Blog GA4 Fast Formulas: Track Links to External Sites

GA4 Fast Formulas: Track Links to External Sites

Quick Tips for Impactful Iteration

AUTHORS: Yosaif Cohain , Ally Duffey Cubilette

Sep 11, 2024

2 Min Read

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This byte-sized series from CI’s Analytics Team offers quick tips to level up your website one optimization at a time (as it should be done!). Designed for busy arts marketers at every skill level, you can refine your site with quick analyses that get clear results leadership will love.

Today, let’s learn how best to answer the question…

“Is Our Site driving people to external partners?”

Level: Beginner
GA4 Setup: Basic

The tips in this post can be achieved with the GA4 tools available to all—no customization required.

If you have links that drive your users to external partners—such as for class registrations, presenter information, etc—you can track that as Outbound Clicks via Enhanced Measurement in the admin settings. (Learn more in this tutorial from Google.)

Here’s an example of external links on Ailey’s site:

Why we love this analysis

For organizations that link to external sites, this quick report can give you the data you need to measure your success and make site changes (e.g. copy, layout) to increase clicks. In some cases, you might also share this data with your partners to demonstrate your impact.

Your Fast Formulas…

To analyze site performance, the formula is: Total users where event equals click and link_url contains domain name of external site divided by total users. To analyze page performance, the formula is: total users where event equals click and link_url contains domain name of external site, and page path equals your page divided by the total users where page path = your page.

Pro Tip: Use additional fields to segment your data. This will help you understand how performance varies for different types of users. For example, use traffic source dimensions to associate this behavior with marketing initiatives (so you can identify which campaigns are driving higher quality traffic), or use the device category dimension to see if behavior varies for desktop vs. mobile users (perhaps the mobile version of the page has the CTA too far down on the page?).

That’s It—Happy Tracking!

If you want to take your website glow-up even further, explore analytics resources below or dive into CI’s analytics services and contact us for custom solutions. We love talking nerdy!

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