Can we get links that aren't redirects?

I am just getting interested in tracking outbound links as I need to be able to track how many clicks there are on an outbound "buy tickets" button. I just posted a topic in the forums related to your question. http://drupal.org/node/152434

I just discovered the Links Package, so I'm not familiar with it's abilities. I'll be looking into how it works for the next couple of days.

Here's the gist of the post:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm wondering what the different options are for tracking outbound traffic. If someone could point me to modules or other solutions, that would be awesome. It would be great if the solution allowed google analytics to "see" the clicks so that reporting could be integrated.

Google Analytics integration
As I said above, it would be great if the clicks to buy tickets are tracked by google analytics. Does the url example.com/links/goto/x/y/links_weblink get tracked this way or does it get forwarded without notifying Google Analytics? Couldn't the user be sent to a page which has the google analytics code and nothing else and once the page loads the user would be redirected to the target url. Is there a better way?

Making the process automatic for the administrator
The approach below would result in the url be written out in the HTML as a normal url (good for search engines???), but when the user clicks the link, they would instead be passed to the link packages tracking url.

Here are the needs for this proposal:

• Links Package - tracking url will be used to collect data about clicks.
• input filter identifies outbound links - I was thinking it would be possible to create a filter that automatically picks up all outbound links, and adds a class to the link identifying it as outbound. This class would be added to fielded links by modifying the theing function
• jQuery redirects outbound links to outbound link processor - When a user clicks on a link link with the "outbound" class some form of JScript would intercept the click and pass the user through a link counter which would invisibly pass the user to the requested url. Thickbox seems to intercept links using this method, so I assume it's something easy to do in jQuery.

Note: To me, this just sounds like a simple, yet powerful approach to this problem but I'm not really familiar with the code for jQuery, nor with how to build a filter module that would identify the outbound links and add the class to the anchor. Also, I haven't looked into Weblinks Package yet, so some of the info above may be way off base or not needed. As you can tell, this is all new to me.

Any other feedback on this would be great ... guidance on how to approach making this or a better alternative ...

MikeyLikesIt: your questions should be filed as feature requests, or discussed in the forums, not created in a (mostly) unrelated issue.

Any update on this?

I'm pretty sure I did this feature (the direct out-link) in the more recent releases. Which version are you running?

Kind regards,

Syscrusher

sorry, I see this is HEAD.
I am using 5.x
trying to migrate to drupal 6.x today.
I understand this feature is now available in the 6.x version of links.

thnx