In this post I’ll show you how you can create a report to measure internal and outbound link clicks in Google Data Studio.

This is a follow up from a previous post ( How to track Internal and Outbound link clicks in Google Tag Manager ) about how to setup the correct link tracking in GTM.

Since we’ve set up the tags so we can see what links our website visitors are clicking on in Google Analytics, we can set up a dashboard in Data Studio to help better understand how users navigate on the site.

1. Adding the data to Data Studio

First you’ll need to add your Google Analytics account as a data source.

Now that the data is added we can start building the report.

2. Creating a table for Outbound link clicks

In the previous post we created both our internal and outbound link Events with the following setup;

Track Type = Event
Category = Navigation
Action = Internal Link Click / Outbound Link Click
Label = {{Click URL}}

So the first thing to do is to create a table for our Outbound link clicks, so clicks on links leading to another website.

We can do this by creating a table set up as the following;

Dimension = Event Label
Metric = Total Events

However, this is showing all event labels, not just Outbound link click events. So we need to create a filter for this table.

To make sure we are only seeing Outbound link clicks, create the filter like this;

Include > Event Action > Equal to (=) > Outbound Link click

Now it should only show links to other websites. We can also change some of the styling and rename the Dimension and Metric columns.

For example, we want to rename the dimension column from “Event Label” to “Outbound Links”.

You can do this by clicking on the ABC icon next to the Dimension or Metric name. We can also rename the metric “Total Events” to “Link clicks”. This helps make our table easier to understand.

We can now create the table for Internal Link clicks.

3. Creating table for Internal link clicks

We follow the exact same steps as for the Outbound table, except when it comes to creating a table filter.

For that we set up the following table filter.

Include > Event Action > Equal to (=) > Internal Link click

We also rename our Dimension and Metric columns to “Internal Links” and “Link clicks”.

I’ve also decided to alter the tables by removing pagination, removing row numbers and adding a heatmap for the metric column.

Our Internal link click table now looks like this.

Next we can move on to our final table which will show page titles.

4. Creating a table for Page Titles

The next step is creating a table that lets us filter by Page Title. We create a table set up as the following;

Dimension = Page Title
Metric = Page Views

We also need to make sure that under Interactions “Apply Filter” is ticked. This will let us filter by page to see what outbound and internal links were clicked on each specific page.

5. Creating two scorecards for Outbound and Internal link clicks

The final step is to create two scorecards. One showing the total number of outbound link clicks and the other the total number of internal link clicks.

And to make sure we only see the type of link click we want, we had either the Outbound or Internal filters (that we created for the tables) to the scorecards.

6. Taking a look at the finished Data Studio report

And after going through these steps we arrive at our final Data Studio report, which we can use to measure things!

Hope you enjoyed this post about how to measure Internal and Outbound link clicks using Google Data Studio.

Remember to check out the previous post about setting up theses tags using Google Tag Manager.

How to track Internal and Outbound link clicks in Google Tag Manager

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