Track file download in google analytics

You can add more or change your parameters to be more specific such as Page Title which page the PDF was downloaded. You can get as granular as needed depending on your marketing campaigns. We will just be passing over 1 parameter in this guide- we are tracking all PDF file downloads and the file name anchor text of that PDF.

That will give me enough info to segment my audiences based on what they downloaded. This is where a lot of users often get tripped up. This will ensure GA4 knows that these are custom events and which event names to look for. For our parameter configuration, we want to keep it the same as the source event which is GTM and already defined. PDF or whatever filetype used.

You should see a hit being sent by the name of the tag to GA4. In Real-time view, we can see our tag fire when clicking a PDF document. PDF is clicked, we can take a look at the events and find our tag being fired. We only did a basic parameter pass in this quick tutorial where we just grabbed the click text anchor text of the PDF. Again, feel free to get as granular as needed and add as many parameters as you wish. As you can see, our.

Want to create a segmented audience for this event to remarket to on Google Ads or Facebook Ads? Need to put these users into an email flow that downloaded a specific eBook? All that is possible based on your goals. It can also help you determine which kind of content upgrades your audience really wants. Depending on your website's setup and your resources, there are a number of options for tracking file downloads. Let's look at how this tracking works in Google Analytics.

Then we'll walk through the options you have available for tracking downloads. We'll start with the easiest solutions, and end with the most difficult. Google Analytics loves to track pageviews. Because web pages execute JavaScript when they load in your browser.

PDFs and other types of downloadable files don't trigger JavaScript. So the standard Google Analytics tracking code does not record file downloads. The same applies to user activity on a web page. If the user's action doesn't trigger your code, Google Analytics won't track it.

If you want to track events that don't execute browser-based code, you have to do some extra work. You have to tell Google Analytics what you want to track, and how to track it.

You can put some additional code on your website. Or you can use a plugin that puts the event tracking code in place for you. Event tracking is critical to understand because it's a fundamental part of Google analytics. Event tracking is how you tell Google Analytics to record user behavior that doesn't automatically trigger your tracking code. Usually, events are actions on the pages of your website. Common examples of events include video views, page scrolling, or file downloads.

The event code sends a hit to Google with the category of the event. It also tells Google the action that occurred and gives that action a label. In the event code, you can also tell Google to assign a value to the event.

An interaction event is a true or false type of command that exists within the event code. It tells Google that something did, or did not happen based on the user interacting with your webpage.

Interaction events can be used to track bounce rate more precisely. Non-interaction events don't affect your bounce rate at all. But if you don't want to add code to your files manually, there are automated alternatives. Automation is also a better solution if you need to track many downloadable files. There are several automated solutions for tracking downloads on your website. If you have GTM on your website, all you need to do to track your downloads is create an event trigger.

The trigger will record an event in Google Analytics every time a visitor clicks your download link. Within the trigger, you can use a regular expression to fire an event based on your file extensions.

This expression tells the trigger to fire if any of these extensions are present in your URLs. So, if someone clicks a link on your site that contains. And that action will record a download event in Google analytics. Tracking downloads using GTM is a very straightforward process.

And it's the industry standard for measuring this type of event. The MonsterInsights interface allows you to track file downloads automatically. And they give you the option to use events or virtual page views. Tracking your downloads in MonsterInsights extremely easy to configure, and it's a comparable option to GTM.

My client wishes to track PDF download. I remember you talking about that. The best way is to use Google Tag Manager.