How to track clicks on inbound links besides via URL parameters?

Question

We use a custom CMS on a site and we're having various parameters on inbound links for own tracking and inbound marketing purposes.

Usually these URL parameters are added to the links so the system could collect stats about where exactly which links were clicked, how often, and so on.

If the same link appears on different spots on the site, line in an article, in a sidebar, in footer, in "recommended" section and so on, it would have different parameters in each of these spots, similar to these:

• http://example.com/link.html?p=footer
• http://example.com/link.html?a=1
• http://example.com/link.html?p=article&a=3

Later, by having the stats, dynamically, we can better interlink the site, and give better article recommendations to the users, etc.

However, this technique causes issues with crawl budget from search engines, as there are many different URL parameters (and their multiple combinations) each URL could have, and even, if the pages have canonical tags, spiders still waste a lot of crawl budget on countless "non-original" URLs instead of crawling just canonical versions.

Question: What are some other ways of having all this inner tracking/gathering of click data for inbound marketing purposes happening, but without the use of URL parameters? How else can we collect link clicking data like before, besides via URL parameters?

The main goal is to have clean canonical URLs without parameters to preserve crawl budget (and have correct page rank flow), but at the same time collect the click data for our needs.

Answer 1

This is my 2 cents, but to preserve crawl budget and page authority I would utilize Json breadcrumbs. Another way to add differentiating clicks is to add a google analytics tracking event. From the code below, you're sending an even when your link is clicked and the label is 'page1.html'. You don't need to use javascript either.

    <a href="page1.html" onClick="clickone()">Anchor Text </a>

<script>
function clickone(){
ga ('send', 'event', 'internal-link', 'click', 'page1.html')
}
</script>

I really only use url building for external link campaigns, but that's me. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Create an array using PHP Session variables that add a new page with each new internal click. On an external click add the array to a text file.

Answer 3

I would start by writing a click counter that store number of clicks in text file with the links id, class, href, title. Here's were I would start: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26891603/button-click-counter-save-number

Actually if you write to an xml file you can have it display on a digital report.

Answer 4

The more or less standard way of managing traffic sources is using UTM parameters instead of your own custom parameters. UTM parameters are recognised as dimensions to track traffic sources by all the main analytics packages, including Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, Piwik and many others.

There's many tools to produce and standardise UTM parameters. The most known one is Google's campaign URL builder.

To track clicks in links to other sites many people use events triggered by Javascript in the page.