Most modern websites associate themselves with their partner pages on Facebook, twitter or just an associate site by having a prominent link or a banner on the page. Ever wondered if these outbound links are taking the visitors away from your site. Those visitors could have engaged a little more or might even get converted instead of just going away to the other site and never coming back?
Here is an easy step you can implement using Google analytics and check if the visitors who click on those external links ever come back or not.
First of all, let’s see how you should tag your Exit Links, Events or Virtual pages.
Most would follow tagging outbound links as events. Doing this would let you know how many people have clicked on these links. But this does not tell us what happened after the click happened. Thus Event tracking can be discarded for this requirement.
To know whether the visitor who clicked on the exit link came back to the site or not, we can use ‘virtual page’ tagging. In the below example, we tagged a Facebook link on the site as a virtual page. And this is all the implementation that needs to be done to study that particular outbound link.
To study the post-click behavior of an exit link, go to the ‘Navigation Summary’ of the virtual page from ‘Site content’ report and check out the next page list. The ‘% Next Pages’ would approximately tell us what share of visits clicking on the exit link came back and interacted with the site. While ‘% Exits’ gives an idea about the share of visits that never came back to the site.
In addition, we can also obtain the following information using this implementation:
- In the site content report, by observing the ‘Avg. Time spent on Page’ metric, we can know how long does it take for visits to return back to the site if at all they came back. In other words it is the possible time spent on the external site
- The Next Page list of the Navigation Summary would tell us the most popular links clicked next, after they come back to the site.
However, like always, there are certain disadvantage and limitations also of this implementation:
- Virtual page tagging will inflate the page count, so it is advised to have a duplicate Google Analytics profile which filters these pages.
- Does not consider a visitor as a comeback visitor if the person just comes back to the site and does not interact with any site content after clicking on the outbound link.
So hope this will help you gain more clarity about your site performance and prevent you from losing visitors to your website.