External links (also known as ‘Outbound links’) are links to other websites from your website.
An external link is a URL that, when clicked, takes a user from one web page to another web page, and both the source and destination web pages are hosted on different websites/domains.
For example, a link to your LinkedIn profile from your ‘About Us’ page is an external link.
Introduction to GA4 outbound link/click tracking.
Through the GA4 ‘outbound clicks’ tracking feature, you can track clicks on external links in your GA4 property without any additional code or tagging.
Once you have enabled the ‘Outbound clicks’ tracking feature under ‘Enhanced Measurement’ in your GA4 property, GA4 automatically start tracking clicks on external links (i.e. outbound clicks):
Note: Outbound link tracking is also known as ‘exit tracking’.
Understanding the ‘click’ event.
Once you have enabled the ‘Outbound clicks’ tracking feature under ‘Enhanced Measurement’ in your GA4 property, whenever a user clicks on an external link on your website, GA4 fires an event called ‘click’.
You can see the ‘click’ event in your GA4 property via the ‘Events’ report:
You should check how the ‘click’ events are being recorded in the GA4 BigQuery data table and what event parameters are being passed along with this event type.
Take a close look at the various event parameters which are sent along with the ‘click’ events:
- ga_session_id
- page_title
- page_referrer
- page_location
- link_url
- ga_session_number
- batch_ordering_id
- outbound
- link_classes
- engagement_time_msec
- ignore_referrer
- session_engaged
- content_group
- engaged_session_event
- batch_page_id
- link_domain
While creating a text prompt to generate SQL, we will refer to these event parameters (esp, ‘link_url’ and ‘page_location’).