Does anyone know of a way to track downloads of a pdf (as opposed to tracking onClicks for a link to the pdf) using google analytics?

Straight out of the box, Google Analytics does a great job of tracking your web pages. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't automatically track file downloads (such as PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint files and Word docs). The great news is that getting Google Analytics to track downloads doesn't take a whole lot of effort on your end.

To track file downloads we recommend using Google Analytic's Event Tracking. Let's look at how you can use Event Tracking to begin tracking your own website's downloads today. Basic HTML knowledge: you should understand the basic anatomy of a standard HTML link.

You must be able to edit the HTML of the web page containing the link to your file download. Let's jump right into an example. Let's assume we have a PDF I'd like to offer as a free download on our site, and let's say the filename of the offer is RecipesForDogs.pdf.

I want to track how many people download this PDF from our website. So, to start off, I first create a simple link to my file on one of our web pages. This is just a basic HTML link to the PDF file that's been uploaded to our server.

Nothing fancy here. In the above link, I've added an onClick event handler (in bold). This event handler is where I'm asking Google Analytics to track clicks on this link as an Event.

Don't worry if this seems complicated to you; all you'll need to do is copy the code above and modify a few parts to match your needs. Let's look at how you'd do this. First, you'll need to modify the href attribute in the code I've provided so it points to the specific file on your server that you wish to track.

After you've got the link pointed at the file you'd like to track downloads for, you'll want to tweak the Category. In the example above, I categorized the Recipes for Dogs PDF in an "Offers" category. Especially helpful when you offer many different types downloads on your website (like Ebooks, free reports, questionnaires, etc.), the Categories you choose are what will allow you to logically and intuitively sort through all your downloads data when you review it in Google Analytics.

You can create as many Categories as you'd like and give the Categories any names you like; it's completely custom and based on how you'd like to organize and think about your data. Once you figure out what Category you'd like to use for your download, swap that out with my "Offers" Category in my example.