In GA, how can I see which sites I sent the most traffic to?

Question

There is the "Exit Pages" tab, but that only shows what were the pages where people most exited the website.

Is there a place or configuration that could show me which external websites or pages my website sent the highest amount of traffic?

Answer 1

Yes, but you need to do a little work first.

Because links that lead away from your site are not automatically tracked by Google Analytics, you will need to manually tag all outbound links that you want to track.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en-GB

Google do have a work around

First, delay the outbound click by a fraction of a second. This delay will hardly be noticeable by the user, but it will provide the browser more time to load the tracking code. Without this method, it's possible that a user can click the outbound link before the tracking code loads, in which case the event will not be recorded. Here's what the JavaScript code in the section should look like: <script type="text/javascript"> function trackOutboundLink(link, category, action) { try { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category , action]); } catch(err){} setTimeout(function() { document.location.href = link.href; }, 100); } </script>

Next, revise outbound links to call the new function without first following the link. For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com, you would use the _trackEvent() method in the link's <a> tag: <a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="trackOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com'); return false;">

The example above uses the category label Outbound Links. This is a useful way to categorise all outbound links in the Event Tracking reports. It sets the specific name of the website as the second parameter in the call. With this structure in place, you could then see Outbound Links as one of the event categories and drill down to see which particular outbound links are the most popular. Make sure that you use return false for the onClick handler, because without that statement, the browser will follow the link before the recordOutboundLink method has a chance to execute.

Another way is:

You could set this up, by having an additional page in your website.

So if you're sending visitors to external traffic and would like to monitor which sites, then instead of sending them direct to that site, you send them to a unique page on your site which then forwards them to the destination site. This 'middle' page can be configured in GA and measured.

Your website with link to external site -> middle page -> directly forwards to external site

This is easily achieved with the QueryString, for example your webpage would show something like

<a href = "externalSite.com">...</a>

You would update it to

<a href = "mySite.com/forwardingPage.aspx?site=externalSite.com">...</a>

Then, the forwarding page can forward based upon the Querystring in a new window (thus allowing the middle page to actually load and the GA javascript to fire). This is now measurable in GA