You Ask, I Answer: Tracking Clicks in a PDF?

In today's episode, Robbie asks, I'm wondering if you have a solution to go one step further in your Google Analytics tracking and track hyperlink clicks within a PDF itself. What I'm trying to do is find out which links my email subscribers are clicking on within a PDF after I email them a link to a hosted version of the PDF. Yes. There are a number of ways to do this. It's a very common thing, and it's a very good thing to do because you want to know what's getting clicked on.

The easiest way, the easiest way to do this is with a URL shortener and appropriately uh UTM tagged links within the PDF. So you would generate uh a link like trustinsights.ai, right? And you would add your UTM codes. Source would probably be PDF, right? Uh medium would be email because you're emailing this PDF to people, and then the campaign and the content and the keywords would be things that you would set appropriately for that uh that PDF.

I would suggest that you use the UTM content tag as a way to distinguish, like if the the same destination is in the PDF, but in multiple places, use your UTM content tag to denote those places within the PDF. Now that's straightforward, right? So you tag the URL with all the tracking tags you want, and then you use a a shortener. Uh bit.ly, for example, would be one uh shortener, and you would put those links in your uh PDF, and then you in your dashboard you could track them. Um when you do it this way, you will see uh as long as they are links to your site, you will see the traffic from that PDF just by going into Google Analytics and seeing you know, source medium, campaign, etc.

All that stuff. That's the most straightforward way to accomplish what you're asking. Now, if you want to kick it up a notch, uh, and and really who doesn't want to kick it up a notch these days, if you have the means to do so, it's gonna cost you about like five bucks a month. Um, you can run your own custom URL shortener. Now there are services that do it.

Um most of them cost more than five bucks a month, or uh there's an open source package called URLs, it's uh Y O U R L S dot org. And you can download this open source package that runs on your server. You you put on either your website server, you make you can build a custom server. Um, I think I host mine. Where do I host?

Oh, I host mine on Linode Um for five bucks a month. Right, and in this, you then put all of your custom URLs. I'll in fact bring up the uh screenshot of the control panel here. What's nice about this service is that uh you can see all of the links that I put in here in in my instance I'm tracking 326,000 links and a hundred and seven thousand clicks. This is why if you have a lot of stuff to track, or you want to track clicks to sites that are not yours, you would want to do something like this because this allows you to track uh any click on links that you share anywhere, regardless of whether you own the site or not.

Um, you can see this is um uh the trust insights uh dot news, our our news uh sharing service, and it all these links just run and and go out to different services, dirt go out to different places for tracking. Now the advantage of this, well, there's two advantages. One, it's got a really nice dashboard that lets you see how many clicks any link has gotten, and two uh because it's your shortener, you can do more than just link tracking, right? You can prepend um uh uh link retargeting. That's what we do.

We do a link retargeting where if you click on a link, any link, you are enrolled, you're cookied into a retargeting audience in which I can then show you ads. Now, if you are really kicking up another notch, you could create links that are um tagged by category, like these are healthcare links I'm sharing, a B2B links or uh IT links, and have different retargeting audiences. That's what we do. Um retargeting audiences based on the links, um, so that you can then show relevant ads to those audiences. Now, for just a PDF or a set of PDFs, this is probably overkill, right?

You probably want to stick with the the first solution in the beginning, but if you unless you're generating a lot of content, or you want to track a lot of links in a PDF, if that's the case, you may want to look into a solution like this that has um all the IT infrastructure in place so that you can do mass reporting very very quickly. You know, one of the problems with some of the the SAS-based um systems is that their reporting is not great. By being by having your own server, you can have total control over the data collection and the data reporting. The other thing I think is important, and this is more if you are an enterprise rather than um a small business or a mid-sized business. If you want to be doing this kind of uh link tracking and link retargeting, if you have compliance requirements like GDPR or C CPA or whatever, running your own service on your servers, whether they're in house, on premises, or or uh private cloud, uh, allows you to meet compliance guidelines a little more easily because you don't have to wait for the vendor to certify that you know the server's ISO 27001 compliant or PCI compliant or whatever.

You can use this with the help of your IT department and run those same benefits, uh, get those same benefits of like a commercial link shortener, but be compliant with the regulations that you have to meet. Especially true if like uh you're dealing with stuff like HIPAA or SPI or PHI. You want to make sure that information is not leaking anywhere out. So a custom URL shortener may be the way to go for you as well for compliance purposes while still achieving your marketing goals. So something to think about, something to check with IT and legal to see if it's a good fit for you.

So lots of different options. Choose the option that best matches your regulatory requirements, your technical skills, your budget, uh, and uh and the level of complexity of the implementation from simple UTM tagging and uh an L D URL shortener, uh, off the shelf URL shortener, all the way to a custom built solution for total control over compliance. All of them will get the job done of reporting on those clicks within a PDF. It's a great question, it's a great idea. Something you should definitely be doing.

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