Outbound Link Tracking #

Tracking outbound links is a common task for site owners. It lets you know how often an external URL was clicked, which page the clicks occured on, and filter your dashboard accordingly. Pirsch allows you to automate this task by placing a JavaScript snippet on your website.

Adding Outbound Link Tracking #

Tracking outbound link clicks requires adding the pirsch-extended.js script to your website. If you have the regular pirsch.js and/or pirsch-events.js scripts installed, tracking page views and events, you need to replace them with the extended script. The extended script combines the functionality of the other scripts, including tracking file downloads and 404 error pages.

Navigate to the settings page on the dashboard and select the Integration tab. Copy the code snippet for your domain and add it to the head section of each page you want to track outbound links on. Here is a simple example on what it will look like. You can use the advanced options on the settings page to customize the snippet.

<script defer type="text/javascript" src="https://api.pirsch.io/pirsch-extended.js"
    id="pirschextendedjs"
    data-code="zddEQ4e6QGDno9GCe6dofGgWARPEyJWt"></script>

The script will also track file downloads by default. If you don't want this behaviour, you can disable it by adding the data-disable-downloads parameter.

Analyzing Outbound Link Clicks on Your Dashboard #

External link clicks will be tracked as events on your dashboard. By default, they will be displayed as Outbound Link Click, but you can change that by setting the data-outbound-link-event-name parameter. Expanding the event will reveal the external links that have been clicked by your visitors.

Click an entry in the details view to filter the dashboard. The Event Pages panel lists all pages the link has been clicked on.

Ignoring Links #

You can ignore individual links by setting either the pirsch-ignore HTML parameter or pirsch-ignore CSS class. Clicking the links below won't trigger an outbound link event.

<a href="https://example.com" pirsch-ignore>Outbound Links</a>
<a href="https://example.com" class="pirsch-ignore">Outbound Links</a>