How to track outbound link clicks using Google Analytics

website traffic is hard to win and easy to lose and if you have buttons and links on your website that take people away every one of those clicks is an exit click it's an outbound link click and by default google analytics does not track those exit clicks because they are non-page view interactions anything that is not a visitor moving from one url to another is a non-page view interaction and there are all kinds of them and these non-page view interactions aren't tracked unless we set up event tracking in the next few minutes i'm going to show you how to set up event tracking for outbound link clicks and exit clicks using google tag manager and then using google analytics to report on every one of those clicks so you know exactly where people are clicking to leave your website ready let's jump in this is a website home page this happens to be the orbit media website super high performing b2b lead gen site and if you scroll down to the very bottom of the footer you're going to find some social media icons that link to social media networks i'll click on one of those is an exit click here's another example this is a book page we wrote a book it's called content chemistry it's the illustrated handbook for content marketing i highly recommend it on this page there are several places you can leave to go buy the book in other places on other websites this goes to the distributor this goes to amazon to barnes and noble this also goes to the distributor which of these gets clicked the most so i can find that out if i set up event tracking for exit clicks using google tag manager here we are inside google tag manager which is of course a tool for managing all of the marketing tracking codes that you have on a website think of things like facial facebook pixels and uh google analytics javascript inside google tag manager we need to confirm that there is a variable set up first so we're going to do that from inside here in the variable section and it's the click url variable so this is already set up if you if you don't see it here the built-in variables you're going to click on configure and scroll down and just make sure that click url i don't know why they aren't just turned on by default you're we're going to need that one because we need to track the click url right the place that that the click went the the destination so i've already set this up as a tag it's it's in here ga event off site click but i'll set it up again just so you can follow along so i'm going to start by clicking new i'm going to make a new tag this is going to be a in this case i'm still using google uh google analytics universal and what type of tracking is this going to be it's going to be an event because it's not a page view interaction all events have category action and labels maybe i'll call this this category off-site link the action we'll just call it click and the label i want to track what where they clicked what they clicked on so i'm going to use that pre-built variable that we just set up a second ago the click url that's how we're going to track the url that was clicked on the destination the ahref equals the tag the link that they're going to right you could set a value if you'd like i'm going to leave it blank for now non-interaction hit if we set this to be true that's going to be uh that means that this hit will affect our bounce rates a bounce is technically a one hit session so if this is not interaction hit true this is going to be a hit and any time that this is clicked a one-page visit could still be uh would no longer be a bounce if they clicked on one of those exit clicks so i don't want this to affect my bounce rate i want to leave the definition of bounce to be basically like a one-page visit so i want to set non-interaction hit to be false in other words hey tag manager don't let this event affect my website's bounce rate we don't need any advanced settings so at this point we're going to name it and save it i'm going to call this ga for google analytics i'm going to call it event because that's the type of tag that we're setting up and you can call it something like uh off-site off-site click next we're going to add a trigger this tag will get triggered when an interaction meets a certain set of criteria that's when it gets triggered you can see i've already made one but i'll set up i'll set up another one now just so you can follow along i'm going to call it uh this was the off-site link clicks we'll make another one of those so to do that we're going to click the plus to create a trigger the trigger is going to be for what clicks just links we're going to make it on a click what kind of clicked not all of them just some of them which ones we're going to make it when the click url as in the place that they go to contains what it does not contain my web address www.orbitmedia.com that's it this trigger will get fired anytime anyone clicks on a link that does not go to its own to its own website that's when it gets triggered and what is it going to trigger a tag that is the event so at this point i'm going to give this i'm going to name it and save it and this is going to be off-site link click that's the trigger i've already made this trigger so i don't need to make it again uh we're going to close this down and just pretend that that was the one that already existed last step is to submit the container as you submit a container you can make a note about the change you just made to the container documentation is the key to collaboration and quality so make sure to make good notes about all the things that that we just did cool okay because this tag is already in place and this trigger's already in place and this event is already being tracked i'm going to show you now how to do the analysis for this to find out to answer both those two questions are these getting clicked if so which one's getting clicked the most the social media icons and are these getting clicked and which one's getting clicked the most these links to an offsite conversion to buy the book lastly i'm just very curious in general about which off-site link click on this entire domain gets clicked the most often who knows we're about to find out so inside google analytics the event reports are going to be of course in the behavior section abc acquisition behavior conversion where they came from what they did and what percentage of people took which actions events are just all in the behavior section which is exactly where you'd expect to find them in that section there's a couple of different reports top events all reports no matter where they happened or pages allowing us to look at just the page that had that offsite link click i'm going to start with my first question which is the home page footer has social media icons which gets clicked the most i've got the date range set to be january 1st to present i'm going to get several like six months of data here this is not a super high traffic website and i have no reason to believe that behavior on these off-site link clicks would have changed during that time there's no seasonality relevant that's relevant here so i think that's fine date range equals data the lower traffic your website the longer the date range you'll have to choose this is obviously a list of all the pages on our site i'm going to click to drill down on a page and the drill down from the pages report is going to show me