In this video, I'm going to show you how you
can track external link clicks with the help of Google Tag Manager and forward this information
on to Google Analytics. All and more coming up. Hey there measuregeeks, Julian here. Back with a another video for you. Today, we are answering a question from our
MeasureMaster Tom. If you don't know what MeasureMasters is,
it's our premium membership community. You want to check it out down below, we'll
have a link. Well Tom asks, how can he track his affiliate
link clicks on his website with the help of Google Tag Manager? Well, this is really the external link click
methodology of tracking links with the help of Google Tag Manager. Then you can forward this information onto
Google Analytics or your facebook pixel or your Google Ads tag in order to this be your
goal or retargeting audience. With Google Tag Manager, we can do this pretty
easily because there's a built in functionality and actually there's something new in this
technique that was announced a little while ago. And now it makes it even easier to track outbound link clicks. So without further ado, let's dive in and
see how we can track external link clicks with GTM. Alright, to get started, we have here our
demo shop where I have already Google Tag Manager installed. And we now want to pick up any kind of external
links that the user clicks on. So we're not talking about internal links,
like to this blog post right here, but rather external link clicks, such as we have, for
example, here to wordpress.org. This go outside of our domain and it would
be a good idea to know which links to user clicks in order to leave our page. So you might want to optimize this, but it
might also have another purpose. For example, if we have an affiliate product
in our store on our blog posts, such as this one, we want to know how many people clicked
actually on this link to go to our partner store. And then we track this with the help of Google
Tag Manager and Google Analytics. So let's get started. In our Google Tag Manager, to start tracking
links, we need to have a trigger setup. So let's go over to the trigger section here,
and click on new. And this will be a generic link click trigger. Why do I say generic? Because we are going to just deploy the listener
functionality to see if it actually works. And then later, we will specify to only track
certain clicks. So let's proceed with the trigger configuration. We click on the field and choose the just
links option right here. Now, you might be tempted to use all elements. But this wouldn't detect the actual link in
the background. So when the user leaves the page, and therefore
we need to use to just links click trigger. We leave all the configuration untouched for
now, and just save this. Now that we have this installed, we go into
the preview and debug mode, which will put our browser and Only our browser into a special
mode where we go back to the page and reload the page. If we have Google Tag Manager correctly installed,
you should see a preview mode down here. And this will give us useful information on
what is happening when the user interacts with our page. So for example, if I click on this image here,
I will do this with the Command key press or the control key pressed in order for it
to open up in a new tab. We see that our link click fired right here. And this needs to happen in order for us to
know that our listener functionality actually works. So we know that our trigger is working correctly. We have here the link click, and with this
link click, currently nothing is happening. And we can also click on the Buy Now button right here. And this is obviously desired click that we
want to distinguish of clicks that are internal to our page and external. So we need a way to distinguish the fifth
from the seventh click here. How would we do this? There is a new method to detect outbound links
in Google Tag Manager. We need to create a variable for this. So let's go over to Google Tag Manager and
click on variables. And here we're going to configure a new user
defined variable. The variable type will be an auto event variable. And the variable type that we choose here
is the element URL. And then we get this little compound Type
menu down here where we can choose is this outbound. Now, there is one more setting called affiliated
domains. So what this variable essentially does, it
will detect whether the link that you have clicked is outside of the domain. It will look at the element URL. And if the element URL is different from the
URL that Google Tag Manager is installed on, it will tell the variable Okay, this is an
outbound link click. You can choose affiliated domains which are
domains that you don't want to count as an external link click. So if you have any kind of subdomains or domains
like paypal.com, where the user would naturally go to, but it's not really an external domain
that you want to track, you can put them in here as a comma separated list. For us, this should be fine. We'll go ahead and give this all a name. Let's save this and see how this behaves. Let's refresh our preview and debug mode. Go back to our page, refresh that. And let's try this out again. I'm going to click on the internal link and
then on the external link, and we see here we have our fifth and seventh click. Our fifth click doesn't have any tags firing
right now, but we can look into the variables and especially in our autoevent variable that
is outbound, and it says false. So this is actually an internal link click
our tags shouldn't fire and we don't want to track this. But on the seventh link click we also have
false. We see, I clicked on the image. The image is actually an internal link. But if I click on the Buy Now button, right
here, so our ninth click, we see that the auto event variable turned true. So this is an actual click that leads our
user away from the website. This is something we want to track. So we can now change our trigger over to only
turn true when this variable is actually true. So let's go ahead in Google Tag Manager and
turn our trigger into a specific trigger. So the link click will now be for outbound
