wangarific

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Google Analytics makes it dead simple to track outbound clicks on your site.

First, you need to put your Google Analytics code above the content of your page (or at the very least, before any link you want to track). The function call you will add to the OnClick javascript hook will reference a function in the Analytics code so it needs to be loaded by the time you get to the link. Page speed principles recommend that you put javascript at the bottom, since there can be a little lag in loading it, but in this case there’s no way around it. Google is pretty fast anyway so I consider this a fair tradeoff for additional data.

Then, simply add this bit to your links (if you use Google Website Optimizer, you’ll notice it uses the same mechanism to track clicks):

onClick='javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/click/tracking")'

You can change /click/tracking to anything you want. I like to bucket my tracking into different areas and change the term tracking to something that makes sense to me. If it’s affiliate clicks I might put /click/aff/company/tag and programmatically change the company name or the tag based on the page. (you can use php to do this).

Let’s say you want to track a click on an affiliate link on a particular page, you could do this if you were running WordPress:

onClick='javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/click/affiliate/<?php echo $post->ID; ?>")'

which would resolve to:

onClick='javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/click/affiliate/XXXX")'

with XXXX as the ID of the post.

(remember, to run PHP in a post on WordPress you’ll need to download a php execution plugin and turn off comments for security)

How do you review the data? Go into your Google Analytics and each of the clicks is considered a pageview. I review it by going to Content -> Top Content – View full Report and then searching on the term /click/. Advanced users of Analytics now recognize that you can start assigning goal values and whatnot but I generally avoid that because I don’t find that adds value.