How to Track Link Clicks and Button Clicks in WordPress (Easy Way)

When you’re running a WordPress website, it’s important to know how users behave and interact with your content. Every click, whether on a link or a button, offers valuable insights into user behavior, content effectiveness, and overall website performance.

While tracking these interactions might seem complex, WordPress offers a straightforward solution. We’ve helped many users set up tracking on their sites, and we’ll walk you through a simple process for tracking link clicks without editing code.

You can use the insights to improve your website, plan your marketing and content strategies, see which articles work the best, and see where people click the most.

In this guide, we will show you how to easily track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress.

Why Should You Track Link and Button Clicks in WordPress?

Links and buttons are two of the most common ways users interact with websites on the Internet. These elements also lead website visitors to make purchases, sign up, and convert into customers.

Tracking how your users interact with different elements on your WordPress website helps you learn what’s working. More importantly, it helps you understand what’s not working and needs improvement.

For instance, if users are not clicking on the ‘add to cart’ button in your online store, then you can investigate what’s stopping them from doing so. Another great example is your affiliate links. You can track which links your users click more often than others.

These insights can help you make data-driven decisions for the success of your business. Having said that, let’s look at how to track clicks on a link in WordPress.

We have broken down this guide into the following sections so you can easily follow along:

Tracking Link and Button Clicks in WordPress Using MonsterInsights

The best tool to collect marketing data on your website is Google Analytics. However, despite Google’s best efforts, many beginners and even experienced marketers find it a bit intimidating.

This is where MonsterInsights comes in. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that allows you to properly set up Google Analytics and make the most out of it.

MonsterInsights goes beyond just adding a tracking script in the footer. It automatically adds proper event tracking to all links, buttons, cart areas, and more. Most importantly, it also shows you human-readable reports inside your WordPress dashboard.

MonsterInsights has a free version, but you will need at least the Pro plan to take full advantage of all the powerful tracking features it offers.

To learn more, see our detailed MonsterInsights review.

Setting up MonsterInsights is super easy.

First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will see the welcome screen and the setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Launch the Wizard’ button and follow the onscreen instructions to connect your website to Google Analytics.

If you need detailed instructions, then see our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, which will walk you through the entire setup.

Once you have set up MonsterInsights, you can resume this tutorial. Now that everything is running let’s start setting up click tracking.

Tracking Affiliate Links in WordPress

A lot of web publishers use affiliate marketing to make money online.

As an affiliate marketer, you will need to learn how your affiliate links are doing. Obviously, you can track your affiliate earnings from third-party resources, but that does not give you an accurate picture of how users interact with your affiliate links.

Most affiliate marketers use a link-cloaking plugin like ThirstyAffiliates. This allows you to create shorter affiliate links and manage all your links inside WordPress.

For example, https://www.example.com/refer/awesomeproduct/.

MonsterInsights makes it easy to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.

Simply go to Insights » Settings and switch to the ‘Publisher’ tab. From here, you can add your affiliate link’s unique path to start tracking.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

Within a few hours, you will be able to see your affiliate link performance in your Publisher reports located under the Insights » Reports menu in WordPress.

Tracking Outbound Links in WordPress

Outbound links are links pointing to external websites. These could also be uncloaked affiliate links, links to your partner websites, or other websites you own.

MonsterInsights automatically tracks all clicks on those outgoing links. You can view them by visiting the Insights » Reports page and going to the Publishers report.

Pro tip: If you see that you are sending a lot of clicks to an external website, then you should contact them to work out a strategic partnership. This can be a sponsorship, cross-promotion, affiliate partnership, etc.

For more details, please see our guide on how to track outbound links in WordPress.

eCommerce Tracking in WordPress

If you run an eCommerce business using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, then you should track which products get the most clicks.

MonsterInsights comes with powerful eCommerce tracking features. Now, it’s time to turn on eCommerce tracking on your WordPress blog.

If you try to set up eCommerce tracking manually, then you’ll need to edit the tracking code, use Google Tag Manager, or both. The manual method can be tricky for beginners, and the slightest mistake can mess up your tracking and data.

