Track PDF opens from Google or other external sites?

[mjdavid007]

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. 

[Pablo_Childe]

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]

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?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

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.