Problem tracking outbound links using TagManager

Question

Hope somebody can help me. I'm a newby and have a website, using Google Analytics. I now want to track outbound links from my website to a third party website.

Based on what I found on internet, I have set up tag manager, sas you can see here: https://saskiahermans.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/TagManager.docx

However, after a few days I can't find any outbound clicks back in Google Analytics, where I'm sure there have been some.

What am I doing wrong? Can anybody please help?

Answer 1

Ok, after debugging it in comments and looking at the actual tracking, here what is sent to GA4 on outbound clicks on the site in question:

en: "click",
ep.link_id: "",
ep.link_classes: "",
ep.link_url: <URL>,
ep.link_domain: <domain>,
ep.outbound: "true",

Well this is plenty. Now go to your GA4 property, Admin -> Custom Definitions (under the Property) -> Make sure your eps (event parameters) are registered as custom dimensions. Like so:

You probably want to do that for the ep.outbound and ep.link_domain. Don't do it for the link_url. Url can be too high-cardinality for GA4 to handle.

After you're done with defining custom dimensions, give it time to gather data and filter into the custom dimensions (about a day) and go to your Explorer, click the + sign in Dimensions and add your custom dimensions to the list. Now just pull the dimensions and metrics you're interested in into the report and they all should be good.

If you still don't see the dimensions filled, make sure your measurement id in the tracking tid: "G-V24L72RLMM" is the same as in the Admin -> Data Streams. It's a popular mistake when people send data in a wrong analytics property.