Comments on: Tracking Link Clicks to External Sites with Google Analytics

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Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:33:54 +0000

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By: Stephen Akins

Stephen Akins — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:17:40 +0000

I like the simplicity of your solution; but your readers should know that this won’t work with the current Google Analytics tracking code (the event tracking function has changed).

I have a current, and slightly more robust solution, on my own blog:
http://stephenakins.blogspot.com/2010/12/link-tracking-using-jquery-and-google.html

By: Gary Freeh

Gary Freeh — Thu, 13 May 2010 05:28:01 +0000

Howdy there,Excellent blog post dude! i’m Fed up with using RSS feeds and do you use twitter?so i can follow you there:D.
PS:Have you thought putting video to your blog to keep the people more enjoyed?I think it works.Sincerely, Gary Freeh

By: AjEG

AjEG — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:29:56 +0000

I wonder if an even simpler method would be to just create a webpage on your site with a filename and page title of the external link and redirect code (like below). This way, the link is tracked in Site Overlay, and the filename will show up in all tracking. It does still count page views towards your internal, but for me that is something I can factor out in the Google Analytics reports.

page title

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:23:29 +0000

Will this code work if you use templates on your site with your Google Analytics? For example, I only have to add my google analytics code to three templates which are used for all content to fit into automatically. Would putting the code at the top and adding the extra code into the URL work that same for template sites or is it only usable when you add the Google Analytics code to every individual Web page?

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:38:54 +0000

By moving the Google Analytics code to the top under did you find that the rest of your analytics tracked as normal but now included the external link information also? I am nervous to move the code up and have the analytics for the rest of my site stop tracking properly. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Emily

By: John Grimes

John Grimes — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:24:39 +0000

The only problem I can see with this approach is that clicks on external links will be counted as page views and bundled up with the other (internal) page views in the charts and totals.

Or does Google Analytics recognise the the /outgoing prefix and exclude these URLs from the totals?

The other way to track external links is to use event tracking, using a function something like:

pageTracker._trackEvent(‘link’, ‘external’, href)