You Ask, I Answer: Tracking PDFs as Pageviews in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Suzanne asks, how do you get Google Analytics to show you the name of the PDF being clicked on? This is a follow-up question to my February 20th, 2019 video on tracking PDFs as goals in Google Analytics. So if you want to go uh back into the archives, you can uh go to the blog post that goes with this. We'll have a link to that old episode. The short answer is to track PDFs as uh like any other page on your website, we have to create a page view because a PDF contains no HTML, therefore you can't put a Google Analytics tag in it, but we can track the click to it.

So in Google Tag Manager, the way they do this is with a built-in click URL variable and a virtual page view. So let's uh let's switch swap over here. What we're gonna do uh is you're gonna open up your Google Tag Manager. The first thing we need to do is make sure that we have we're tracking click URLs. That's one of the many, many, many built-in variables.

So go to variables, click on configure for built-ins, and scroll down until you get to the click section. Personally, I like to make sure that all these are clicked, just as a general best practice. Um, but at the very least, you want to absolutely make sure that click URL is turned on. Alright, and uh for good measure, you by the way, you should always have your Google Analytics uh set in here as a variable as well, just to make sure that uh you're not mistyping the ID number later on. Next, you're gonna need a trigger.

The trigger for a PDF uh should be a the trigger type is just links. Click just links, right? Like so. And we want the click URL, which is what we just selected in variables, to match the regular expression, ignoring case of backslash dot PDF. Now, what this is doing is it's saying that we want to find any URL that has the dot PDF uh extended.

We escape the period because we're using a regular expression, which is a type of code that allows you to match multiple variations. And the reason we're choosing this instead of contains is that if you've got a bigger website, sometimes people will name files like a capital dot PDF at the end, or you know, or capitalize just the P or whatever the case is. People do some strange things on larger websites. Uh and as a result, you would use this to track it. Now, if you are confident, because it's your website, maybe it's a smaller site, that uh no one ever does that, then you could just use contains, remove that backslash and contains dot PDF.

So we're tracking any URL that contains that dot PDF. This is a trigger uh essentially saying uh Google Tag Manager, listen for this and raise your hand when this happens. I'm going to, because my website's a little older and uh sometimes I do weird things, I'm gonna leave it as the match regular expression. Okay, so now we've got a variable that is going to store a URL in its entirety when it's uh when it has that that uh that click URL, whatever the click is. And we've got a trigger that says I want to run this only on things that on URLs that contain dot PDF.

So the last thing we need to do now is set up that tag in order to send the actual information to Google Analytics. We have not done that yet. We're gonna create a new tag. Let's call this something intelligible. Google Analytics PDF virtual page view.

Our tag configuration, we're gonna be using the Google Analytics Universal Analytics here. We're gonna be doing a uh settings variable here. Make sure we have our that's my tag there. We're going to make sure we have a page view setup because that's what we're sending. And then we're going to go down here to advanced settings.

Right. And in advanced settings, oh, enable overrides. There we are. We're going to do a field to set. We're going to override our normal variable.

And we're going to choose in this case the built-in Google Analytics variable page. That is, whoops. That is the page URL that Google Analytics is looking for. And in that in this case, we are going to use that click URL variable. So now we've got our click URL.

We're sending as a page here. So now what we've done is we're saying Google Analytics, we're overriding the normal settings. And we're saying, hey, this link click that we're sending that we know a user clicked on is actually a page view. Treat it the same as though that PDF was a page on the website and track it as such. So we're essentially sending in in some ways, it's not falsified data, but it's not it's not real in the sense that there's no ju Google Analytics tag running on that PDF page.

I'm gonna hit save here. What this is going to do is it will now create page views on in our Google Analytics tracking. Oh, always remember to hit submit. Um it will create page views in Google Analytics with those that full URL, including the PDF itself. So to Suzanne's question, that will show you the name of the PDF in your analytics.

Now, that means it'll show up in your behavior section on what content on your site has gotten the most page views because each of these PDFs will show up as a page in those page views. You can see which is the most popular PDF. This does not set a PDF as a goal, right? That's go back to the February 20th video for that. But this does set it as a page view.

It's a probably a pretty good idea to have this implemented on your website if you've got a lot of PDFs. The steps we just took, by the way, apply to any uh the file type. So if I go back to my workspace here, we have a PDF click with that uh regex. If you've got an MP3, let's say you have a podcast and you want to track links to podcast episodes, make an MP3 click URL and repeat the exact same process. If you've got video files for some strange reason stored on a website, if you have code samples, if you've got you know uh JSON or or PHP or R code that you want to see people uh downloading it, you do the exact same thing.

So you can track multiple different types of files uh on your website with this technique. So that's how you do it. It's very straightforward. It's not obvious, like it's not written down in the manual anywhere. Uh, but it is a pretty straightforward process once you implement it.

So that's the process. Good question. Tag manager, Google Tag Manager is one of the most powerful and underused and underrated tools, I would say, in the entire Google marketing platform. We spend so much time on Google Analytics, rightly so, because that's where the outputs come to make decisions. But what you can do with Tag Manager is fascinating.

So if you have some time, you know, when when when it's quiet or where or you have a few mom moments, spend some time in Tag Manager. Spend a lot of time in Tag Manager. Learn its capabilities, because it's pretty darn cool. As always, please leave questions in the questions box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.