How to report number of clicks on each external link
GA Noobie Trying to create a report that will list external link urls or domains and show number of click events against each. Tried following GA4 help and have a total report showing total external link clicks but can’t see how to break this down and show the link URLs .
Details
Reporting
The short answer is:
To report external link URLs and their click counts in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you must use the Explorations feature.
Standard GA4 reports do not expose the specific link URL dimension alongside the click event count by default.
The solution relies on GA4’s native Enhanced Measurement, which automatically collects the click event with the crucial link_url parameter for outbound clicks.
You’ll create a new Free-form Exploration report, importing the Link URL dimension and the Event count metric.
Crucially, you will apply a filter where the Event name exactly matches click and optionally, an additional filter for the Outbound parameter to exactly match true to isolate only the external clicks.
This API-driven data collection provides a cost-effective, no-code solution directly within the platform.
The long answer is:
The challenge you’re encountering is common for users transitioning from Universal Analytics, as GA4 structures its reporting around events and their associated parameters, which are often not fully exposed in the default ‘Reports’ section.
Your solution is a native, API-level integration available via the GA4 interface itself: creating a custom report using the Explorations feature, which leverages the powerful Google Analytics Data API under the hood to query raw event data and its rich parameters.
The core issue is that while the standard Engagement > Events report shows the total count for the click event, it does not drill down to the link_url parameter, which contains the specific external URL that was clicked.
To resolve this, you’ll perform a multi-step process within Explorations to effectively filter and display the raw event parameter data.
First, you must ensure that Enhanced Measurement is enabled for your web data stream in the Admin section, specifically confirming that Outbound clicks is toggled on; this is the mechanism that automatically fires the click event with parameters like link_url and outbound=true for external links.
Once data is collected, you navigate to Explorations and start a Blank or Free-form exploration.
In the Variables column, you will import the Link URL dimension and the Event count metric.
Drag the Link URL dimension into the Rows panel and the Event count metric into the Values panel of your report configuration.
The most critical step is adding a Filter to refine the data.
You must add a filter where Event name exactly matches click and, for precision, another filter where the Outbound dimension exactly matches true.
This configuration precisely isolates the outbound click events, showing the specific external link URL in the row and the number of times it was clicked using the event count metric.
This method is exceptionally cost-effective as it requires no custom coding, GTM deployment, or external service charges, relying entirely on the native, robust data collection and API-powered query capabilities inherent to the Google Analytics 4 platform.
Furthermore, once you have this Exploration, you can also consider integrating your GA4 data with Looker Studio via its connector to build a more permanently visible and easily shareable dashboard, which also draws upon the Google Analytics Data API for its source data.
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