Readers Comments (7)

1. Shailendra Dubey says:

   May 3, 2010 at 11:12 pm

   Hi Srinivas,

   The method mentioned above has a side effect, for each outbound link additional pageviews will count in your analytics account, which is not correct because these pageviews are not for your website, these are for those links which are sending visitors out from your website.

   To correct this there is one updated method using Event Tracking which can be used to track outbound link. To enable this follow below steps

   1. Set up Event Tracking in your Analytics Tracking code.

   This is a simple matter of adding the following line to the tracking code for your pages after the page tracking object is set up:

   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(‘UA-XXXXX-X’);
   pageTracker._trackPageview();

   2. Add a JavaScript method in the head of your document to delay the outbound click by a fraction of a second.

   This delay will hardly be noticeable by the user, but it will provide the browser more time to load the tracking code. Without this method, it’s possible that a user can click on the outbound link before the tracking code loads, in which case the event will not be recorded. Here’s what the JavaScript code in the section should look like (assuming you will use your own tracking code ID):

   function recordOutboundLink(link, category, action) {
   try {
   var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXX-X”);
   pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action);
   setTimeout(‘document.location = “‘ + link.href + ‘”‘, 100)
   }catch(err){}
   }

   3. Update your outbound links to call the new function without first following the link. For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com, you would use the _trackEvent() method in the link’s tag:

   The example above uses the category label Outbound Links. This is a useful way to categorize all outbound links in the Event Tracking reports. It sets the specific name of the website as the second parameter in the call. With this structure in place, you could then see Outbound Links as one of the event categories and drill down to see which particular outbound links are the most popular. Be sure to use return false for the onClick handler, because without that statement the browser will follow the link before the recordOutboundLink method has a chance to execute.

   Refer below URL for more clarification

   http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527
2. admin says:

   May 5, 2010 at 12:31 am

   Lets see the Tracking outbound links http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72712 We have implemented this method.
3. Shailendra Dubey says:

   May 10, 2010 at 12:39 am

   Srinivas

   I am agree with you.

   I I have also implemented the old method of tracking outbound link. But if you implement the new method then i am sure you will get the correct view of outbound links.
4. koti reddy says:

   June 14, 2010 at 8:42 am

   ur phone number is not working sir
5. Reply SMS Hindi says:

   January 21, 2011 at 4:15 am

   yes your instructions are clear and helpful, but you can’t copy the code because of the image – I want to be able to copy the code
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