With the MonsterInsights eCommerce addon, the process is very simple. All you need to do is enable the addon and the plugin will automatically set up eCommerce tracking on your site.

First, you need to go to the Insights » Addons page. From here, you need to install the ‘eCommerce’ addon for MonsterInsights.

After that, you need to head over to the Insights » Settings page and switch to the eCommerce tab.

From here, you can turn on enhanced eCommerce tracking. MonsterInsights will automatically detect your eCommerce plugin and turn it on for you.

That’s all you have successfully enabled eCommerce tracking on your website.

The best part is that MonsterInsights shows the performance of your online store in your WordPress dashboard. Simply go to Insights » Reports and switch to the eCommerce » Overview tab.

You will see an overview of your eCommerce conversions.

Plus, you can see which product is performing the best and helps generate the most revenue.

The report will also help you find your top referral sources, as well as the exact conversions and revenue for each source. This information helps you learn which referral sources to maximize and which are not doing well.

You may want to see our step-by-step guide on how to properly set up eCommerce tracking in WordPress.

Tracking File Downloads in WordPress

If you have a membership site that sells digital downloads or offers downloadable content on your website, then tracking file download buttons will help you find how users interact with those files.

MonsterInsights automatically tracks file downloads for common file types like documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, and zip files.

You can also add other file types that you may want to track. Simply go to the Insights » Settings page and then switch to the ‘Engagement’ tab.

From here, you will need to scroll down to the File Downloads section.

Here, you can add the file type extension you want to track.

You can view file download stats by visiting Insights » Reports and switching to the ‘Publisher’ tab.

After that, scroll down to the ‘Top Download Links’ report to see which files get the most downloads.

Tracking Form Conversions in WordPress

Forms play an important role in the success of any website. You use forms for an email newsletter, shopping cart, purchase and order forms, and all your contact forms.

It is important to understand how users interact with your forms, which forms get more conversions, and which forms are not getting enough attention.

Let’s start tracking forms in WordPress using MonsterInsights.

First, you need to head over to the Settings » Addons page. From here, install the ‘Forms’ addon.

Once enabled, MonsterInsights will automatically detect the forms on your website and start gathering interaction data. It works seamlessly with all popular WordPress form plugins like WPForms, Formidable Forms, Gravity Forms, and more.

To view your form reports, you need to go to the Insights » Reports page and switch to the ‘Forms’ tab.

For more details, please see our guide on how to set up WordPress form tracking in WordPress.

Tracking Any Custom Link in WordPress

So far, we have discussed how to track button and link clicks across your website automatically. What if you wanted to track a specific link on your WordPress site and create custom reports?

Luckily, MonsterInsights makes this easy as well. It’s called a custom link attribution feature, and here is how you can add that to any link on your website. Simply add your link in the following format:

<a href="https://www.example.com" data-vars-ga-category="Call to action clicks" data-vars-ga-action="CTA link click" data-vars-ga-label="Homepage CTA clicks">My custom link</a> 

This link contains three new link attributes:

• data-vars-ga-category: Sets a category for your link
• data-vars-ga-action: Describes the action this link performs
• data-vars-ga-label: A label for your link that helps you identify it

To insert the link in your content, first head to the content editor by editing a post or a page. Next, you will need to click the 3 dots to view more options and then select the ‘Edit as HTML’ option.

This will change your text from the visual view to the HTML view.

Now go ahead and add your custom link. Once that is done, simply update or publish your page or post.

MonsterInsights will now start to track your custom links in Google Analytics.

You can find your custom link tracking report in Google Analytics by going to the Reports » Engagement » Event: Event name.

On the other hand, you can also view the data in Universal Analytics. But hurry and export your reports because Universal Analytics will close down soon and all your previous data will be lost.

You can find the report by going to the Behavior » Events » Top Events section.

We hope this article helped you learn how to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress. You may also want to see our complete guide on WordPress SEO and our expert picks for the best email marketing services for small business.

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