Collecting metrics on downloaded files

[bdenham]

Can someone provide a link to instructions on capturing how many times a download link has been clicked? Using the existing page URL dimensions for the download link doesn't seem to work. But maybe that's because the link is structured like this from the main page: https://www.adobe.io/commerce-xd-kits/pwa-studio-uikit-venia-v1.3.xd

When I add this URL to the standard page access analytics dimension in the project, the returned results are always 0.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

There are 3 requirements for AA to track download links automatically:

1. You must have enabled "trackDownloadLinks" in AppMeasurement. See https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/config-vars/trackdownloadlinks... .
2. Your link's extension, "xd" in your case, must be in the list of file extensions that AppMeasurement recognises as downloadable file types. See https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/config-vars/linkdownloadfilety... .
3. The user must have clicked the link from your website. So if the user opens the link directly, then it won't get counted. (This "problem" happens very often with PDFs.)

If any one of those does not occur, then AA won't be able to report your download links as expected.

[bdenham]

Thanks so much, @yuhuisg! That's exactly the info I needed. I got sidetracked on Friday and couldn't make progress with the research. So thank you very much for the details. I'll make sure I set up the links to meet all three requirements. To enforce the third requirement, I can hide the file URL inside a function to prevent people from sharing direct links—something like that.

Thanks again, @yuhuisg!