We need some way to record minimal information to determine how many times a partners subscribers clicked on an external link (from a Wikipedia article). Resolution needed is total per day per partner.
Ideally it would be able to gather this information pre and post launch of each partner, so it would not rely entirely upon the exit interstitial.
Implementation ideas
We could add an event schema and submit external click event from the browser. For older browsers, if required, we could also add those events from the server-side zero link redirector (the piece of php code that shows server-side interstitials).
Background:
- if zero is disabled, an external link click navigates there directly
- if zero is enabled, an external link click shows an interstitial warning, requiring user confirmation
- if user has clicked "always accept" before, navigation happens without an additional confirmation
In case of #2, we would generate two events - one on link click, and one when user decides to proceed or to cancel, or to close the browser. I am worried that tracking browser closing might be fairly hard and inaccurate, thus having the first event would provide a good way to evaluate number accuracy.
Schema fields
- carrier-id - string, e.g. "123-45"
- browser - it would be great to track what browser has generated this link - do events auto-log this?
- action - enum value:
- extlink - ext link clicked without getting any warnings
- extlink-auto - ext link clicked and navigated to without a warning because user has already agreed to always go
- extlink-warn - an interstitial is shown
- extlink-conf - user confirmed navigation to the external link
- extlink-back - user decided not to proceed and went back to the page
- extlink-close - user closed the browser when they see an interstitial (might be hard to implement)
- extlink-always - user decided to continue and to always do it in the future
We should also add the image viewing events here (TBD)