Do you want to know how the visitors engage with your e-files,or e-books or some other files on your website?

If yes, then no need to worry.

Because  with the help of Monsterinsights one can easily  track the file downloads and actions of the visitors on the website accurately.In my blog post , I’m going to share on how to track the file downloads of the visitor of your website, their interests from time being i.e what type of content they actually find interest. Based on this assumption, you can place the content on users interests which helps in increasing the downloads.

Reasons for tracking the file downloads:

If your website is accompanied by some downloadable material, you need to check whether they are downloading them or not. Google Analytics does not allow the automated monitoring of file downloads. That’s because files can’t ask for a monitoring pixel, which is a short code snippet required to monitor user actions. 

As a consequence, nothing is reported in Google Analytics and downloads are not tracked.

However with MonsterInsights, you can certainly allow file download tracking in Google Analytics without having to touch a single line of code. 

Some of the advantages of monitoring file downloads are: 

  1. Find out how popular your downloadable resources are 
  2. Find out which form of content you can sell more and which one is a waste of your time. 
  3. Save your time and resources by making the downloads that your audience really needs.

Now let’s dig into the actual section on how to track file downloads on your website.

How to track file downloads on your website?

In order to enable the file downloading tracking, you need to set the Google Analytics in WordPress using the Monsterinsights.

After configuration, the file download monitoring will be automatically activated and monitored as events. The good part, however, is that you don’t have to do anymore setup, as MonsterInsights will take care of it. 

Google Analytics uses monitoring events to measure user experiences with content such as downloads, mobile ad clicks, video playback, etc.

Adding file extensions to track the downloads:

MonsterInsights allows you to monitor downloads of the following file extensions: doc, pdf, ppt, zip, xls, docx, pptx, and xlsx. But you can add more extensions you want to track. 

To add file extensions to MonsterInsights, go to Insights and then press Settings. Then pick engagement from the top menu and scroll down to File Downloads. You can also add more extensions also.

How to view downloads in WordPress?

Once the tracking is set up, now you need to view the reports. This can be done in the following steps.

  • Just navigate to insights>>Reports>>Publisher reports
  • Scroll down to see the reports.

The reports show the top download links of your website. Based on it you can create more relevant content so as to attract the users. It also lets you plug the holes in your content as you can build or re-use the content form.

How to view file downloads in Google analytics?

In order to view the file downloads, login into your Google analytics account and then select the website you want to track the file downloads.If you have allowed download monitoring as a page view, you can find the download report in the All Pages report along with other blog posts and pages.

This report can be accessed by navigating to Behaviour » Site Content » All Pages.

If you have allowed the downloads to be recorded as events, you will see the download data in your event report. 

In your event reports, navigate to Behavior » Events on the left column. You’re going to see four different options.

  1. Overview: It offers you a list of the top event details on your web. 
  2. Top Events: This gives you a list of events that keep your visitors focused on your blog. 
  3. Pages: This gives you a list of pages where your downloaded resource is hosted. In other words, it’s a list of posts and pages where events happen on your blog. 
  4. Events Flow: The Events Flow Report lets you figure out which events keep your visitors engaging with your site. It also visualizes the route that users take from one common event to another.

In order to get the detailed reports click on the Top Events and then click on the download button to view the reports in depth.

File Downloads tracking with Monsterinsights:

In your event log, you can see that all file downloads are classified as downloads. 

Take a look, for example, at the file download monitoring report in Google Analytics below.

It’s a snapshot of real-time Analytics numbers, so you can see how data is being downloaded from Google Analytics. 

There are several important components in each event report, whether they be downloads, ad clicks, video play or some other. They’re: 

Category event: As mentioned above, every download file is classified as downloads. 

Event Action: This is the full URL of a file that you would like to track.

Event label: This is the href attribute label.

Conclusion:

If you want to know the exact file downloads of your website,Monsterinsights helps you to a great extent. The above content is very knowledgeable and helps you to find the file downloads of your website and eventually add the content based on the visitors interests.