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Consider an Excel Online spreadsheet with hyperlinks to numerous third-party URLs. Is there a way to track when users follow one of those links?

All the tracking tricks I’ve found for Google Analytics and Tag Manager seem to involve links to or from my website, but not from Excel (or similarly, from an email) directly to a third party site. Is there perhaps a way to wrap the destination URL with additional information that first routes it through Google Analytics or my site before bouncing the user to the final destination? (Note that Excel Online doesn't currently support macros/VBA.)

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  • Off the top of my head, I'd look into "on trigger" macros for Excel - you should be able to create a macro trigger that increases a cell by one whenever it's clicked.
    – Selkie
    Nov 29, 2017 at 23:20
  • Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, I should have noted that users access the spreadsheet through both Excel and Excel Online, and the latter doesn’t currently support using macros/VBA. (I've edited the question to that effect.) Nov 30, 2017 at 14:14

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Using the GA Measurement Protocol offers one solution. Here are the high-level steps:

  1. In your spreadsheet, use the hyperlink function to create links that will go to your website. Pass the final URL as a querystring parameter. Here is a link to the spreadsheet I created with no macros or VBA: Excel Redirect Spreadsheet
  2. Parse the URL on your site and send a Measurement Protocol hit to GA. Here is the a link to the page that parses the link from the spreadsheet using JavaScript: Excel Redirect HTML page You can view source to see the JavaScript.
  3. Redirect the URL to its final destination.

Hope this helps.

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  • Sounds promising (thanks!), but your links give me 404 errors --- are those examples still posted? Jan 9, 2018 at 20:52
  • The links should be working now. It turned out GoDaddy was having a problem with my DNS settings and my whole site was down. Jan 11, 2018 at 11:10
  • My apologies, but when I got back around to this issue the links were again broken. Could I please trouble you to repost your xlsx and html examples? Jun 19, 2018 at 16:19

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