Tracking how many downloads a file received

  • justballtennis · Member ·

    Hello everybody,

    I recently created a file that was downloadable for my users. I wanted to do this to track how many people downloaded it, so that eventually I could create something and possibly charge for it. However, apparently on premium plan you cant track the downloads you can only track the page views. Is there anyway round this?
    Thankyou
    JustBall

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • avydun · Member ·

    Hello,

    Sorry this is not the answer you might expect, but it’s only the WordPress.com Business plan that you can integrate your blog with Google Analytics to get detailed, rich insights.

    With the Google Analytics integration, you will be able to get rich analysis of how clicks on your links are performing. You will be able to see the number of clicks on justball-goal-sheet.pdf

    You will have to get either the Business plan or risk not knowing the number of clicks.

    I hope this helps. Feel free to get back if you have questions.

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, another point to consider is that all public WPcom sites are crawled and indexed by search engines and the direct link to your document will be picked up and cached by that search engine. That also means that people will be able to download the document from the search engine link.

    In order to avoid this, another option is to host the PDF on an external service which is not crawled, like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, and the like. Depending on the service some of those might be able to track the number of downloads for you. (Pro versions of both Box and Dropbox do – no affiliation.)

    Hope that also helps. Let us know if you have any other question.

    Also, if you do already have the Business plan upgrade, you have other options which you can discuss directly with Support when you post through the contact form at https://wordpress.com/help/contact

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Our stats track the number of clicks on particular links, so if you look at your day/week/month stats you can see how many times people clicked on the link for a particular file. We don’t have a way to track downloads, or to view the total stats for a specific file, though.

    I’ll add a feature request for this, but can’t make any promises if or when something like that will be implemented, and I think @justjennifer’s suggestion might be the better option here – even with Google Analytics you’ll still only be able to track clicks on the file on WordPress.com, not downloads from cached versions, or right-click downloads, i.e. someone downloading the file without actually clicking the link.

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Thanks for that @kokkieh. :)

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    @kokkieh- Thinking about this a little further I’d like to use this opportunity to ask whether sites on the Business plan upgrade are able to control whether search engines can index and cache such documents if they are uploaded to the site’s Media Library. Thanks again.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    @justjennifer,

    It’s not possible to edit the robots.txt file file we create for a site, but I’m think if you install your own SEO plugin rather than using Jetpack’s SEO module to generate the robots file you’ll be able to do this.

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Thanks again.

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