PDF Tracking with Google Analytics
Monday, June 27, 2011
PDF documents, for better or worse, are now ubiquitous across the web; making an appearance on most websites, and hence most likely on yours too.
You might be surprised, then, to find out that the extremely popular Google Analytics statistics package (that you are most likely using), does not provide statistics on PDF usage by default; leaving a potentially large gap in your stats.
But we can help you fix that.
Google Analytics operate by tracking a code that is embedded on every page of your website. When a PDF document is downloaded from your site (viewing a PDF through the browser also counts as a download), it doesn’t contain any tracking code, and hence the download is not recorded.
With the appropriate customisations we can enable PDF tracking in Google Analytics, giving you detailed statistics about PDF usage.
To aid analysis, files can be grouped into categories as appropriate. For example annual reports and newsletters can each be grouped under a separate category.
This way you can readily see both how many times the, say, 2010 annual report or February 2010 newsletter were downloaded in any given period (file statistics); and how many times annual reports or newsletters were downloaded (category statistics).
All these statistics appear in a separate section within Google Analytics, and reports can easily be generated and exported in the preferred format enabling you to distribute the information quickly and efficiently.
And what is even more interesting is that in a similar way tracking can also be enabled for other types of actions that are not monitored by default, such as user interactions with play, stop and pause buttons on audio and video files.
This means that you no longer have to guess how many times your videos have been viewed (say from page views), but can know exactly how many times, and how, users interacted with video and audio files, all information neatly summarised in a readable report.
Contact us now to see how PDF (or other event) tracking can be enabled for your site, and how you would benefit.
