ClickHawk™ is very easy to use and only takes a few minutes to set up. Of course, the total set up time will depend on the number campaigns and links you are tracking.

If you are already somewhat familiar with creating and managing keyword campaigns on search engines, you should find the ClickHawk™ interface very intuitive and easy to navigate.

For those who are still not quite sure how ClickHawk™ works, the most important thing to remember is that ClickHawk™ runs on our servers and sits between the search engine server and your web site. In the final step, you will log in to your search engine campaign and replace the click through links with the links your generate in ClickHawk™. When finished, your clicks will be routed through the ClickHawk™ servers for tracking and analyzing and then immediately to your web site. The whole process takes a about 1/100th of a second and is completely transparent to end users.


Step 1. - Add and Activate New Campaign.
Click "Add New Campaign" on the left menu. You will notice that it is possible to add multiple campaigns at once, but for the purposes of these instructions, we will walk through the entire process of adding a single campaign.

On the Add Campaign screen, enter the arbitrary name for the campaign. Remember that your campaign names will be the top-level sorting field (assuming you do not use multiple logins). The name may consist of any combination of letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores, but may not contain other special characters such as quotes, commas, or ampersands. The name you choose should be meaningful for organization purposes, and it is often helpful to match the name with your the campaign you are tracking, (eg Yahoo - Software Keywords, or Google AdSense™ - Shopping Content sites).


Activate Campaign
If you plan to use this campaign right away, you must activate it. To do this, check the box in the row for that campaign, select "Active Selected" from the drop down menu, and click the Update button.  Note that campaigns that are inactive will continue to redirect your traffic, but no data will be tracked or recorded by ClickHawk™.

 

View/Edit Campaigns Screen On this screen you will see all of your campaigns listed, along with the status, number of links, and number of clicks today for each campaign. The "Clicks Today" field may be delayed about 15 minutes from real-time, but most search engines real-time numbers have at least the same delay, if not longer. For this reason, it is possible for the ClickHawk™ number to be higher than the what the SE is reporting when viewing current day reports. It is recommended that same-day reports not be used for decision making because of varying time delays between different servers. By the following day, all the servers should be completely updated and the data should be accurate for comparison at that point.

Step 2. - Add Links.
From the View/Edit Campaigns screen, click on the campaign name. The resulting screen can also be used to edit the name or change the status of the campaign. Enter an arbitrary name for the link. It is recommended to keep the link name as short as possible (20 characters or less) and to try and match the corresponding link name that you are using on the SE.

The Link URL must be the full URL to the exact page on your site on which you want visitors to land when they click on this link from the SE. This can be your home page, but is more often a specific page designed to receive and convert traffic from this campaign or keyword group. Remember, once your set up is complete at both ClickHawk™ and the Search Engine (SE), your links on the SE will no longer point to your page, they will point to ClickHawk™. Where the visitor lands will be determined by what you enter in this field.
 

TIP A very easy way to update your Link URLs is to have the Search Engine web site open at the same time, in a separate browser window. Navigate to your campaign and link on the SE site, then simply copy and paste the link from the SE into ClickHawk. You can even leave the SE window open for Step 4, when you will need to replace the link URL in the SE with the tracking URL generated by ClickHawk.

Step 3. - Create Tracking URLs.
When you save your Link in ClickHawk™, you will arrive on the Manage Links screen. You can also get to the page at any time by clicking on a campaign name in the View/Edit Campaigns screen and then clicking View / Edit Links on the left menu.

To create your tracking URL, simply check the box in the row next to the appropriate link, select "Create Click URLs" from the drop down menu, and click the Update button.


Step 4. - Update Link URLs at Search Engine.
Copy the URL you just generated with ClickHawk™ and paste it in to the Link field in the search engine (or other ad server) interface. If you are replacing an existing URL, the URL being replaced should be the same one you entered in ClickHawk™ when you were setting up your link.

Save your changes on the SE (or other ad server) and be sure to test your link, by clicking it on the example ad in the SE interface. Clicking that link will direct you through ClickHawk™ to the page on your site. verify that you land on the correct page.


YOU'RE DONE!
Assuming the campaign and link are both "active" in ClickHawk™, you are now tracking all of your click traffic. If you have more than link configured on the SE (or ad server) make sure that all active links are replaced with ClickHawk™ tracking URLs. It is not necessary to set up a separate link on ClickHawk™ for each SE link, but many users do it this way in order to track different links separately.

Reports
Now that you are tracking your click traffic, you will begin to build up your ClickHawk™ database for use in traffic analysis and reports. The more data you have, the more accurate your analysis will be. Most reports are available the next day, with the exception of the Show All Clicks report which can be run for the current day and includes data up to the last 15 minutes.

For more information on how to use the reports, click here.