Google Analytics is an excellent solution for analysing traffic to a website. This is not necessarily the best, but it will fit 90% of users. One of his faults is not able to analyse and track external links. In other words: “Where my visitors go?”
SeoMix an update on the various solutions that exist to track outbound links.
External links Vs Google Analytics
Why follow the external links?
The interest of the analysis of outbound links is twofold: first, that tells you where your visitors are going, and in particular to which sites and content types. This suggests several things:
- I have too many external links?
- Can I create a similar content (or better) as the resource to which I make a link?
- Can I host with me the content I linked from my site?
- How best to put my links to lower the bounce rate, my loyal visitors and increase my conversion rate?
- The second interest is to measure each element of its site. The webmaster will have reliable statistics and concrete for all matters relating to:
- Link Exchanges
- The sale of advertising space
- Downloads of resources placed on other sites
- The guest blogging
- The topics of interest to visitors.
Follow outgoing links in Analytics
The ratio of external links
The two solutions are presented just after appeal to the same function in Google Analytics , namely event tracing (and not the custom variables , which I had already mentioned). Relevant data can be found in “Content” => “Tracking events” => “Category”.
Here, you can analyse` all the events you set up your website and then clicks on your external links. The baseline report provides the total number of events and unique events (ie a single event per session) and the value of the event if you have given one.
- I created a custom report on the monitoring of events. It allows to highlight these elements:
- The category of the event (“click to exit”)
- The action of the event (“Output to the site XXX”)
- The URL of the page from which the event took place (from which page visitors leave my site)
For each of these elements, we will find this information:
- Total number of events
- Number of single events
- Value of the event
- Number of E-commerce transactions
- Sales E-commerce
The solution Jquery
If your site already loaded jQuery , it will use this library. Otherwise, the code will load a standard javascript to set up monitoring of external links directly to Google Analytics. The code does not carry much weight and does not overload the page loads (less than 4KB)
Copy the following code in the Header of your page, and after Jquery if the library is already present.
< script to to ‘ + jQuery ( this ) . attr ( ‘href’ ) ] ) ; } } ; } } ; }
The manual solution
One can also choose to follow a limited number of outgoing links. To do this, you must manually add a tag onclick on links that you want to follow, as in the example below (replace XXXXXX with information related to the link that will be followed).
< a href = “XXXXXX” onclick = “_gaq.push (['_trackEvent', 'click-out', 'output to XXXXXX']);” > XXXXXX < / a >
In the meantime, let’s be patient to see if Google Analytics will implement or not to follow outgoing links natively.
Author Bio:
Vishal Shah is an Online Marketer. He is owner of the Website Development Company and passionate about Website Designing Company at OptiMatrix Solution
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