Expand my Community achievements bar.

Webinar: Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Product Innovations: A Quarterly Overview. Come learn for the Adobe Analytics Product team who will be covering AJO reporting, Graph-based Stitching, guided analysis for CJA, and more!
SOLVED

File Views Metric in Adobe Analytics

Avatar

Level 1

Hello, novice user here. Our organization is using AA to evaluate internal SharePoint site usage metrics across various sites. We have PPT files (playbooks) embedded within different sites and would like to be able to measure the number of views and/or unique viewers for each file. After much searching I'm unable to find any guidance for building dimensions/metrics for file views. I'm curious to see if anyone else has had a similar requirement. Thanks!

1 Accepted Solution

Avatar

Correct answer by
Community Advisor

I think the problem is going to come from the fact that files are not webpages... they don't have Javascript, they don't have cookies, etc...

 

Adobe's "file" tracking is generally limited to "downloads", which is essentially when a user clicks on a link with a file format (in this case ".ppt") and it tracks it similar to a "exit" link (but as a download rather than an exit....

 

However, SharePoint has a lot of different ways to download a file, and they aren't limited to clicking on a link... there are actual controls like "download the file" which don't actually have the file reference in something Adobe can read natively.... plus, this doesn't get you views on the file.

 

One thing you could try (and I can't guarantee this will work the way you expect cause I've literally never tried it), but you could create something like a no-js image request and embed it in the file (basically it's a 1x1 white pixel) (similar to what you would add to a newsletter that can't have Javascript on it)... but there are some risks:

 

1. I don't know if you can have a pixel per slide, or if all images would "load" as soon as the file is opened

2. If the user is offline, even if the tracking works in normal situations, offline views would be lost

3. Because there are no cookies, UVs and Vs would be inflated

 

This is certainly an interesting challenge, but not one that I have ever had to deal with before... Good Luck.

View solution in original post

1 Reply

Avatar

Correct answer by
Community Advisor

I think the problem is going to come from the fact that files are not webpages... they don't have Javascript, they don't have cookies, etc...

 

Adobe's "file" tracking is generally limited to "downloads", which is essentially when a user clicks on a link with a file format (in this case ".ppt") and it tracks it similar to a "exit" link (but as a download rather than an exit....

 

However, SharePoint has a lot of different ways to download a file, and they aren't limited to clicking on a link... there are actual controls like "download the file" which don't actually have the file reference in something Adobe can read natively.... plus, this doesn't get you views on the file.

 

One thing you could try (and I can't guarantee this will work the way you expect cause I've literally never tried it), but you could create something like a no-js image request and embed it in the file (basically it's a 1x1 white pixel) (similar to what you would add to a newsletter that can't have Javascript on it)... but there are some risks:

 

1. I don't know if you can have a pixel per slide, or if all images would "load" as soon as the file is opened

2. If the user is offline, even if the tracking works in normal situations, offline views would be lost

3. Because there are no cookies, UVs and Vs would be inflated

 

This is certainly an interesting challenge, but not one that I have ever had to deal with before... Good Luck.