outbound link tracking, adapted from SNAC project

0.md

track external links

assuming modern as of 2016 ga tracking code and jquery is on the page

based on the example in the manual but does not require adding onclick="trackOutboundLink('http://www.example.com'); return false;" to the HTML of every link

• event category outbound
• event action click
• event label url of the outbound click

If you are already doing things with ga for events or whatnot, you may need to bust out with /* jshint latedef: false */ if you are using jshint and get errors about ga being used before it is defined.

outbound_link_events.js

$(document).ready(function() {
  if (typeof ga !== 'undefined') {
    // google event tracking track outbound links
    // based on https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en
    // attach on click handler to body to watch for outbound links
    $('body').on('click','a[href^="http://"], a[href^="https://"]',function() {
      var url = $(this).attr('href');
      ga('send', 'event', 'outbound', 'click', url, {
        'transport': 'beacon',  // use navigator.sendBeacon
        // click captured and tracked, send the user along
        'hitCallback': function () {
          document.location = url;
        }
      });
      return false;
    });
  }
}  

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