click counter for external/outbound links

By schulera on 7 Apr 2009 at 14:51 UTC

hello,

We recently installed Drupal for our institution intranet. I am the librarian here so I am creating the library content. What this means is that I have a page full of external links to various databases and e-journals. Since I cannot get usage statistics from all of the providers of those services, I would like to have a basic click counter so that I know what external links are followed & how often (or if at all).

I have installed the statistics module so I can get INTERNAL page counts displayed at the bottom of each page (e.g. "15 counts") but this is too basic.

I have read conflicting reports about the links module, and I installed it to see what it could do for me. I can't figure it out, and suspect it isn't what I need anyway. I have also read something about using Google Analytics -- which seems too complicated. I have also read about the External Link Popularity module. I have not tried it yet. Will it work for my needs?

I am looking for a simple solution, that does NOT involve any scripting. If you have an idea, and can explain it without too much techie jargon or Drupal lingo, I would appreciate it greatly!

Thanks -
amy

Comments

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WorldFallz commented 7 April 2009 at 15:53

I don't believe you can do this without scripting. afaik, if you don't want to use google analytics, the only way you can know if a link was clicked is to use javascript which is what GA uses itself. And js can, of course, be bypassed by the user anyway.

A Solution

duncan.moo commented 4 November 2009 at 11:37

If anyone comes across this thread as I did, a solution to counting external link popularity is a module named just that:
http://drupal.org/project/pop_links

In my case I want to count clicks and use that to sort by popularity.