I’ve recently started using MyBlogLog to track which external links on my site are the most popular. Here are my thoughts on the free version of their service.
Once you’ve created an account with MyBlogLog, to start tracking outgoing links on your site, all you have to do is add a line of JavaScript to your pages.
Once you’ve done this and you’ve given it a few days for people to click on your external links, you’ll start seeing a tooltip when you mouse over your more popular links, which shows the relative popularity of that link.
Some of my links don’t show a tooltip; I assume that’s because they’re not popular enough to be listed.
You can set up your MyBlogLog service to either show the relative popularity of a link (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) or how many clicks it received that day (e.g. 5 clicks today, etc).
Or you can turn off the popularity tooltip, but where’s the fun in that?
When you login to MyBlogLog, the stats page is broken into two areas:
- Where readers came from to get to your site
- What external links they clicked on within your site
The free version of the service only shows the top ten links, which, for my needs, is fine. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how useful this service is in addition to whatever regular stats package you use (I use AWStats).
However, it’s certainly easy to use and it is interesting to see what people are clicking on when they leave your site.
If you have a commercial interest in what external links are being clicked on (e.g. you have a number of affiliate links) then I’m sure it would be much more useful to you.
MyBlogLog also provides you with a small piece of code that enables you to show the top five external links on your site.