How to Track Link Clicks in Google Analytics 4 and WordPress

Can you track link clicks in Google Analytics 4 and WordPress? Looking for a link click tracking plugin?

Google Analytics 4 does track some link clicks, but not all of them are tracked by default. To track those clicks, you’d need to manually set up event tracking using Google Tag Manager or custom code. Plus, reporting in GA4 is difficult.

To make link click tracking in Google Analytics 4 much easier, though, you can use the smartest Google Analytics WordPress plugin on the market: MonsterInsights. MonsterInsights can very easily automate your link click tracking.

In this article, we’ll show you how to track link clicks in Google Analytics for your WordPress site step by step.

Start Tracking Your Link Clicks Today!

Why Use Google Analytics 4 to Track Link Clicks in WordPress?

Links and buttons are major points of user interaction on your site. Most often, you’ll use links and buttons as the call-to-action elements that you want your users to click.

Let’s see a few examples:

• Affiliate links will lead your users to buy your referred products and let you earn some referral income.
• Add to Cart buttons will lead your customers to buy a product from your store.
• Form Submit buttons will let your users to send a message using your online contact form.
• File download buttons will let your users to download files from your site.
• Outbound links will redirect your readers to other websites (resources) you suggest they visit.
• Call-to-action buttons will take your users to your product landing pages, donate page, or other important conversion page.
• Click-to-call buttons are great for generating calls from users on mobile devices.
• Video play buttons are awesome to track so you know if your visitors are watching your videos.

Tracking these links and buttons can help you understand more about how exactly your users are navigating and interacting with your site.

For instance, if you track link clicks in Google Analytics, you can find out which outbound or affiliate links are getting clicked, which forms are getting submitted the most often, how many visitors are clicking to call you, and more. Then, you can analyze the reports and make improvements.

After you’ve optimized your links and buttons, they’re sure to get more visibility and more engagement. When users are more engaged on your site, your site conversions will increase significantly.

In a nutshell, Google Analytics click tracking can help you to understand exactly how your users interact on your site so that you can make informed decisions that lead to business growth.

Video Tutorial

How to Track Link Clicks in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 can provide you with many of your website’s important metrics and comes with built-in tracking for certain click events, but it doesn’t track them all. Plus, building the event report you need to help you understand your data gets pretty tricky.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics 4, you might need to hire an expert or a developer to help you get click tracking set up.

That’s why we recommend you use MonsterInsights to track your events and click metrics with ease.

MonsterInsights makes the entire process of using Google Analytics in WordPress super simple, so that anyone can easily set up Google Analytics and configure advanced tracking.

Just follow these steps to set up link click tracking in Google Analytics.

Step 1: Install MonsterInsights on Your WordPress Site

To get started, you’ll need to download MonsterInsights and install it on your WordPress.

You can find the setup files in your account area under the Downloads tab.

After downloading MonsterInsights, upload the ZIP files to WordPress. You can do that by going to Plugins » Add New » Upload Plugin.

Next, install the plugin and click the Activate Plugin button.

Step 2: Connect Google Analytics with MonsterInsights

After activating MonsterInsights, you’ll now have to connect your site with your Google Analytics account.

MonsterInsights makes this process effortless, as you don’t have to hire a developer or touch a single line of code. Using its setup wizard, you can add the tracking code to your website in no time.

For detailed instructions, here’s our guide on how to properly set up Google Analytics in WordPress.

Once it’s set up, you can view the overview report for your site on your WordPress dashboard from the MonsterInsights Dashboard Widget.

To view detailed reports for your site, you’ll need to go to Insights » Reports from your WordPress dashboard.

Now, let’s go ahead and learn how to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress using MonsterInsights.

How to Make Google Analytics 4 Track Link Clicks

Now that MonsterInsights is up and running on your website and you’ve connected Google Analytics, here are some of the ways MonsterInsights helps you track link clicks in WordPress.

1. Tracking Affiliate Links in WordPress

MonsterInsights makes affiliate link tracking easy in WordPress. Use a plugin like Pretty Links to make your links look nice, give them all a trackable prefix (word in the URL), tell MonsterInsights what prefix you’re using, and watch that data come into your reports.

Or, if you’re using ThirstyAffiliates to manage your affiliate links, you don’t need to configure anything to track your affiliate links in MonsterInsights. We integrate right into that plugin to automatically track your affiliate links.

