@jennifer_dungan I dont see any manipulations as such. For reporting can you pls help and suggest how should we see pdf downloads?
Should we just measure downloads using the Download Link dimension? And should I use the instance metric or unique visitor metric for correct data points?
Well, as far as the "PDF" downloads are concerned, the Download Link dimensions should be fine.
Instance or Unique Visitor have relevance... depending on what you are trying to see...
For instance, if you want to know just how many users are downloading PDFs... using UVs would rollup all the unique visitors as a de-duplicated total (when looking at a breakdown of all the PDFs)... however, it will not give you the raw today of downloads (or tell you if the same person ends up downloading the same PDF multiple times). If you are trying to get a sense of how many users are accessing this content, this would be a good way to pull it.
Using Instances will tell you in absolute terms how many PDFs were downloaded, including ones that were downloaded multiple times by the same user....
They are both correct and legitimate metrics to use... it really depends on what you are trying to report on.
However, I am still concerned that you mentioned you have PDFs showing up in your Pages Report... that sounds like something is still wrong, and that you could have inflated PVs... but it's so hard to diagnose without seeing it.....