Google Analytics: Track Outbound Clicks

December 3, 2007

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Google Analytics have been the best free tool to analyse my websites. Through Google Analytics I have been able to open “Gold Mines” to see how can I improve my websites/projects to make more money online. But I know that many people just use Google Analytics to see their traffic only. I will show you a tip so you can see and analyse how your visitors act with your adverters and affiliates banners and text links:

This trick can show you how you can track how many times your advertisers/affiliates banners and text links have been clicked and also check if there is something fishy. Some affiliate programs don’t pay even if you are in a trusted “Affiliate network” or a “trusted” affiliate program. Also this trick can track how many times your file have been downloaded.

Add on each Link of your site this small code:
onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/clicks/keyword');"

For example, I want to track how many people have been clicked on the text link or banner that I am promoting:

< . a href="http://www.advertiser.com" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/clicks/keyword');" .>

Add the onClick event to any link you wish to track. It’s good practice to use “/clicks” at the start of the name. By doing so, you can easily track your outbound links. You can also add anything else and not just click, but notice that instead of clicks you have to add something that is unique so you can track them and not mix with anything else like a post with that keyword. Another good example can be a unique number where you know that this is for tracking “1931913313/keyword1″

How to check the stat?

• Login to your Google analytics account

• Click view statistics for the site that you are tracking

• Click the “Content” in the left sidebar

• Click “Content Drilldown”

• If you added “clicks” in the “onclick” to track. Then you will see that word in the statistics: /clicks

• Then use the “Find” feature and try to search for “Clicks”

• You should now see a break down of each outbound link that has been clicked

If you have some doubts about it Google expalin it very well Here:

How do I track clicks on outbound links?

Google Analytics provides an easy way to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because these links do not lead to a page on your site containing the UTM JavaScript, you will need to tag the link itself with the urchinTracker JavaScript. This piece of JavaScript assigns a pageview to any click on a link - the pageview is attributed to the filename you specify.

For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com as a pageview for “/outgoing/example_com” you would add the following attribute to the link’s tag:

< . a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outgoing/example.com');" .>

It is a good idea to log all of your outbound links into a logical directory structure as shown in the example. This way, you will be able to easily identify what pages visitors clicked on to leave your site.

Important: if your pages include a call to urchinTracker(), utmLinker(), utmSetTrans(), or utmLinkPost(), your Analytics tracking code must be placed in your HTML code above any of these calls. In these cases the tracking code can be placed anywhere between the opening tag and the JavaScript call.

To verify that urchinTracker is being called correctly, you can check your Top Content report 24-48 hours after the updated tracking code has been executed. You should be able to see the assigned pagename in your report.

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