Are you looking for a way to track outbound links in WordPress? Outbound links are those that direct visitors away from your website. These could be links to affiliate products, social networks, or other websites that you’ve linked to from your own. For this article, we’ll illustrate to you how to track outbound links with ease in WordPress so that you can see which ones are getting the highest clicks.
Why is tracking outbound links in WordPress crucial?
After you have built your website, you must learn how users interact with it in order to grow it. The best way to accomplish this is to use Google Analytics.
It enables you to see where your visitors are coming from, what pages they are visiting, and how much time they are spending on your website. This data allows you to fine-tune your strategy and improve your website accordingly.
On the other hand, learning about outgoing or external links can assist you in determining which outgoing links are more frequently clicked. If you recommend affiliate products, tracking outbound links can help you figure out which products perform better with your audience.
After that, let us just look at how to conveniently track outbound links in WordPress.
All external links can be tracked in Google Analytics.
The MonsterInsights plugin must first be installed and turned on. You can use the free version as well. See our free guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for more information.
MonsterInsights is the most widely used Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It enables you to correctly connect your website to Google Analytics.
After activation, navigate to the Insights » Settings page in your WordPress admin area and select the ‘Tracking’ tab.
Select ‘Yes’ next to the ‘Enable MonsterInsights events tracking’ option under the ‘Engagement’ section.
That’s all there is to it; you’ve enabled outbound link tracking on your WordPress site.
Internal Affiliate Links Are Tracked as Outbound Links
To manage and cloak affiliate links, many WordPress site owners use affiliate marketing plugins. This enables them to use beautiful URLs like this:
http://example.com/refer/productname/
Google Analytics does not really track these URLs as outbound links by default, so they will not appear in your outgoing-link reports.
MonsterInsights makes it simple to correct this.
Select the ‘Tracking’ tab on the Insights » Settings page. There are several sections on the tracking page. To proceed, go to the ‘Affiliate Links’ section.
You must now enter the path that you use for your affiliate links. This is the prefix that your link cloaking or affiliate link manager plugin has added.
After that, you need to give those links a label. This label will be added to your Google Analytics report and will aid in the identification of those links in your reports.
Do not fail to save your settings and click the Save Changes button.
Using Google Analytics to View Outbound Link Reports
Allow Google Analytics at least 24 hours to collect data if you have just enabled outbound link tracking on your WordPress site.
After that, go to your Google Analytics dashboard and navigate to the Behavior » Events » Top Events page.
Your outbound links will appear in the ‘outbound-link’ event category, while your affiliate links will appear in the label you specified in the plugin settings.
When you click on it, it will display the URLs that users have visited on your website.
Outbound link activity can also be viewed in real time. Simply navigate to the Real-time » Events page within your Google Analytics dashboard.
Your outbound link and outbound affiliate links will be reported as events.
We hope this article was useful in teaching you how to track outbound links in WordPress. Our comprehensive step-by-step WordPress SEO guide for beginners might also be of interest to you.
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