Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links

By  on  

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about who's coming to your website. One of the most important statistics the service provides is the referrer statistic -- you've gotta know who's sending people to your website, right? What about where you send others though? Using MooTools 1.2, you can direct Google Analytics' pageTracker to track outbound link clicks.

The MooTools 1.2 JavaScript

//google analytics code
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-#######-#");
pageTracker._trackPageview();

//moo code
window.addEvent('load', function() {
	if(pageTracker) {
		$$('a[href^=http]').each(function(el) {
			el.addEvent('click',function() {
				var dd = '/outgoing/' + el.get('href').replace('http://','');
				pageTracker._trackPageview(dd);
			}.bind(this));
		});
	}
});

Here's what you would see on your "Top Exit Pages" within Google Analytics:

Excellent! Who knew it would be so easy?

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

  • By
    Add Styles to Console Statements

    I was recently checking out Google Plus because they implement some awesome effects.  I opened the console and same the following message: WARNING! Using this console may allow attackers to impersonate you and steal your information using an attack called Self-XSS. Do not enter or paste code that you...

Discussion

  1. Really nice men ! Thanks for the tip , I’ll use that when I’ll rebuild my blog for this winter :)

  2. Ahh, very cool! Thanks for sharing, David.

  3. Evan

    I use event delegation and classes on my anchors. It’s not automatic like your solution you have to remember to add the classes to your outgoing links but you can use it to do a bunch of different things like tracking files and outgoing links.

    track to /outgoing/
    track to /files/

  4. Evan:
    Can this be used to track how many times a video has been watched? I presume that putting the path to the individual file could monitor this? Is there anything else Mootools can do with analytics?

    David Walsh:
    Thanks for this tutorial and others. I have been dropping in for a while now but 1st comment.

    Cheers, Adam

  5. And here is the jQuery version: http://www.prodevtips.com/2008/08/19/tracking-clicks-with-jquery-and-google-analytics/

    Note that I wrote that one before David, just so you guys know, I didn’t just copy the MooTools code and jQuerify it, probably the opposite ;)

  6. @Henrik: There would have been nothing wrong with porting over my script.

  7. Wouldn’t it be better to use domready instead of load?

    and how do I avoid internal links with http:// getting tracked ?

  8. Bram:
    When you specify the element selector you can use it on specified links. For example for your advertisements:

    $$('advertisement').each(function(el) {
    

    Hope that this helped you with your problem!

  9. Victor

    I am not entirely sure how to implement this. the typical google analytics tracking code is shown below. do i jsut modify this to include the entire code above? Also, do i need to install the mootools framework in my wordpress blog before this will work? i feel i am close but without any knowledge of mootools, it looks very confusing. help!

    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxxx-x");
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
    } catch(err) {}
  10. This post it’s really cool. I like it a lot.

    There’s a “but”! … But, you’re counting pageviews… i’ll recommend you to use eventTracker… cause’ here you are counting pageviews and that will increase the total pageviews of your site. And even more, those pageviews you’re counting have 100% bounce so your bounce rate will suffer a lot!

    Even so i will try to adapt this code for using it with eventTracker… :)

    David, it will be nice to have you on my twitter @dmanzur. i’ll follow you :)

  11. I recently started using Google Analytics, and the vast amount of statistics this tool provides have left me confused! So, I have decided to learn more about Google Analytics, and I have found this resource to be very comprehensive and helpful. MooTools is one of the more popular JavaScript frameworks and I’m glad to start from it.

  12. This will be handy for my next side project. Thanks David. Awesome job as usual.

  13. Really cooll
    Thank you so much…

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!