There’s news over at the Site Meter blog today that the free website statistics package has added tracking of outbound links to it’s offering.
The free version of their service will now track the last 100 URLs that your readers leave your blog to visit if you have the javascript version of their tracker installed on your blog.
Not included in the tracking are clicks on AdSense ads (or most other advertising) and clicks generated by javascript. It only tracks the last click of a reader on your site (ie if a reader clicks multiple links during their visit it only shows the last one).
They also say that it doesn’t track clicks by readers using certain browsers (including Safari). This might explain why it seems to only be giving me a URL for about 1 in 10 of my outbound links (see screenshot below).
This is a welcome addition to Site Meter which is going to make stats packages like MyBlogLog have to rethink their service – but I have to say that the implementation of it is not as good as the Performancing Metrics package that should be released in beta in the next week or so.
Found via Makovision
Thanks for mentioning this! I use sitemeter on my site and never noticed it was added!
I agree, it does not work too well with javascripts, so I’m getting a lot of empty stats, but it is extremely useful to see which text links people click on.
i just looked at my clicks and it is showing outbound clicks on affiliate programs, that is good news, lets hope I can see a sale from it!
rediculously helpful. I’m now addicted to my stats
I use a number of stats tracking programs including Mint and Analytics and each provides its own outclick tracker (Mint Outclicks Pepper and Analytics’ Site Overlay), but I’ve been beta testing CrazyEgg recently and I really like it.
One especially cool feature of CrazyEgg is the heatmap.
Good stuff.
crazy egg hasn’t worked for me
That’s a cool new feature. Nice!
David Askaripour
http://www.cashcampus.com/ftt
I use awstats, its not pretty, but I love the organization of the information, and how easy it is to catch patterns at a glance. It’s open source, maybe someone can give it a web 2.0 face lift.
Hehe it’s not pretty but then neither is Excel and lots of people use that. :) In fact Sitemeter’s not really pretty either (purple and green graphs? c’mon) but they work!
I’ve been using statcounter.com for a long time now, and felt the basic features were good enough for me. However, just recently I added addfreestats.com who also have a good outbound details. It tracks the last couple of people (I think it was 500) and it gives a breif history of the user (entry/exit page, how they navigated in the site, time they stayed, country, etc.)
how can i access the crazyegg service? it seems to be in beta stage and is closed to using. email me if you can help me get access. attractionchronicles (at) gmail. com
Oh, I forgot to mention…
Like Donovan (post 10), if anyone has the opportunity to invite people to crazyegg, please invite me too (mkda85 _at_ gmail.com).. Thanks in advance.