Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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 -
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Kickboard2 -
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 analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Tracking 301 redirect traffic in Google Analytics
if I 301 redirect www.mywebsite.com to go to www.yourwebsite.com, how can I track the traffic in Google Analytics that is coming from mywebsite.com?? I don't think that's a referral traffic, is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO0 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Can you track two Google Analytics Accounts on one site?
If you have a site that had an old analytics account and then implemented a new one is it possible to run tracking code that records to both accounts without causing your site or data issues? We are doing this so we don't loose data at any point - ideally it wouldn't have been split between the two but making one redundant isn't an option. Ideally we would have merged the data from both accounts and had one - however the research we have done points to this not being a possibility - unless one of you guys knows different? It would be great if anyone has experience on any this.. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisAllbones0 -
How to track subfolders in GA?
Is it possible to get the visitor statistics for a subfolder (example.com/blog/) in Google Analytics? I already have GA tracking set-up like normal, and visitors do get logged, but to see data only for /blog/ I have to go to Content > Site Content > All pages and search for "/blog/". Should I create a new profile in Google Analytics? Or is there a better way to only see stats for a subfolder?
Reporting & Analytics | | Qon0