will affect your stats.

Article 383 Last updated: 12/07/2019 1:24:04 PM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=383