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Outbound links in Google analytics

January 22nd, 2007 by GiorgosK · 2 Comments

intro_small.jpgGoogle with “Google analytics” the web site statistics service offers a very important service to webmasters for free. The service is undoubtedly perfect for its price. There is a missing feature though that many webmasters wish they had; where do visitors go when leaving the website. Google has addressed this partially and you can add an onclick event in your outbound links (inside your anchor tag)

onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outgoing/example_com');"

I am saying that this is a partial solution because it would be tedious for people with websites that have more than say 100 pages to do this manually. Therefore I created this simple javascript solution that goes on each and every outbound link on you page and adds this click event. Here it is

function attachOnClick() {
var _B = document.domain;
var _A = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for( var i = 0; i < _A.length; i++ )
{
if ( ( (_B != '' && _A[i].href.indexOf(_B) < 0) || _B == '') && _A[i].href.indexOf('://') > 0 )
{
_A[i].onclick = function(){
outlink = “/outlinks/”+this.href.substring(7) ;
urchinTracker(outlink);
};
}
}
}
attachOnClick();

You can save this in a javascript file analytics_report_outbound.js and then insert it in your page footer like this

<script xsrc="analytics_report_outbound.js" mce_src="analytics_report_outbound.js"     type="text/javascript"></script>

Hope it helps.

Tags: web statistics · google · javascript

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 hitech // Nov 23, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    I just added this code to my blog and footer, I will let you know how well it works for me.

  • 2 Markus Diersbock // Mar 1, 2008 at 6:15 am

    To see how Google Analytics detects clicks and displays them within the Site Overlay check out:

    Google Analytics Site Overlay

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