You can view your affiliate links tracking reports by visiting Insights » Reports » Publishers from your WordPress dashboard.

You can always click the View All Affiliate Links Report button at the bottom of the MonsterInsights report to view more data in Google Analytics.

If you want detailed instructions, here’s our complete guide on setting up affiliate link tracking.

2. eCommerce Tracking in WordPress

MonsterInsights eCommerce tracking helps you to track all the data you need for your WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, GiveWP, LifterLMS, MemberPress, or Restrict Content Pro store. The eCommerce report will show a total Add to Cart button clicks, total Remove from Cart button clicks, and total purchase complete button clicks for your online store.

You’ll just need to install MonsterInsights eCommerce Addon on your WordPress site.

That’s it!

Now, you can view your eCommerce reports by going to Insights » Reports » eCommerce.

As you scroll down, you’ll see how many times the Add to Cart button was clicked and also the Remove from the Cart button, plus more metrics.

3. Form Submit Button Tracking in WordPress

MonsterInsights comes with a powerful Forms Tracking addon to automate forms conversion tracking.

By enabling forms tracking, you can view which forms are triggering the most views and submissions. The number of total submissions for forms is counted when a user clicks the Submit or Send button for a form.

To enable forms tracking, you’ll need to install and activate the Forms addon on your site. Navigate to Insights » Addons and find the Forms Addon. Then, click the Install button.

That’s it. You’ve completed the setup process. Now you can view your form conversion reports by going to Insights » Reports » Forms from your WordPress dashboard.

As you can see above in the screenshot, it’ll show you how many impressions and conversions each of your forms triggered. The number of conversions refers to the total clicks on the Submit or Send button in your forms.

4. Tracking File Download Button Clicks in WordPress

If you’ve added downloadable resources on your WordPress site, tracking those downloads can help you discover your most popular resources and make decisions that’ll grow your business.

MonsterInsights makes file downloads tracking very easy for WordPress users. You can set up this feature in just a few clicks.

First, you’ll need to go to Insights » Settings » Engagement. Next, scroll down to the File Downloads box.

You can see the file extensions that MonsterInsights tracks by default. To track downloads of more file extensions, you just need to add them to the field, separated by a comma.

That’s it! The plugin will now track all the clicks users perform to download your resources.

Now, you can see your download reports by going to Insights » Reports » Publishers.

5. Tracking Outbound Links in WordPress

MonsterInsights tracks your outbound link clicks automatically and shows you the reports in the Publishers reports tab. But you’ll need to purchase at least the Plus plan to view the Publishers report.

Once you’ve set up MonsterInsights properly, you can go to Insights » Reports » Publishers from your WordPress dashboard to view your outbound links reports.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can view your top outbound links with total clicks.

6. Tracking Media Clicks in WordPress

Want to know how many people are clicking to play the embedded videos on your site, and whether they’re watching all the way to the end? Set up video play tracking quickly and easily with the MonsterInsights Media Addon!

Just toggle tracking on for whichever type of videos you have embedded, then use Google Analytics to see your media tracking data.

For more on media tracking, read How to Track Video Plays in Google Analytics (Easiest Way).

7. Tracking Custom Links in WordPress

In addition to the automated options to track link clicks and button clicks discussed above, MonsterInsights lets you track your custom links such as call-to-action buttons easily.

Our Custom Link Attribution feature allows you easily add custom event tracking to your links.

It’s easy to add custom event tracking to your WordPress links with MonsterInsights. All you need to do is to add the following data-variable tags to the HTML of your link:

<a href="https://www.monsterinsights.com" data-vars-ga-category="Custom Category" data-vars-ga-action="Custom Action" data-vars-ga-label="Custom Label">Example</a>

Once you add the tags, MonsterInsights will send the link click data to Google Analytics 4 for you to use in your reports.

For a full tutorial on custom event tracking, check out How to Set Up Google Analytics Event Tracking in WordPress.

With that, you’ve successfully set up Google Analytics link and button click tracking.

Start Tracking Your Link Clicks Today!

We hope this article helped you to learn how to track link clicks in Google Analytics for your WordPress site.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out 45 Best WordPress Plugins for 2022 (Most are FREE).

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