I was inspired by one of Randfish's posts a few month's back about MyBlogLog, a system that keeps track of how many times your site visitors click through an outbound link. (It's the system that Rand has been running lately on seomoz.org that displays a small popularity tag whenever you mouse over an outbound link.). Since then there have been a few posts here on this topic with 2K making the capstone post titled "click Tracking Tools 101". Report from MyBlogLog
Follow-up On MyBlogLog
Click Tracking Tools 101
I run an academic hub site and although most of the links go out to informational sites I do have a few categories for commercial sites - and some of them are getting really nice traffic. The stats show that during the month of November some of those commercial sites got over 1000 visitors from me! I inherited these commercial categories from a previous owner and was going to delete. However, now I am in an informed position to ask them for sponsorship support.
I also noted that some groups of informational sites are getting thousands of visitors per month from my site, making me more aware of what my visitors are interested in. This has informed content development and we are now building a number of new pages that will cater to these same visitors that we are currently referring away.
If you don't know where your traffic is going think about trying one of the services that have been discussed here at seomoz.org. Or if you have a success story or question, just add them as a comment to this post.
I track Adsense for free with my own code. Have combined it with some other statistic so I can see referer, page views and page tracking also.
Have you tried using LinkLog from www.blogflux.com? I use it, very cool. Not sure if worth the money for Adsense tracking.
I have noticed that right clicks also will be counted as clicks with MyBlogLog. I guess not many are right clicking links and don't visit them, but it's something to be aware of.
BTW, I haven't tried it for a very long time, and because of that I have a question: Since MyBlogLog is using javascript to track clicks, spiders which run through the website should not be counted. Can somebody verify this?
I'm so glad you commented on this and followed up on it. I missed the earlier entries on the topic.
I have wanted to check where my visitors exit for a long time for the precise reasons you give. Initially I was seriously considering redirects to do this but I knew it wasn't fair to those with whom I traded links...and never bothered with any of the other links.
I'll give it a try.
It is the best way I can think of to see what my visitors find interesting for further content development.
Thank you.
Dave
It is nice that measurring traffic leaving your site has provided you with information you could need to improve the site and to potensially increase funding. If you in addition to this could identify the number of unique visitors you send in a time period and how this users typuically click through your site before they leave then you would have even more valuable data.