Track PDF opens from Google or other external sites? | Community
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M
mjdavid007
Level 3
October 15, 2025
Question

Track PDF opens from Google or other external sites?

  • October 15, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 564 views

We have plenty of PDF on our website that Google has indexed. Since they don't require a password to be viewed, the visitors can view them after clicking on the Google results. If that's the only thing they do, we can't see any data on Adobe Analytics.

 

We are aware that having a landing page would make things much easier but, is there anyway to track these PDF views?

 

Thanks a lot. 

3 replies

Pablo_Childe
Community Advisor
Pablo_ChildeCommunity Advisor
Community Advisor
October 15, 2025

You could try wrap PDF in a html wrapper make it a page basically you can track regularly in Analytics.

 

Also Adobe has a PDF forms type product that allows you to see native PDF navigation and interactions(its seperate from Adobe Analytics).

 

GLTU

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
October 15, 2025

Creating a wrapper is a decent idea, but it won't get around the PDFs themselves being indexed directly by Google...

 

Unless this is paired with blocking your PDFs from being indexed (again, I think this needs to be a part of the PDF rendering and would require re-authoring all the PDFs)

 

But if you do this, do you really need a wrapper, or you just funnel traffic to the download page(s) and use the "Download Link" tracking to track which files are being accessed from your site?

M
mjdavid007Author
Level 3
October 16, 2025

Exactly, we would still have the same problem by wrapping the PDF. The only solution I see right now is creating a landing page with information about the PDF so that page gets indexed and positioned, then making the PDF itself private so the user needs to be logged in to download. This way we would get trackable traffic to the site, but users would be forced to sign up in the site.

    Jennifer_Dungan
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    October 15, 2025

    PDFs are tricky... these are an encapsulated file, not a webpage... Typically, Adobe Analytics tracks the opening of "pdfs" by tracking the click action (as a "download" type) on links that open specific files (as listed by you - there is a default list that includes pdf)

     

     

     

    There is no tracking inside the PDF itself.

     

    You cannot embed JavaScript inside a PDF... in theory, you could go back to the old days, and essentially create a hard code "noscript" tracking pixel to embed inside of each PDF, but this will add significant overhead on the people creating the PDFs, assuming you can even get them to reliably do this step every time.. plus having to go back and update every existing PDF in your system.

     

    Each pixel would need to be crafted to provide enough detail to identify the file, and since it would be hard-coded with no scripting, you wouldn't be able to get any reliable UV data... and if your site has any sort of an opt-out function, you may need to check if you have any legal issues with this kind of hard-coded solution, as there would be no opt-out available....

     

    Unfortunately, my recommendation is that this is just the nature of PDFs and you won't be able to get any data.

      Devyendar
      Devyendar
      Level 6
      October 16, 2025

      You can track pdf in a 2 step approach.

      1) Apply Server 301 redirects of all PDF links to corresponding webpages that contain pdfs (and you could additionally add nofollow tags to the links to avoid the pdf's being index directly by the search engines.

      2) If you embed PDFs directly within webpages or allow them to be download the approach @jennifer_dungan provided below would also you to track all the pdf downloads in addition to the view if embedded in the page.

       

      Alternatively, if you want the pdfs to be indexed and shown in the search results, noscript tags is the only way and it complicate the pdf creation/authoring process.

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