: How to track clicks on inbound links besides via URL parameters? We use a custom CMS on a site and we're having various parameters on inbound links for own tracking and inbound marketing purposes.

@Shelley277

The more or less standard way of managing traffic sources is using UTM parameters instead of your own custom parameters. UTM parameters are recognised as dimensions to track traffic sources by all the main analytics packages, including Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, Piwik and many others.

There's many tools to produce and standardise UTM parameters. The most known one is Google's campaign URL builder.

To track clicks in links to other sites many people use events triggered by Javascript in the page.

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@Ravi8258870

I would start by writing a click counter that store number of clicks in text file with the links id, class, href, title. Here's were I would start: stackoverflow.com/questions/26891603/button-click-counter-save-number
Actually if you write to an xml file you can have it display on a digital report.

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@Alves908

Create an array using PHP Session variables that add a new page with each new internal click. On an external click add the array to a text file.

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@Miguel251

This is my 2 cents, but to preserve crawl budget and page authority I would utilize Json breadcrumbs. Another way to add differentiating clicks is to add a google analytics tracking event. From the code below, you're sending an even when your link is clicked and the label is 'page1.html'. You don't need to use javascript either.

<a href="page1.html" onClick="clickone()">Anchor Text </a>

<script>
function clickone(){
ga ('send', 'event', 'internal-link', 'click', 'page1.html')
}
</script>


I really only use url building for external link campaigns, but that's me. Hope this helps.

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