Tracking pdf downloads
-
hello,
I have a site with 100's of pdf's for download and I would like to track how many people are downloading these, does anyone have a simple solution for this?
Is there anyway I can do this in Google Analytics using one piece of code, thanks...
-
Hi Guys thank you to all for your help on this topic
It's very much appreciated, cheers...
-
For hundreds of files you might want to consider these Ga hacks: Brian Clifton's GA add-ons http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/free-to-use-plugins/ There is another by Stephane Hamel http://gaAddons.com/ Both will do the job...
-
install piwik it will tell you how many times that url with the pdf was downloaded, also awstats which usually comes standard on cpanel will tell you the number of downloads.
-
You could use some jQuery to pull the name of the file into the trackPageview GA call from the href, that would automate populating it anyway. If href contains pdf, onClick is now this, etc.
-
One method would be to use the logs on your server. If you're using IIS for example, every time a pdf was downloaded or viewed, this would be stored in the IIS Logs. It would normally show the time, date and IP address that viewed the pdf file.
You can get software to analyse these logs here;
http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1864&g=6
Otherwise instead of linking directly to your pdf in your website, you could point the link to anther html page, which then in turn opens/downloads the pdf. You could then put the Google Analytics tracking code in this html page and then you would be able to track how many time that page was viewed in analytics (and therefore how many times the pdf was viewed).
The html page would just need to contain a simple redirect to the pdf, eg.
<title>Your Page Title</title>
Optional page text here.
You would also need to insert your analytics tracking code in the section.
Hope this helps.
-
You want to track individual pdfs?
Off the top of my head adding ="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/spoofpage')>anchor text will spoof a page view to your spoofpage in analytics.
That will require individually tagging each pdf though.
Let me have a think if there's anyway to change the 'spoofpage' to the href 'url' to allow you to add the same code to each.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Google Analytics Goals - Button Tracking
Does anyone know if there is a really easy way to track a button in Google Analytics yourself? It seems that most button click goal setups involve some use of tricky code and I'm wondering if there is a much easier way to do this that will allow us to simply setup and track certain button clicks as goal conversions in Analytics. Your help here is much appreciated!
Reporting & Analytics | | Gavo0 -
Google Tag Manager Tracking
We have Google Tag Manager set up to track our website https://kontenta.co.uk/ Although we have a blog - https://kontenta.co.uk/designroom/ I'm just wondering if it's better to track the sites separately? If so, how do I add the blog to tag manager? Does it need setting up as a filter to match the regular expression https://kontenta.co.uk/designroom/* We just need to figure out the best way to measure both the website and blog traffic and if users are coming from the blog to the site, and what interactions they are making. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Jseddon920 -
Conversion Tracking Setup; Is there a decent guide?
Ok, I'm looking into how to set up conversion tracking for our website, and frankly, I'm totally confused. In looking at Google documentation, I'm not sure if I need to use Tag manager, throw some code into the site with jQuery, or sacrifice a goat. I'd like to implement a variety of tracking goals / events / things on several websites, so I'm really looking for a comprehensive guide. I couldn't find any in depth stuff on google. Help?
Reporting & Analytics | | MichaelGregory1 -
Cross Domain Tracking for multiple sub-domains with multi-lingual and culture versions
Hi, I have a question regarding cross-domain tracking that I haven't seen answered completely elsewhere. A client has a main domain, we'll say www.example.com and 4 or 5 sub-domains e.g. shop.example.com, support.example.com, account.example.com and service.example.com. The different sub-domains are managed by different third parties, with just www.example.com and account.example.com under our control. To add a further dimension, these sites all have multi-lingual versions as folders and in some cases multi-cultural versions e.g. www.example.com/de/ for Germany and www.example.com/ch-de/ for German-speaking Swiss. Not every language/culture has an equivalent site in place for each of the sub-domains e.g. the UK support site serves Denmark and Swiss-German users will use the German site: www.example.com/dk/ links to support.example.com/uk/ for support-based content
Reporting & Analytics | | Nobody1565908128979
www.example.com/ch-de/ links to support.example.com/de/ At present, they use different analytics tracking codes and accounts. Moving forward, they would like to consolidate the data together to be able to see the collective and separate performances. They would also like to be able to see goal completions from referrals when someone clicks from the main domain to the sub-domain or across sub-domains or potentially across language and culture too. I have several questions I would really appreciate some guidance on: What will be the best way to configure Google Analytics to achieve this? Will we need to decorate the HTML links in between each of the sites? Will we need to use a new Google Analytics property? It may not be easy to answer this based on the information above, so I'm happy to provide additional information if required. Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Google Analytics subdomain ecommerce tracking flatlines :-(
Buongiorno from 19 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 This website http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ contains a shop sub domian @ http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/. I configured the site Ga analytics code to include the subdomain (see below code). I had to do this as i was getting refferal data from the actuall subdomain. But after following the instructions on p117 of cutroni's ga book things have gone wrong, mainly now eCommerce data has dissapeared 😞 So my question is please: "Why has installing the GA code above caused eCommerce tracking to suddenly go dead?" Grazie tanto,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
David0 -
How to track and verify 301 redirects from 22 old websites to a new one?
Me and my team have just finished a website which will replace 22 old ones (6 main domains and 16 sub-domains, 19 in wordpress and 3 in Joomla). This means more than 20,000 links that we're trying to redirect with the most granularity possible. But we're experiencing a lot of conflicts because of the quantity and variety of links and the interference of Wordpress. And I'm having trouble finding which links are working and which aren't. I have a URL list in a plain .txt file for every website, is there a tool that can check these links for me? I've tested many wordpress plugins, but I didn't find a good one. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | bernardovailati0 -
Is there a way to use Google Analytics event tracking for YouTube embedded videos on my website?
Hello! I am trying to track different types of interaction on the YouTube for videos which are embedded on a website to measure the interaction on these video from my organic traffic. Is there a good way to go about this with the code since these are coming from an iFrame on YouTube? Would appreciate any feedback or help on implementing the event tracking with YouTube videos. Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | CabbageTree0