I’ve been looking for online tools, tutorials that could help me tracking all outbound links from my website.
I tried almost everything I found online, really, signed up for useless tool, tried dozen of JS script, but at the end I found the answer in the Google Analytics official support pages, but I still had to do some customization: the original code provided by Google Analytics works, no discussion, but I wanted to keep the “_blank” attribute somehow, and that’s why I had to edit a bit the script, and here is the final version:
<script> /** * Function that tracks a click on an outbound link in Analytics. * This function takes a valid URL string as an argument, and uses that URL string * as the event label. Setting the transport method to 'beacon' lets the hit be sent * using 'navigator.sendBeacon' in browser that support it. */ var trackOutboundLink = function(url) { ga('send', 'event', 'outbound', 'click', url, { 'transport': 'beacon', 'hitCallback': function(){window.open(url, '_blank');} }); } </script>
You have then to update your links as per example here below:
<a href="http://www.example.com" onclick="trackOutboundLink('http://www.example.com'); return false;">Check out example.com</a>
Was it useful for you? Let me know!