Google analytics set goal download pdf

Google ultimately decide to buy one of your products. To take a concrete example: a local bagel bakery has a link to a PDF menu posted on its website, and wants to monitor what percentage of the site visitors actually download the file reasoning that taking the time to download a PDF menu implies at least some level of interest in eventually visiting the physical store.

It then wants to use this information to directly compare the effectiveness of its various online marketing campaigns, e. Google AdWords vs. Facebook Ads vs. Effectiveness in this case being defined as the percentage of visitors from each source who not only visit the website, but who go on to download the PDF menu, and if you need to manage PDF files the use of software like sodapdf are pretty good for this purpose.

To that end, we still see a lot of confusion on the Internet on how to actually set up this type of tracking, so we decided to put together a quick walk-through.

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Could you use this strategy of tagging the document to have the pdf act as a landing page? Leave a Reply Cancel reply Thanks for choosing to leave a comment.

Please keep in mind that comments are moderated and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation. Get notified of new comments on this post. If discussion generates more than a few emails daily your subscription will be paused automatically. You made it this far. Try opening an additional browser, logging into Google Analytics, and clicking on the PDF download on your live site to enable the event.

This method is perfect for those who have a little bit of coding experience and have the ability to edit the source code of the page they want to edit. Now, depending on the type of analytics code you have on your site, there are two ways to add the code. After doing so, switch back to Google Analytics to see if the event is coming through in real time. Once the event starts to come through in analytics, if you want to use PDF downloads as a goal conversion, this next step is quite simple.

But what if your business or Content Management System is naming files in a very bizarre way and all you can see in reports is this? This is a bit more technical. The href attribute shows the destination URL of that link a. You should explain to a developer, that this new custom attribute should include some meaningful, more understandable information about the file.

Maybe in your CMS, that file is already using a proper name? This step to get a developer buy-in is the most difficult. Now, the easier part — GTM configuration. Enter the following settings:. In the Attribute Name field, you must enter the name of that custom attribute that your developer has added, e. Sometimes, file links on websites contain no file extension at all like. This principle was already covered in the previous chapter. Try to cooperate with a developer and ask for additional data attributes, like data-filename or data-fileurl.

Another option could be to ask a developer to push the file information to the Data Layer every time a visitor clicks the file link. Here is an example of the code:. Once a developer does that, you will need to check. Once you have this, create a Custom Event Trigger :. Then create a Data Layer Variable that will return the filename:. Sometimes, I end blog posts with the most popular questions I see online related to the current topic.

This time, I have only one. Hopefully, the list will be updated in the future if I notice new trends in the comments section below. Can you track the download button in the PDF file? Usually, people refer to this button that is available when you open a PDF file in the browser like Google Chrome :. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is no. You cannot track that because you are now viewing the PDF file directly in a browser and you cannot place tracking codes in these files.

Once you get a grasp on the main concepts, like triggers, tags, variables, you should be up-and-running fairly quickly. Every time a file link is clicked, the trigger will be activated and the GA tag will be fired. If file links on your site do not contain file names or extensions, you should cooperate with a developer:. This is so helpful, thank you!! I really appreciate how you walked through the very very basic beginner steps as well.

Any idea how to track direct links to a PDF file? Everything above makes sense from a link click perspective, but how would you handle someone taking your PDF link and posting it online and then as a website owner, knowing how many people not only see the PDF from link clicks, but also from direct traffic?

Super helpful. I'm applying for jobs and have a resume link on my website-now I can see how often it has been clicked. Thank you so much for this really clear explanation! I've not used GTM before and was quite confused about how to go about tracking downloads and getting it hooked up properly with Google Analytics.