I've published a small e-book in PDF format, which contains several embedded links to external URLs. I want to measure the clicks users make from that offline PDF to those external URL destinations. NOTE: these outbound links will NOT be outbound from my website, but rather from the offline PDF.
GA Events is the typical way to track outbound links from a webpage, but how to execute this when the link instead originates in an offline PDF?
I tried sending each link from the PDF to a unique (but non-existent) URL on my own website domain, with a corresponding htaccess 301 redirect to the correct external URL. This functioned seamlessly for the user, but failed to track because a pageview never actually occurred on my site ...
Any suggestions?