event category aha there's the event category just as i set it up in google tag manager when i click the drill down from event category it's going to bring me to the event action which is just as i set it up in the tag in tag manager which was click and yet one more drill down will bring me to the final dimension which is event label event label we had set up to be the click url the destination of the click and right here at the top of this report i can see which of these got clicked the most uh it looks like there were a few that are not relevant to that maybe 10 or 15 percent the ones that remain um facebook wins number one followed by linkedin after linkedin comes twitter and then finally uh people clicking to go to the youtube channel analysis i'm not very active on facebook maybe i should be my audience is sending me clues that uh facebook is um uh a relevant social media network for them boy i'm not really getting a lot of visitors to go to the youtube even though we've been investing in youtube lately maybe i could increase the visual prominence or the order or remove something else from around that to call out youtube to increase the percentage of people who click on that from there but mostly i don't really want people to leave my website and go to social media networks those places are filled with distractions and competitors and like all kinds of like irrelevant stuff they're farther away from the conversion for me so i'm basically happy with the low amount of engagement on these because um i'm not really trying to promote uh facebook or linkedin second bit of analysis we've got a book page the book page has some conversion focus these ones i do want people to click conversion focused clicks uh this one taken to the visitor to the uh the distributor uh and these two taking people to uh uh marketplaces amazon and barnes noble so why don't we check that to see which of those gets collected most should be pretty easy right gonna come back in here go back to all pages for that i'm gonna use the breadcrumb to go up a level to all the pages and that page was called the name of the book so i'm just going to copy that url come to this report filter for that url filter of course unless you're using advanced filter just filters for the first column first column is the primary dimension in this case it's the page primary dimension is always more or less the name of the report that you're on there it is content chemistry that's the number of uh of events that have been triggered on that page i'm going to click to drill down which now we see the event categories off-site link clicks is the one that's most that's relevant to me and there's the click and one more click down will take me to the event label which was the click url as we saw here they are this is the analysis uh about half of all the clicks go to amazon interesting it's not the most visually prominent but it is the top click just shows the power of brand second most popular is the distributor there's two clicks to get to the distributor one's at the uh the big the big button and the other one is farther down here uh there would be ways if i wanted to to track that separately um i don't care that much and then barnes noble is in a a distant third only five percent of the events triggered on this page were for that um if i uh cared to go deeper i could look at the total page views for this url and then divide by the number of uh events uh offsite link clicks uh and then calculate the actual click-through rate from this page to those and then uh consider doing some conversion optimization or in any way just click through rate optimization by uh considering um adjustments to the visual hierarchy to try to increase the percentage of people who go to that who leave and go to that that source that marketplace while i'm here i want to answer one more question i'm very curious just what is the most common exit click on this website of all the buttons and links that i put on this site to that take people to all the other places right i can't track back button activity with this uh with this event um i can't track you know browser tabs being closed but i can track the the uh the popularity of all the clicks that i that we have put on our site right in the templates or in the editorial if it's a link for that i'm just going to go to the top events report from top events i can find that there it is offsite link click it's the fourth most popular event you can find another video where we um we teach how we set up event tracking to watch the video views off-site link click takes me to this page here there's the click and i drill down yet one more time to go to the event label which is the click url here are all of the most popular clicks that people use to leave our website ah that one goes to a google doc not normally trackable because i don't have google analytics tracking code set up on google docs of course that's a third-party tool but i know where that is that's a page where we shared our content marketing template there's another video made about that and i can see that that's actually was pretty successful because uh 1400 people clicked on that link to get to our our content marketing google doc template uh there was another that looks like it was some kind of pop-up window there's another we link to a free privacy policy tool facebook was our third most popular keyword tool dot io was uh was the next one keyword tool.io oh that's a tool i've recommended before it's a free way to see what phrases google suggests is if you're typing in a search into a query into google if i click to drill down i can see just keyword tool.io 515 times people have left my website to go to that tool wow from which pages are they leaving to go to that tool okay to answer that question i need to add another dimension to this i want to see the page i'm looking at the event label that's useful uh i suppose i could make a segment to show just people who when that event label was triggered but since i'm already on this report and there's only one row here that i drilled down i'm going to do it with a secondary dimension secondary dimension just to find the page literally just page to see from which page people are triggering that event label and i can see it looks like it's uh 84 are on the blog keywords article okay we've got a very uh effective exit click uh uh there's a link on that page that that we must really be trying hard to get people to leave and go there it's a blog post doesn't bother me at all they're not enough funnel they're not they don't have strong intent it doesn't bother me a bit uh that we're sending traffic to that tool i recommended that tool after all i made the link because i'm trying to be a helpful content marketer fun right really interesting i know very few marketers that actually do this kind of analysis so now you know how to find out where people are leaving your website this is andy from orbit media studios as i mentioned a web design company here in chicago we hope you found this useful we'll keep making these if you know anybody that would get value from this and and should be tracking these kinds of things on their website feel free to pass us along we'd be super grateful and if you want to get the next one as soon as it comes out just make sure to subscribe see you soon

Channel: Orbit Media Studios

Views: 264

Keywords:

Id: 48GV2Flavh8

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021