links, External links. And as this trigger fires on option we go
with some link clicks, where the auto event variable is outbound equals true. That's really what this is all about. Now you can tick these option if you want
to, but I will test them a bit month in depth so waiting for tags is a good option in order
for the browser to have time to process the outgoing request to Google Analytics before
he redirects the user on to the external website. And check validation is something you would
need to experiment with, it pertains to the callback function that happens within the
browser for the link. And if that is successful. For now, I will leave this turned off. Now since I click this first box right here,
there's another menu that pops up, it says enable this trigger when all of these conditions
are true. Now, this pertains to the listener functionality. Where do we want to listen to all of these
clicks, I want to do this on all the pages. So I will go with the page URL matches regex
dot star, which would match up to any URL that Google Tag Manager is installed on. So let's save this and we can really try it
out because we don't have a tag that we would fire. So we would need to create a tag first. And the tags are the information that you
sent over to your tool in the end. In our case, that would be Google Analytics. But you could also do this for Facebook ads
or Google ads. So let's go ahead and give this tech a name. We want to build a Google Analytics tag, we're
going to send an event and for external link clicks. As the tag configuration, we choose our Universal
Analytics. And as a track time, this time we choose event. Now, we get all these different categories,
you can fill them out as your heart's content. But be aware that this will show up in your
reporting later on in analytics. So for us right now, I'm going to go with
the category External links. Now, I also want to know what link was clicked. So I'm going to go ahead and choose an auto
event variable. Unfortunately, I haven't activated them yet. Go with built in variables, and I'm going
to choose the click text. And as the label I'm going to choose the URL
that the user actually went to. So again, I'm going to choose a built in variable
which is our Click URL variable, alright. As the non interaction hit, I will choose
true. So it doesn't mess with my bounce rate. And I can choose where to send my Google this
information, I have a Google settings variable already set up. If you don't have one set up, you can click
on enable override settings and put your tracking ID in here in order to send it to the right
account. Now we just need to choose the trigger. We already prepared that right here and save
this. And now we get to the last part where we would
test this on. So let's refresh our preview and debug mode. Go back to our page and try this all out. I'm going to click on an internal link first. We see nothing fires. Now, let's click on this Buy Now button. And we have the seventh link click and we
see Google Analytics event external link clicks fired. Our tag fired and information should have
been sent to Google Analytics. How can we verify? Let's go over to our tag assistant and look
into the information that was sent over Google Alerts right here. One event was sent. This is our event that was sent. And we can see our category was External links. That's what we entered in our attack configurations. We have the action, which is the link text
by now. And then the label the actual link that the
user went to. Let's test a little bit more. Let's go can on, go to this blog page. Now, nothing should fire. Nothing fires right here. You're getting redirected on to our shop and
our blog right here. And if I click on this wordpress.org link,
what happens again, with the Command key pressed? We have a fifth link click, and our event
external link clicks has fired. Again, let's look into our tag assistant. And we see Google Analytics one event fired. We have an external link click the action
which would be the text of the link that was clicked wordpress.org and the label is the
actual URL. So this seems to work as expected. And we have now tracked all the links that
are external to our page on the whole website. Now let's verify one more time inside of Google
Analytics. Inside of Google Analytics, we should see
data come up in the real time reporting. So let's go here under events. And we see there was a link click right here. So a few seconds ago, if you go to events
last 30 minutes, we see here our event category was external link clicks, and somebody clicked
on the Buy Now button. Another one was, again, external link clicks,
this time, somebody clicked on the link wordpress.org. Now this data will be recorded and later on,
be available in your behavior reports under events right here. You should be able to see all the different
external link clicks. Unfortunately, this takes a while to populate. So just for verification, we can see this
in the real time reporting. All right, now that we have verify that everything
is working. There's just one last step because this is
actually not yet live on the website. And it's tracking user actual user information,
you would need to submit a version. So it goes live on your website, give your
version a name. So you recognize it. If you want to roll back later, then you publish
this. And after a second, your version is now published, and it's live
on the website. All right. So there you have it. This is how you can track external link clicks,
and also your affiliate link clicks on your website with the help of Google Tag Manager. I hope this answers your question, Tom. And if you have a question, and you can leave
it all the time in the comments down below, I read all of them and try to answer most
of them if they actually make sense. And if you want to check out our MeasureMasters
program, don't forget the link down below in the description. Now if you're new here, then you probably
haven't subscribed yet. So I'll give you the chance right now over
there. We bring you new videos every week. So you definitely should hit that subscribe
button. Now, my name is Julian. see on the next one.
