How to track outbound link clicks in GA4
GA4 can tell you when someone clicks a link that takes them off your site, to a partner, a marketplace, a social profile. Some of it works out of the box; the rest is a quick Tag Manager setup.
The built-in way: enhanced measurement
GA4's enhanced measurement captures outbound clicks automatically as a click event with an outbound: true parameter, as long as the link points to a different domain. Check it is enabled in GA4 Admin under your web data stream, Enhanced measurement. For many sites this is all you need.
When you need a custom event
The automatic version has limits: it only fires on true cross-domain links, and the useful detail (which link, which section) is not always easy to report on. For precise tracking, fire your own event from Google Tag Manager using a Click trigger, sending the link URL and text as parameters.
Making it reportable
- Register the parameters (like
link_url) as custom dimensions in GA4 so they show in reports. - If an outbound click matters commercially, mark the event as a key event.
One caveat: because the person is leaving, the event has to fire before the browser navigates away, which GTM handles but a hand-rolled script often gets wrong.
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