You Ask, I Answer: PDF Pageviews and Goals in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Joe asks, uh, thanks for the video. One thing I feel rounded out would be as a new Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics user to see how the results surface of tracking PDFs as pages in Google Analytics. For example, example, which section under goals, behaviors, other where would you see these show up? So this is a follow-up to the uh previous episodes on setting up PDF tracking as page views, uh virtual page views in Google Analytics, or setting up PDFs as goals in Google Analytics. So to refresh, let's uh let's go ahead and switch this over here.

Just uh as a quick refresher, uh in the previous episodes, one of the things we did was we set up uh a PDF goal. Uh someone downloads a PDF that is we are tracking that as a goal in Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager. So tag manager would be the uh the method for tracking, and then uh we would we would see it show up as a goal in Google Analytics. And the second thing was uh using Tag Manager to uh fire a page view every time someone clicks on a PDF as though it was being loaded as a page on our website. So with that, uh where would these show up?

Well, the goals is pretty straightforward. When you go to conversions here, uh go to goals, and we can look at our oops, wrong button there. Uh we can look at our goals overview, and you can see uh, for example, there are download PDF, right? There's two goals completions there. Um someone has downloaded a PDF twice uh in this in the last week.

That's a goal that to me is something that I wanted somebody to do. Um and because PDFs typically on my site are ones that are like a speaking kit to hire me as a public speaker. So that's a good thing, and that it allows you to track things like multi-channel funnels, attribution, and all that stuff to figure out um based on that goal, uh, what channels are helping drive those conversions. So as a quick example here, let's uh select none and then just select PDFs here. And where did those conversions come from?

It came from ref one from referral, one from direct. So I know that uh something referred someone to my website and I was able to uh to see a goal completion. If we switch to source medium we might be able to get more detail about Heidi Cohen's website. So thank you Heidi. So that's an example of where to find the PDF as a goal.

Now if you want to see it as a page view and you want to see the individual PDF itself you go to site content recalling that this requires PDFs set up as page views. When we go to site content we go to all pages here. And the easiest way to figure this out is to just type in dot PDF in the search bar there. And when you do that you can see uh what are that's uh that's getting everything but there's the there's the uh the two goal completions in this case it was a uh speaking kit uh my my most current speaking kit so two goal completions there for uh and two pages I mean for that particular PDF so I can see that what is the one that uh came in for me. Uh let's I wonder if this is working on regular expression.

Yep. So um this search bar uses uh the regular expression syntax so if you just want to see just the files themselves add that little backslash before the dot PDF and you'll now see just those files. So that's in a nutshell how you find uh those two things. And remember that that is contingent upon uh having both systems set up. If you only use the page views version, you're obviously only going to see uh the uh the page views PDFs.

You won't see any goal setups. You need to set up both. As a reminder, that looks like this, where you have a tag for the PDF page view, right? Uh there, and then download PDF as a goal. And both can use the same tracking mechanism, but they have they do different things.

You need to set them up individually. They're not something that you just do once and you get both benefits. You have to set up both benefits individually. Remember also that those techniques can be used for any other file type that is not HTML. So it could be an MP4 video, an MP3 audio, like a podcast, uh link to a podcast link, for example.

Uh, all those things would be really good things to do. So if you've got links to files of any kind on your website, make sure that uh you have uh this tracking set up. If you want to see at least some of what Google thinks you have on your website for those terms, uh here's a real simple way to do it. Type in file type PDF and site colon and your domain name. And this will tell you what Google thinks uh you have for PDFs on your website.

Now you may or may not want some of these, you may have to go back and do some cleaning on your website. Uh but these will also, if there's links in the HTML, Google will track these as page views. Now, if somebody were to click straight into this file from this search result here, you would not get the page view because Google Analytics has not had a chance to fire on an HTML page. Our system only tracks those PDFs that have links on our site, not direct links in. So you will not see that.

Um there is a a technical hack for for working around that, but it is way too complicated and probably is not going to help a whole lot. But just keep that in mind. There is a way, if it's absolutely mission critical, there's a way to essentially uh mask PDFs and fire you know measurement pixels and all that stuff. But most people most of the time are not going to need it. Just make sure the links are are linked up properly on your site, and then when somebody clicks on that link, you'll get the page view.

So good question, Joe. Uh, if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below, of course. Uh subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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