How To Track Clicks Properly

[leporello]

Say I have 5 call to actions on a page all of which link to go/pokersite. How can I track the number of clicks that each individual call to action received (or is this possible).

[addaminsane]

i think there is a feature in google analytics that shows hyperlinks that have been clicked.

Other than that it would be a huge hassle, and if you used a specific script to track all of these, overtime it would be a huge server load.

another way to do rig it is to use something like bit.ly to manage the link. you'd enter your affiliate link and then put the bit.ly into the redirect. when you type in a bit.ly link and a + attatched to the url, it shows the amount of clicks and some other info.

you could setup each link as a serparate bit.ly link, but that could be alot of work. at the same time, it may be less work than other options, and there would be no effect on the size of your sites database.

[Hazo]

Hey Ian hit me on IM and I'll help you out.

[leporello]

Still looking for help with this. Will ship a link or two to anyone who can give me a beginners tutorial.

[GregW]

I've tried a handful of click tracking scripts and whilst they did work well, they cause a little bit more hassle than I would like as you need to send each click through a redirect. That's all well and good on small scale tracking, but on a larger scale it can get a bit trickier to manage, especially if you need to change all your aff links in the future and stuff like that. More to worry about basically.

A big script like OpenX would probably be overkill for you as well and more effort than it's worth for simple tracking stuff.

I'd just go down the GoogleAnalytics route of adding onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/go/pokerstars/');" to your a tags. So they will look like this:

<a href="/visit/pokerstars/" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/go/pokerstars/');" target="_blank">

All you will need to do then is work out a logical structure for how the pageviews show up for link clicks in GA (that's just the javascript pageTracker bit) to help with reports and looking at the data. For two links on a PokerStars review page for example you might use the following:

<a href="/visit/pokerstars/" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/go/pokerstars/review-page/top-link/');" target="_blank">Top Link</a>

<a href="/visit/pokerstars/" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/go/pokerstars/review-page/bottom-link/');" target="_blank">Botton Link</a>

Adding link tracking this way is really quite simple and it won't affect your affiliate links in any way, which makes life easier.

This can only look confusing because of the javascript code you're copying and pasting, but if you don't let that scare you it's really an easy thing to add.

[kushmoney]

Thank you GregW, I was wondering how to get tracking on each link.

Now I have to go through 1k+ pages and fix all my links so I track them.

[cprpoker]

If you are in WP and using UltimateGA (or similar) for analytics reporting then you can configure it to track outbound links. Only works for wordpress content and not text built into templates

[cprpoker]

But I guess that doesn't really solve the OPs issue since it would tag all OB links the same.

[Unknown Webmaster]

The method GregW has described works well and is reasonably easy to implement, but anyone considering to use it on big site out to read this article first: Website Optimizer Tricks: Tracking Outbound Links -- The Right Way
(the article is about Google Website Optimizer, but the exact same thing happens with Google Analytics, and the solution is the same)

The article describes how that method of tracking can be inaccurate, as well as how it can be improved.

I don't think there are anything wrong with using the code Greg posted, and I use code that has a very similar "problems" on my sites, and to my knowledge it hasn't caused me any problems. I just think it is important to consider the potential inaccuracy before you implement it on your site, since it would be really annoying to have to go back and change it later.

[Michael Martinez]

However, Google Analytics under-reports data so if you're trying to audit click-throughs I would not advise relying on Google tools.

Some people use 301-redirects and then cull the click data from their raw server logs. None of the Javascript-methods are reliable enough for auditing purposes (Javascript doesn't always execute, especially when it's remotely hosted).