An outbound click is a user click on your site that sends them to a different domain. Think of it as handing visitors off to another website. It’s usually tracked as a click event and often analyzed alongside traffic sources like referral and campaign tags such as UTM parameters.
Why it matters: outbound clicks reveal which partners, CTAs, and placements actually move users off-site—affiliate links, marketplace buttons, docs on another domain, social profiles, etc. They feed into downstream reporting (e.g., partner performance, assisted journeys in an attribution model) and can correlate with your on-site conversion rate when external steps are part of the funnel.
How is it measured?
At minimum, you log an event when a link’s destination host ≠ your site’s host. For multi-domain ecosystems you own, set up cross-domain tracking; otherwise those clicks look “outbound” and can create self-referral noise.
Common formulas (pick one and stay consistent):
- Outbound Click Rate (per session) = Outbound Clicks / Sessions × 100%
- Outbound Click Rate (per pageview) = Outbound Clicks / Pageviews × 100%
Mini-example:
If a landing page had 2,000 pageviews and recorded 180 outbound clicks to partners, OCR(pageview) = 180 / 2,000 × 100% = 9%.
Outbound Click vs. Exit
Not every exit is an outbound click. Exit is just the last pageview of a session and may happen with no click at all (tab closed, network switch, etc.). Outbound clicks are explicit user actions. Use exit rate to diagnose page friction; use outbound clicks to assess external link performance and handoffs.
Quick decision table
| Action on your page | Counts as outbound? |
|---|---|
| Link to partner.com | Yes |
| Link to your docs on docs.yourbrand.com (no cross-domain set) | Yes (but should be fixed) |
| Link to your docs on docs.yourbrand.com (proper cross-domain) | No |
| Closing the tab / typing a new URL | No (that’s an exit, not a click) |
| Link to another page on your site | No (internal click) |
Tip: Keep a clean, deterministic rule for “external domain list,” log the destination URL/host as event parameters, and segment by link position to see which blocks actually pull weight.