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Hi I'm wondering how Google Analytics (GA) knows whether people land on some file on my server. I have my GA tracking javascript code on our base url, example.com. I'm wondering how GA knows whether someone visits a file on my server, for example:

example.com/files/some.pdf

Does the default GA configuration, the javascript code you copy paste onto your index.html, register that people are looking at this PDF?

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    possible duplicate of How to track a download with Google Analytics?
    – Josh Mountain
    Jan 16, 2015 at 16:09
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    @JoshMountain thanks. What if they just type the downloaded file into the browser bar? No GA code will be triggered in this case. This is the use case I'm more interested in.
    – tim peterson
    Jan 16, 2015 at 16:17
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    As far as I know there is no way to track that using GA, you would probably need to use some sort of server-side logging like Awstats.
    – Josh Mountain
    Jan 16, 2015 at 16:18

1 Answer 1

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You need to add custom event tracking to your pages. Look at this link hope it helps.

Put your files behind a PHP,ASPX,CFG application page add the event tracking to the page your url should look something like page.php?file=name_of_file.pdf

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