outbound_click

When it fires

On a click anywhere inside an anchor whose host is not this page's, unless the link is a file, in which case it is a file_download instead and never both.

The listener sits on the document in the capture phase. A router that stops propagation on the way up has not stopped us yet, and a link its own handler removes from the page is still in the tree when we look at it.

Nothing is intercepted. We never call preventDefault, never rewrite the href and never wait for the beacon, so the link is exactly as fast as it would be if the tag had never loaded. A link that is slower because it was measured is a link nobody wants measured.

Attributes

Every entry also carries the resource its client sends once per batch: session.id, user.id once you have called user(), and the rest of the list on the overview. Anything you pass yourself lands in the same map, and your key wins on a collision.

What it never carries

Not the page the click happened on, not the text of the link, and not where on the page it sat. The current URL is read to decide whether the link is off-site and is then thrown away. If you need to know which page sends traffic to a partner, write your own event on the click and put the page in it.

Questions it answers

A widget is a filter, a group by, an aggregate, a time bucket and a limit. These are those five parts written out, and every one of them is something you can build yourself.

See also

• file_download
• page_view