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Tracking of Direct File Downloads from Search Engines

  • 1.  Tracking of Direct File Downloads from Search Engines

    Posted 03-06-2018 12:34 PM
    Introduction
    Major Search engines like Google offers a unique feature with which the users get the ability to directly access the files present in a website. This also helps the businesses by providing the information to the customers as quickly as possible.

    The downside of this feature is the challenge it poses towards analytics tracking. Even the market-leading tools like Google Analytics & Adobe Analytics haven't come up with a solution for this yet.

    Analysis overview

    Problem Statement:

    Let's take an example of a global IT service provider who implemented Adobe Analytics on their website to measure and improve the performance. One of the KRA for the marketing team/manager is the level of customer engagement on the website, which is measured by a set of KPIs. One among them is the "file downloads". Files downloaded from any page on the website is tracked properly and reported. But the files which are downloaded directly from search engines are missed out. This impacted the engagement metrics negatively but in reality, this is not true.

    Root Cause:

    Analytics tools function on the premise of front-end development technologies like JavaScript, JQuery. Analytics codes are executed only when the browser renders a page and processes the HTML/JS codes.  In the case of direct download, there is no web page. The searched file is directly downloaded or opened by readers like PDF/MS Word. This provides no chance for the browser's code to execute hence the analytics tracking is missed out.

    This analysis recipe provides an approach to tackle this problem and help marketers to achieve their goals.

    Analysis Benefits


    This solution brings the direct file downloads data into the Adobe analytics tool. The data will be present in both conversion & traffic variables and it can be used for reporting purposes.

    DAA members, go here to view full recipe.


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    Arunkumar Sundaram
    Digital Analytics Consultant / Delivery Manager
    arun.s@nabler.com
    Nabler (Corporate Account)
    Bangalore
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