Tracking visitors as they leave your site

No website is an island: hyperlinks connect your site to others on the Internet, and visitors flow into and out of your website by following these links.

In previous newsletters we have looked at some of the reasons and techniques for tracking incoming visitors, for example from search engines. Analysis of incoming visitors provides valuable information about marketing, promotions and partnering strategies.

But it is often equally valuable to track visitors leaving your site. This article looks at the reasons for tracking this aspect of visitor behaviour, and gives some tips on how you can get more information about outgoing visitors.

Tracking outgoing visitors: why?

There are several reasons why you might wish to track visitors leaving your site via an outbound hyperlink. This section gives some examples.

A common and important case is where you feature an outbound hyperlink to a partner site as part of a formal or informal commercial relationship - for example, two sites agreeing to a comarketing relationship where each carries banner ads for the other. In such cases you will want to have an independent measure of how many visitors you are sending to each partner, in order to assess the value of the relationship to the partner.

Some of the outbound hyperlinks on your site may be provided purely as a service to your visitors - for example, connecting them to other resources on the web that you think may be of value for them. In this case it is useful to know which of these outbound links are actually used the most by your visitors - this may enable you to identify other links of value to them, and to remove links which are rarely used, thus making your links more relevant and attractive.

Finally, in analysing how visitors use your website it is valuable to study where and why visits end. Unless you track outbound hyperlinks, you cannot distinguish between a visit which ends because the visitor left your site via a hyperlink and one which ends for some other reason (for example, the visitor returns to a favourite search engine via a bookmark). If you can make this distinction it can help you to improve the design of the site. For example, if you find that a lot of visitors are leaving your home page via an outbound hyperlink that you provide purely as a service, you may wish to make that link less prominent or move it to a deeper location so that visitors spend more time on your site.

Tracking outgoing visitors: how?

First the bad news: outgoing hyperlinks are usually not tracked at all. This is because when a visitor clicks on a hyperlink from your site to a third party site, the click is sent immediately to the third party webserver: your webserver does not even know that the link has been followed. This is in stark contrast to incoming hyperlinks, which most webservers record automatically.

Now the good news: it is quite easy to change your site so that outgoing hyperlinks are tracked.

There are several different technical approaches. The easiest is to direct all outbound hyperlinks to an "exit page" on your own site. For example, instead of hyperlinking directly to "www.vbis.biz" we might choose to have a link to "www.site-intelligence.co.uk/exit.html?site=www.vbis.biz". The page "exit.html" contains some server-side code to generate the required outbound hyperlink and to automatically redirect the visitor to the required page. You will probably need to create the exit page code yourself - though a few application servers do provide this as standard - but it is relatively simple.

Why does that help? Because the exit page is served by your own webserver, the outgoing click is recorded and can be analysed.

As a bonus, you can use the exit page to display additional information to the exiting visitor. For example, many sites show a legal notice disclaiming responsibility for third party site content.

Summary

It can be valuable to track outgoing visitors, but most sites are not set up to gather information on outbound hyperlinks. The required changes are quite simple to implement, for example by using a special "exit page".

Any site featuring hyperlinks to third party websites should consider putting in place a tracking mechanism for outbound hyperlinks.

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