To Track External links clicks, fire up GTM again and set up a trigger to fire only when external links are clicked. When you attatch the trigger to the GA tag, it has to be anchored to an “event”.
Remember, pageviews is given as the default for implementing GA across the site.
- Set up Trigger – External Link Clicks
2. Enable up Variables – This captures information about the trigger, in this case, what external link was clicked. Make sure you enable this so then you can attatch it onto the trigger later on.
3. Create GA Event Tag – Create the GA Event tag. Set the track type to “Event” – Because we are tracking the event of a Click to a Link.
Event Tracking Paramters – You can put whatever you want for the Category, Action, Label, etc. This is just what will be recorded for you in Google Analytics.
You can use the Variables for this, so the information about each click will be recorded and reported to GA.
i.e. For External Link clicks, we can do something like this:
Category -> External Link Click
Action -> Track what page that the link was clicked on -> Variable Page Path
{{Page Path}}
Label -> The URL of the Link that was Clicked -> {{Click URL}}
Non Interaction Hit -> This is so that the action doesn’t become a pageview, so hit this as true.
4. Connect the Trigger – Connect the GA Event Tag you just created to the External Link Click Trigger that was created earlier
5. Debug, and Check out GA! – Debug the Tag/Trigger you just set up, and look at your GA now. The Event that we just created will now be imported there so you can see it showing up in the dashboard. The Category, Action and Labels will be reported to GA too if you used variables. So cool!