Are You Tracking Your Outbound Links? Eric Patterson

There are quite a few of us that have links on our web pages that lead our visitors away. They maybe clients, affiliates, or our Facebook Fan Page; but we typically don't know how our visitors are leaving our site, or if they are following our outbound links. If you are a business that uses outbound links and would like know their performance or effects, then you are in luck. Using some special calls on our outbound links allows us to track these outbound links with Google Analytics.

What type of business can benefit from this? The answer is any business that has a website with links leading off their site. No matter what type of business, we can track for ourselves how many visitors on our webpage are following our links instead of relying on the destination's website owners to tell us. Not to mention, a lot of the websites we link to will never let us know how many visitors we have sent their way. When was the last time you got an update from Facebook telling you how many Fan Page visits came from your site? Wouldn't that be valuable information for us to know? Being able to track our visitors and their interactions on our site allows us to understand our visitors more and change our site to meet their interests and needs.

One of the metrics you may like to watch is how many visitors are leaving our site. In the web analytics world this is measured by the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the perctange of vistors to a page which have exited the site instead of staying on our site. Of course, we would want people to stay on our site instead of leaving, so watching this metric can give valuable insights to our problem pages. There can be numerous ways though, in which, a visitor can leave our site. Some of the ways to exit are typing in a new url in the address bar, closing the browser, or following a link that leads off site. Most likely, if we have a link on our site then we want the visitor to follow it or we probably wouldn't have it on there. We also might prefer to not have that action of exiting add to our bounce rate for the page. By sending a fake page to our Analytics account we can not only stop the exit from effecting the page's bounce rate, but also create a page view for the off site link. Now we have a win-win scenario, we are stopping our exit from effecting the bounce rate and we are able to track which off site links are being followed.

There is even more we can now do with our fake page views that represent outbound links. One interesting thing we can do is setup goals based on the "click" of the outbound link. Since we faked out Google Analytics by sending a page for it to store, and we can setup goals based on a destination page, we can marry the two together to give value and further insight into a visitor following an outbound link. You may be wondering why we want to do this though; some websites may get referral money from a linked website, or our business may evolve around promoting other businesses, or you may find out that a visitor who follows your client's list is likely to convert on your other goals, or we can use the reverse goal path report to find out what previous pages these visitors have viewed before converting on the goal. The main idea is having too much data is never bad, it is better to collect the data now so down the road when we find a need for it, it is there for us to analyze.

One example of the benefit of tracking our outbound links on our site could be in regards to our social media marketing strategy. Since we are in the era of the social media, you probably have links on your webpage leading people to check out your Facebook Fan Page, or your Twitter feed. Your superiors and/or you might be wondering how effective this to the business. With the tracking of those outbound links you can add one more level of insight to those reports to your superiors. For this instance, the insight is what percentage of your site's visitors are interested in your social marketing presence. If we see that XX% of our site's visitors that came to our site are going to our fan pages and twitter feeds, then we can make more educated decisions about potential customers and current customers in regards their interests in us being on Facebook or Twitter. If we are spending our time and efforts in managing and updating our social marketing campaigns then shouldn't we know if it fits our business? We can also use this to compare the interest of multiple links on the same page. If we have both our Twitter and Facebook links on the same page, then we can also compare the interest of our Twitter page versus the interest of our Facebook page. Maybe we will see that more of our site visitors are going to our Facebook page. Which, if that was the case, we might decide to focus more time and energy into our Facebook page then our Twitter page. Either way, we can make more educated decisions about where our time and money can be spent.

If you are thinking that effecting your bounce rate is not worth implementing this method of tracking outbound links, then you are in luck too. Google Analytics provides us with a second method to track these by use of Events. I won't go into great details here, since I will have another post coming soon about Events, but I will add that the downside to events is not being able to setup goals on them, which I think is a huge benefit to using the fake page views.

If there any questions or comments then feel free to ask me via email or the d2Labs Facebook Fan Page.