Tracking downloads in Google Analytics. You’re set up, what’s next?

 – posted April 28th, 2009 by Niamh Phelan     Comments (6)

analysing

I deployed your script.  Now what?

If you have deployed our script as Peter showed you, you’ll be able to track the downloads on your site. Now it’s time to analyse your results.  How are the downloads, mailtos and external links going to show up in Google Analytics (GA)?

The script scans each page and autotags all downloads, mailtos and external links with ‘onclick events’.  This means that every time a visitor clicks one of these links, a virtual page view is sent to GA.

The virtual page views appear in the ‘Top Content’ report in GA and they look like this:

Downloads:                        /virtual/download/page/file-name/

Mailtos:                              /virtual/mailto/page/email-address/

External links:                    /virtual/exlink/page/destination-url/

Each time one of these events takes place,

  • the name of the downloaded file is logged,
  • the email address to whom the email is sent is logged, and
  • the destination of the link the visitor followed off your site is logged

Further, in all cases, GA logs the page from which the virtual page view was triggered.  This is valuable data:

Consider a scenario where visitors have the option to download a newsletter from your home page or from your publications page.   By measuring the page from which users launched the download, you have full visibility on which page generated more newsletter downloads.  Note you may have more than one line entry in ‘Top Content’ for any given PDF.  Each line item records each location where the file was downloaded.

How do I structure my account?

You can measure what you want to measure.  Here’s how.

  • If you want to isolate all of these virtual page views, simply type /virtual/ in the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of ‘Top Content’
  • If you want to isolate just the downloads, type /virtual/downloads/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
  • If you want to isolate just external links type /virtual/exlinks/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
  • If you want to isolate just mailtos, type/virtual/mailtos/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.

You get the gist.

For example, to isolate only the file downloads, type, /virtual/downloads/:

top-content-virtual-download-illustration1

The third entry indicates that there were 39 downloads (pageviews) during 36 sessions (unique pageviews) of the file PM18012008.pdf, launched from the page http://www.iqcontent.com/about/jobs/ in the time period selected.

You may be happy to leave your implementation at this; however, I prefer to maintain separate profiles for

  • Real Pageviews
  • All Pageviews
  • Virtual Pageviews

That way, I have one profile that contains only real pageviews, ensuring that I have access to a clean figure.  I also  have one profile in which I can see only the virtual page views and one profile in which I can see both real and virtual pageviews.

Perhaps I want to look at the navigation summary report to find out what real page visitors viewed the most after downloading a given file.  For this I need both virtual and real pageviews in a single profile.

Set up a new profile

Click on the GA logo in the top left of the screen to get to the ‘Analytics Settings’ screen.

Click the ‘Add Website Profile’ button at the bottom of the screen to get to the’Add Profile’ screen.

analytics-settings-add-profile1

The profile will be for your main domain (in our case www.iqcontent.com).  At this point you need to give your profile a name.

Create Profile

Create Profile

Once you click ‘Finish’ you will have created your new profile.

The next step is putting a filter onto your profile to ensure only real, virtual or all pageviews are captured.  Go to the analytics setting screen, choose ‘profile settings,’ and add your filter.

Add Filter

Add Filter

For the ‘Virtual Pageviews’ profile you need to add the ‘include virtual pageviews only’ filter, indicating that only pageviews that start with /virtual/ should be accepted into this profile.

Include Virtual Pageviews Only

Include Virtual Pageviews Only

For the ‘Real Pageviews’ profile you need to add the ‘exclude virtual pageviews’ filter, indicating that pageviews that start with /virtual/ should be not be accepted into this profile.

Exclude Virtual Pageviews

Exclude Virtual Pageviews

Stay out of it

No particular URI filter is required for the ‘All Pageviews’ filter, but as ever, all profiles should have an ‘exclude IP address’ filter to stop your own use of the site from polluting you stats.

Any questions or comments, Peter and I are happy to respond.

Categories Web analytics

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