Outbound clicks and file downloads!

We're now tracking outbound links from your site, as well as file downloads such as JPG and ZIP files. You should start seeing them relatively soon in your stats, well, if you have such content anyways. This feature does require JavaScript, though - sorry all you wordpress.com users, what can I say! Email PhotoMatt :)

This feature can be customized to meet your needs, or disabled if it is causing any problems on your site. (If it is causing problems, please let us know!) However, it was written to be as compatible as possible with any other services you might be running that perform similar functions - MyBlogLog, for example. These actions will show up in the standard page view pages (clicks, and spy), but will soon have their own dedicated pages as well.

There is a lot more information here, including how it can be customized and disabled. The customization is somewhat basic at the moment, but is the first step towards being able to track any data you want for your visitors - usernames, cookie values, and more. That is just around the corner.

This feature is open to everyone right now, but it will likely be a premium only feature in about a month or so. Our site will soon be going through a somewhat major redesign, in terms of what content goes where. And there will be pages dedicated to just analyzing outbound links as well as file downloads. For now, however, it is just mixed in with the standard page views.

9 comments | Mar 22 2007 7:19pm

Reader Comments

Awesome! Thanks!

Aaress Mar 22 2007 10:59pm

I just spotted this feature, so I guessed there'd be a 'blog entry to that affect.

Back-links are the one feature I was missing when using Clicky, so I'm personally really glad to see them...

Wayne Smallman Mar 23 2007 1:18am

Great work! I was also missing this feature.

Suggestion: There should be a page which lists all the outbound links and only them though.

Valentin A. Mar 23 2007 1:35am

Great addition to your features list. When finished, include a page to analyze them, and two more things:

a date1-date2 mode of access
a csv export of data, all of it.

I'll try to explain it to my clients and perhaps they will move completely form urchin to clicky

good work!

Delfi_r Mar 23 2007 4:39am

Dear friends,

it would be nice if you could add a function to show only incoming links, not outcoming too. :) Could you do that? ;)

Vitaly Friedman Mar 23 2007 9:14am

Thanks everyone. As mentioned in the post, there will be a page to show just outbound links and just file downloads. That will come with the minor site redesign that should be ready pretty soon.

Vitaly - we've been doing that forever! That's what the "links" page is - incoming links to your web site!

Sean (Clicky) Mar 23 2007 12pm

You have redesigned the first page, and it's great, as Actions and Average Time are displayed along as visits.

You are on the right direction!

Delfi_r Mar 24 2007 4:42am

Thanks!

In case anyone hasn't noticed there are a few minor bugs with detecting outbound links and file downloads. Going from one subdomain to another subdomain is considered an outbound link because different subdomains are typically different sites. However this isn't supposed to occur when going for example from www.getclicky.com to getclicky.com, but it does. I will try to get this fixed soon. Also, for some sites, subdomains aren't actually different sites but in fact categories for a site (eg "art.ebay.com" and "books.ebay.com"). Because of this I will be adding a way to disable a list of given subdomains for outbound tracking, but it's too complicated to be automatic, considering there can be multiple levels of subdomains and all that. Also it doesn't take mirrors into account yet. I will get that added relatively soon.

When an MSIE visitor clicks an outbound link that has an image inside of it, it is reporting the image details instead of the link details. If you look at Clicky's list of most popular outbound links - http://getclicky.com/stats/links-outbound?site_id=10&date=2007-03-24 - you will see the first one, by a long shot, is "getclicky.com/media/arrow.gif", but the description is "Visit referer". This is from a user clicking the little arrow icon next to a referer, and the URL reported should be the URL you're going to, not the URL of that image. My very limited analysis at this point seems to indicate it's an MSIE only problem (surprise) but I'm not for sure of that yet.

Sean (Clicky) Mar 24 2007 10:05am

We reviewed Get Clicky about a month ago and we are pretty big fans. You can read more about our thoughts at http://www.odinjobs.com/blogs/page/thatsinteresting?entry=get_clicky_sees_what_google

Carl Williams Apr 25 2007 1:42pm

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Outbound clicks and file downloads!

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