Tracking File Downloads with Google Analytics

HTML Warning: The following requires you to modify HTML and should only be done by someone with a basic understanding of HTML. If done incorrectly this can break your links on the page. Once you have edited the page in HTML mode DO NOT switch back to visual or it will strip out the html code that has been added.

On each link that you want to track add the following “onClick” call:

onClick="ga('send', 'event', 'download', 'click', ‘Descriptive text here');"

So it would look like this:

<a href="/RecipesForDogs.pdf" onClick="ga('send', 'event', 'download', 'click', 'Descriptive text here');">Download My Great Recipe Book for Dogs</a>

Then change the ‘Descriptive text here’ to something that describes your PDF being downloaded and you will start to see Events in your Google Analytics dashboard under the “Behavior->Events” section.

For more information please see Google’s documentation.