Best Smart URL: Linkfire vs. Feature.fm vs. Toneden
Stats - Clicks & Click-throughs
Linkfire’s stats are incomparable. At the Click and Click-through level, all three platforms are pretty much even. Where a sea opens up is when you want to dive deeper into Click-throughs.
A Click is a visit to your Smart URL. A Click-Through is a visit to a streaming platform or music store from your Smart URL. If you were a car dealership, I doubt you'd want to pay car salesmen to almost sell cars. When you post a Smart URL link to your Instagram bio, your goal isn’t to almost get people to streaming platforms, it’s to actually get them there.
Analyzing Click data just tells me who almost sold cars. Which traffic sources almost got people to streaming platforms. I want to know what succeeded. Knowing what succeeded allows me to create a formula for success. The more I know about what worked, the better I can make the formula, and the better it will work.
Basic Click-through stats. Shows the total number of Click-throughs for
Referrer
Country
Shows the most basic stats on Click-Throughs only showing the amount in total without context.
Advanced Click-Through stats can be broken down by Referrer, Device type, Operating system, Browser, Country, and City along with the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).
Why CTR matters
Say I get 10,000 Clicks and 500 Click-throughs from Facebook while getting 500 Clicks and 200 Click-throughs from Instagram. Eyeballing it and looking at the raw numbers it would seem Facebook performed better because of the larger numbers. If you look at it from the point of the odds of a Click resulting in a Click-through, you’ll see Facebook at 5% and Instagram at 40%. In this instance, someone on Instagram would be 8 times more likely to Click-through to a streaming platform than someone on Facebook.
Feature.fm and Toneden also do not push through conversion data to Google Analytics for further analysis.
When it comes to marketing anything online, it’s important to know what works. You want to know enough about what works to create an effective formula and for that, nothing beats Linkfire.
Streaming Insights
Data on Click-throughs are great but in the same way, a Click is like a salesman almost selling a car, a Click-through is like a payment in processing. The card could be rejected, there could be insufficient funds, the buyer could cancel the order. With Click-throughs, we know people visited a streaming platform but we don’t know whether they actually streamed anything. Maybe the platform isn’t available in their country and they clicked out of curiosity. Maybe the platform is restricted to paid subscribers and they don’t have a paid account. Knowing whether Click-throughs are driving streams can provide critical insight into the value of the audience you’re reaching.
Neither Feature.fm nor Toneden provides Streaming Insights that tell you whether Click-throughs are driving streams, only Linkfire does. Using Linkfire, you can view streaming data for:
Apple Music
Youtube
Deezer
Pandora
Qobuz
iHeart Radio
Territory Management
Toneden - Doesn’t provide territory management.
Feature.fm - Directs visitors to the correct URL based on the country they’re located in. For example, if you’re in the US you’ll go to iTunes.com but if you’re in the UK you’ll be taken to iTunes.co.uk. I’m not sure what problem this solves, it just seems like busy work but it’s something you can do.
Linkfire - Allows you to automate which platforms appear on your Smart URL and in which order based on the country a visitor is coming from. A visitor in the US might see Spotify first while a visitor from Hong Kong sees QQ music. This feature allows you to explore foreign markets without polluting your data pool. Say you want to target India but don’t want to be linked and pushed to fans of artists that make Indian music across Spotify, Apple Music, etc. You can traffic visitors from India to a platform like Giosaavn.
Affiliate Management
Both Feature.fm and Toneden allow you to attach an Affiliate code that will be connected to your links. Linkfire does that as well but also provides data where you can see Affiliate sales and commissions.
Rescans
When you release a track, it may not be available everywhere at the same time. Rescanning means the Smart Link provider will continuously check for the most recent service destinations, cover art, and metadata. Only Linkfire provides the ability to schedule rescans.
Parameters
When you’re advertising or working with an analytics provider, Parameters help to identify when particular actions take place by providing unique identifiers for those actions. The most important Parameters for any campaign would be Click-Throughs to particular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Feature.fm, Toneden, and Linkfire all provide Parameters for platform Click-throughs. Going beyond that, Feature.fm and Linkfire provides Parameters for:
Album
Song
Artist
Genre
Advertising a single and wanting to follow up that campaign with one pushing the album, you might want to reconnect with the people that have been streaming the single. If you can segment your audience by which song you reached them with, it would allow you to do that. For labels being able to segment audiences by the artists they engage with is critical.
Linkfire free trial: https://punm-alt.lnk.to/6WaicTY5EM | Feature.fm free trial: https://punm-alt.lnk.to/VfftyXEM | Toneden: https://punm-alt.lnk.to/nc5BBKZWEM