About outbound clicks
An outbound click occurs when a visitor to your website clicks a link that takes them to another website. For example, if your website myownpersonaldomain.com, links to another website, example-pet-store.com, all the clicks that lead your visitors to example-pet-store.com are outbound clicks.
You can configure Analytics to detect an outbound click event each time a visitor clicks a link that leads them away from your domain. Outbound click events can be triggered by any kind of link, including links in the body text or button clicks, as long as they lead the website visitor to another domain.
By default, outbound click events will occur for all links leading away from the current domain. Links to domains configured for cross-domain measurement in tag settings will not trigger outbound click events.
Turn on outbound click measurement
To turn on outbound click measurement, follow the steps to enable enhanced event measurement in Analytics.
You don't need to make any changes in your page code. Once you enable enhanced measurement, Analytics will detect all outbound clicks and populate the dimensions.
View outbound clicks in explorations
Create a custom exploration to view your outbound links.
Follow these instructions to create an example custom exploration for outbound clicks:
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- On the left, click
Explore.
- At the top of the screen, select the blank template.
- Next to Dimensions, click + and under Link select:
- Link domain
- Link URL
- Outbound
- Click Import.
- Next to Metrics, click + and under Event select Event count.
- Click Import.
- Under Rows, click + Drop or select dimension and select:
- Link domain
- Link URL
- Outbound
- Under Values, click + Drop or select metric and select Event count.
To see a large screenshot of the exploration settings and output, go to Example outbound clicks exploration in the Analytics demo account.
To learn about other ways you can customize explorations to view your data, go to Get started with Explorations.
To learn more about the outbound click parameters that are passed in and used as dimensions in reporting, go to link dimensions and parameters.