Jamie Huskisson : Track outbound links for Google Analytics automatically

Track outbound links for Google Analytics automatically

Posted on January 9th, 2007 in code tidbits

Place this code before the </body> tag and it’ll track all outbound links that aren’t part of your website.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
var ahrefs = document.getElementsByTagName(’a');
for (var i=0; i<ahrefs.length;i++) {
if (ahrefs[i].href.indexOf(’http://www.jhuskisson.com‘) == -1 && !ahrefs[i].onclick) {
ahrefs[i].onclick = function () { var track = this.href + ”; urchinTracker (’/outgoing/’+track.substring(7)); }
}
}
}
</script>

Simply replace http://www.jhuskisson.com with your own site URL and hey presto - all outbound links that aren’t internal are being tracked by Google Analytics.

There are 16 responses to this post so far

Dan wrote:

will it give me stats of of how many hits a page got on another site that came from my site.

# February 7th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Jamie Huskisson wrote:

Yes Dan it will. This will allow Google Analytics to track how many times a link that points to outside of your own has been clicked.

# February 7th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
MR wrote:

Will this work if the links on the site change. e.g if someone performs a search on my site the results will be different each time but i want to track which of these search result links have been followed.

# August 6th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Jamie Huskisson wrote:

MR - So long as there’s no links below the code, then this will work just fine.

# August 6th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Curious wrote:

How do I do I use this code so I can make the outbound link a “goal” within Google Analytics?

# August 28th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Ross wrote:

Thanks for the plugin! One question: where will the results appear in the report ? Under Top Content ?

# November 9th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
LKamoku wrote:

i entered this info in my footer.php and part of the code turns blue…(using dreamweaver) what does that mean:

turns blue from ‘for var …all the way to…

i have the code there now and when testing my outbound links i dont see any stats (looking in the content drilldown section)

am i doing something wrong?

# November 29th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Konrad wrote:

Thanks for this, it works no probs. I can see the clicks in the site overlay but is there any more straight forward way to see the clicks in Analytics (preferably in list form).

Thanks,

Konrad

# February 1st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Yunus wrote:

This is great and simple so thanks! When I add the code to my site however it doesn’t seem to add the onclick funcion to my links. I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to why this might not be working. Pls see this link as an example http://www.filmfriendsforever.com/filmfeedsforever/2008/03/04/music-video-kap10kurt-directed-by-the-holograms/

# March 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Chris wrote:

if (document.getElementsByTagName) { var ahrefs = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (var i=0; i<ahrefs.length;i++) { if (ahrefs[i].href.indexOf(”http://www.signlanguageltd.co.uk”) == -1 && !ahrefs[i].onclick) { ahrefs[i].onclick = function () { var track = this.href + â€; urchinTracker (â€™/outgoing/â€™+track.substring(7)); } } } }

This will work , there were a few funny characters within the script for some reason, when you put this in dreamweaver it WONT show blue anymore.

Great code though , thanks for posting it

# May 22nd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Chris wrote:

Ok, I cant seem to enclose this in javascript tags , so please put these around the document, if someone can edit this as it wont like the code in comments and make this shown then that would be great.

# May 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Jamie Huskisson wrote:

Seems to be displaying just fine for me here Chris, albeit without any indenting?

# May 22nd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Chris wrote:

Hi Jamie,

Ok thanks for letting me know,

I just had to change some of the charaters within the script and it showed the code correctly in dreamweaver, I am still waiting to see if the results clarify.

# May 22nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Brad wrote:

A couple of questions about implementing this. Since analytics takes hours to update it takes forever to try to figure this out.

1- does this code work with both old and new style analytics code?

2- should this code go above or below the regular analytics code?

3- with the outbound link tracking code that google gives (where you have to tag each link individually), you have to put the main analytics code just after the opening (not closing ) since it has to execute first before the link tracking code. With your code you don’t have to do that?

Thanks. If I can get this to work it will save a ton of time.

# June 27th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Ryota wrote:

Brad - This is what I’ve done to have it work with ga.js. It should still go below ga.js. Google suggests that the new ga.js should go above any calls to its methods, so usually paste the ga.js code right before .

if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
var ahrefs = document.getElementsByTagName(’a');
for (var i=0; i<ahrefs.length;i++) {
if (ahrefs[i].href.indexOf(’http://www.domain.com’) == -1 && !ahrefs[i].onclick) {
ahrefs[i].onclick = function () {
pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outbound/’+this.href.substring(7));}
}
}
}

# August 13th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Ryota wrote:

I paste the ga.js code right before the closing head tag.

# August 13th, 2008 at 9:31 pm

Track outbound links for Google Analytics automatically

There are 16 responses to this post so far

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