Interesting Moment from PDF Download?

Hi Justin,

Marketo's auto suggest cache for those pdf links may not have them yet if no one has clicked them. Go ahead and click all 5 and they should show up shortly.

You can also use "Link contains" instead of "Link is" and enter a unique string from the PDF url like the name of the PDF file.

Justin, Dan is right. We weren't getting any tracking until we changed our "Visits web page" to "contains '.pdf'" from "is '.pdf'"

Diederik, I have to say that the visits web page trigger works for us, as long as we use the contain operator. Clink link might with if it were linked from an email, but not via other channels.

Hi Charlie, Cool! How would Marketo do this? Does it also work if i surf directly to the PDF?

Hi Charlie,

Just to clarify, you're saying that "visits web page" works when going to a pdf file? My understanding was that you had to use "clicks link" on a munchkin-tracked web page for tracking activity with PDFs, because you can't put munchkin in the pdf.

To some of the other comments, I would lean towards "contains" when possible, because "is" can be too restrictive. I have seen activity logs where the url was ever-so-slightly different, causing the trigger not to go off. I guess different browser reformat the url in slight ways, causing the url not to match precisely. Use "contains" and enter the part of the url string that will ALWAYS be present, leaving out the http and www

I just tested it and long story short, both of us are correct: you can use "visits web page" or "clicks link" to track PDF download activity.

Here's what i did for the test: I submitted a form to cookie myself to one of my email addresses. I went directly to the download page (bypassed the gate) of another asset and click the link to download that piece. I went back to the lead record and checked to see what Marketo had recorded.

There were two related activities tracked when I clicked the link to the PDF:

"Clicks link," it turns out, is not limited to email links - it works on landing pages as well.

It also tracked my activity as "visits web page."

I'm not exactly sure how Marketo tracks the PDF download as "visits web page" - my best guess is that assets stored on Marketo are also pages themselves and the munchkin code is stored on those pages. So basically something like this: Landing page > Asset landing page > Javascript to open file triggers

If a technical Marketo person could confirm, that'd be great.

Man, this community is so awesome. Big ups, Marketo.

Bigger ups to everyone that chimed in. This was immensely helpful. Thanks so much!

Hi Charlie,

Just to clarify, there are 2 types of click events:

1. Clicks link
2. Clicks link in email

They are actually 2 different triggers, with no overlap that Im aware of.

Secondly, I visited one of our own PDFs to test, and it is not registering a "Visits web page" activity for the pdf url. Can you confirm the url of the "visits web page" activity entry on your side? Go to your activity log, click the id number on the far left for that log enry, and in the popup, you'll see "Webpage URL." I suspect you won't find ".pdf" there but if I'm wrong, I definitely want to know about it and understand it.

Thanks!

You're welcome Justin!