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How To Track Outbound Links From Your WordPress Blog

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November 29th, 2009
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WordPress FAQs, WordPress Tips

As a webmaster we are all concerned about the number of links that are coming into the blog and all the other stats that usually concern the traffic to the blog. However, another important thing we all miss to see is the number of outbound clicks from our blog to other websites.

Though this may not sound interesting to many people, it definitely holds some importance when you want to track links to sites other than your own site. One of the reasons I want to track this on my blog, is to understand and know what kind of software or services people download or visit, and then try and customize posts to include software or services that are liked by the readers.

Tracking outgoing links from your blog is pretty easy, all you need is a free Google Analytics account and the Google Analyticator WordPress Plugin.

outbound_link_tracking

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, head to the options page and scroll down to the advanced options till you see Outbound link tracking. From the available options, select “Enabled” and save the settings.

Once you do that, wait for a day till the tracking is available in your Google Analytics account. After that you can view the outbound links from your site by visiting Google Analytics and analyze it to understand what your readers are clicking on.

outbound_link_tracking_analytics

To view the outbound links, visit Google Analytics and click on “Content” in the sidebar. In the available options under Content, click on “Event Tracking” to expand it, and then click on Categories to see the Outbound Traffic from your blog.

Hopefully this should be helpful to you to customize your content and suit it to the needs of your users.

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Comments

  1. gmgsm says:

    Thanks for this informative blog post! I had always wanted to track outbound links in my blog and I was thinking to use the Pretty Links plugin but this analyticator plugin one seems much more to the core point of tracking outbound links..

  2. Ali Hussain says:

    wow, thankyou for the plugin information. Now i need not to go to backlink checkers to check my backlinks again and again.

  3. What about blogger? Any facility is there to know the outbound links?

  4. Benny says:

    Great article there. I have a question, I already had the regular Google Analytics code running, and after installing this plugin, I saw that it adds the code – again. Should I just remove my old regular Google Analytics code? Thanks for your help. 🙂

  5. Hi Keith,

    thanks so much for this valuable info and the plug-in! High quality post you’ve got here, I was looking for this info quite some time.

    Cheers & Ciao ….

  6. Jeff R. says:

    My Google Analytics plugin has had this option enabled for quite some time, but I don’t see anything under Event Tracking – Categories.

    Does the plugin add in the javascript snippet to all links automatically? Or is that a step I have to do that you didn’t mention here?

  7. belukar says:

    what a useful tool, I’ll try in my wordpress site. thanks for the information.

  8. Sharninder says:

    I was just wondering, doesn’t Google Analytics do this automatically ? What special option does this plugin enable ?



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  1. […] to track outbound links from your blog? Use WordPress? Use Google Analytics? Checkout this post I wrote on WLTC, which details how you can track outbound traffic when you are using a WordPress […]

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