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Ways to Track Download in the Google Analytics

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Naman Modi
Ways to Track Download in the Google Analytics

If you are offering an ebook, PDF, whitepaper, or any other downloadable items on your website, then it is a good idea to track how often your visitors download your items. Read on for more insights on ways to track downloads in Google Analytics.  

Finding what motivates your visitors is a good way to understand your audience. One way of doing that is to track downloads on your website. Besides that, you also get to know which of your content deserves an upgrade in all your offerings. You can say that ‘Well, Google Analytics will handle that for me.’ Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple since Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track such activities. 

The good news is that you can learn how to set up Google Analytics so that it can automatically track downloads. GA offers several ways to track file downloads on your website based on your resources and website setup. 

In this guide, we shall take you through the several ways to track downloads in Google Analytics on your website. Read on for more information. 

Why Can’t Google Analytics Track Downloads Automatically? 

Google Analytics is usually designed to track page views. The reason being that pages execute JavaScript when they load in the browser. Anything that can execute JavaScript is traceable by GA because Google Analytics is built in the base Google Analytics code. Web-based activities that don’t execute JavaScript, such as PDF and other downloadable files. Therefore, the standard Google Analytics tracking code will not record file downloads. The same goes for a web page’s user activity. Google Analytics won’t track any user action that doesn’t trigger code. 

You will have to put in some extra effort if you want to track events that don’t execute browser-based code. GA has to be instructed on what to track and how to track it. 

Tracking Events & Virtual Page Views with Google Analytics 

You can easily tell Google Analytics to track file downloads in your website using these two ways to track download in Google Analytics:

  • Using event tracking 
  • Creating a virtual pageview 

Event Tracking

Setting event tracking on your website can be done in several ways:

Insert extra code on your website or look for a reliable plugin that can insert that code for you. Understanding event tracking in google analytics is very important because it plays a vital role in Google Analytics. Event tracking simply means telling Google Analytics to record how visitors interact with your website. The interaction doesn’t automatically trigger tracking code in your website. Actions that users take on your web page are called events. Actions such as file downloads, page scrolling, and video views are examples of events. 

Interaction Events

A true or false type command that is found within the event code is known as an interaction event. This type of event informs Google Analytics based on the user’s page interaction that something happened or not. Precise tracking of bounce rate can be done easily using event tracking. The bounce rate on your website is not affected by non-interaction events. 

Tracking File Downloads Automatically 

Contrary to what you may think, including the event tracking code in one file is not that hard. Automated alternatives for adding code to your file are available if you don’t want to do it the hard way. Tracking multiple file downloads on your website is made easier with automation. 

Tracking downloads on your website using an automated solution can be done in several ways. Let’s look at some of the ways to track download in Google Analytics:

  • Using Google Tag Manager

Creating an event trigger is all you need to do if you have already installed GTM on your website. Once you do that, each time a visitor clicks your download link, the trigger will record an event in Google Analytics. Within the Google tag manager, you can use event tracking templates to configure your trigger. 

Depending on the file extension, a regular expression can be used for event firing within the trigger. This is essential when setting up a link click event. A regular expression is used between google tag manager and google analytics to tell the trigger to fire if your URLs have any of these extensions. This means that the trigger will fire when someone clicks links that have .pdf or .xlxs, etc., on your website. This will record a download event in your GA. 

Using GTM to track events on your site will be pretty straightforward. It is also an industry-standard method recommended to track events on websites. 

  • Using a Plugin to Track Events in Google Analytics 

If for one reason or another, you can’t use Google Tag Manager, there are other ways to track downloads in Google Analytics on your website. One of them is using a WordPress plugin. Out of all the plugins in the market, MonsterInsights is the best one for adding tracking file downloads on your website. Using MonsterInsights allows you to automatically track file downloads on your website. It also gives the user an option to use events or virtual page views. With MonsterInsights, choosing the type of file extension you want to track is possible. Using MonsterInsights to track file downloads is just as easy as GTM. 

Conclusion 

These are the available options when you want to track file downloads automatically using Google Analytics. If you can’t use any of these methods, you can try out available options. We trust that this guide was helpful, so you are now ready to track downloads automatically with this way to track download in Google Analytics. 

 

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