MyBlogLog – Track your Outbound Links

I just signed up with the free service at MyBlogLog (affiliate link) which tracks where people go when they leave your blog. Well it tracks them to a point (its not quite stalking) in that it tracks which links your readers click that take them out of your blog.

They offer two versions – a free one which tracks the last 10 outbound links clicked and a paid Pro version ($3 per month) that gives you real time stats and more than just the last 10.

When you sign up for the free version you get 7 days for free of the pro version. You need a different email address for each blog you sign up for. I’m tracking two blogs – this one and my digital camera one. I’m interested in knowing about the outbound links for a number of reasons:

• I guess mainly it gives some instant feedback about what your readers are interested in and how they are using your blog.

• It also might give you an indication as to who is on the receiving end of your traffic (ie if you find a lot of your traffic is going to one blog maybe you could call in a favor from that blogger (or it might explain why they are being extra nice to you).

• It gives you an indication about how much credibility your readers think you have (ie if they all click through on every recommendation you make you might actually be trusted.

• It could give some indication of which ads your readers are clicking on and which they are not (although from what I can see it doesn’t seem to be tracking Adsense clicks which would have been a very handy feature!!! It is tracking some of the static text ads that I’ve got on my digital camera site however which is very useful information to know.

Anyway – its a fun new toy to play with and I’ll make a decision in a week whether to continue using it or not at a pro version level.

found via Reflexive-Blog

Update: Already after just a few minutes of using this tool I can see the benefits of it. For instance it does track my text links quite well and I can already see that one of my amazon text link ads is getting clicked on a few times this hour. This is good to know as it gives me an indication that that link works well in the position I’ve placed it. This could be useful information.

Having said this I can also see what one of my main frustrations will be of this service. In using it on a site as large as my digital camera one (with 2000 pages) I would love to know what pages the clicks are actually coming from on my blog. I don’t have an accurate memory of where each link is placed on my blog – some pages have 10 to 20 outbound links so tracking which page each click is coming from would have been a feature I’d be happy to pay money for.