How To Easily Track File Downloads In Google Analytics

If you offer your audience files for download on your WordPress site, you will certainly be interested in which files are particularly popular. MonsterInsights provides you with an easy way to track file downloads in Google Analytics and identify which content types you should offer more of.

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Tracking File Downloads

Bad news first: Google Analytics does not support the tracking of file downloads out of the box. Now the good news first: With MonsterInsights you can track how often files such as ebooks or free stock images have been downloaded. All this without having to touch a single line of code. Nice, eh?

Setup

First, you have to install the MonsterInsights plugin on your WordPress site. Once you have completed the simple setup, file downloads with the following file extensions will automatically be tracked as events: doc, pdf, ppt, zip, xls, docx, pptx, and xlsx. You can easily add more extensions at Insights > Settings > Engagement > File Downloads.

View Download Reports

In WordPress, you can view your Top Downloads report at Insights > Report > Publishers Report > Top Download Links. In this example you would probably create more PDF reports, podcast episodes, and mp4 files for your audience.

If you have enabled the tracking of downloads as page views, you will find the downloads report in Google Analytics at Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. If downloads tracking has been enables as events, you can see the data in your events report at Behavior > Events > Top Events. Here click downloads to get a detailed report.

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