Tracking ics link

Question

Hi there,

I need to track the following link in Analytics:

https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/global/ics/BlackBerry-Annual-General-and-Special-Meeting-(AGM)-.ics

However, the visits (downloads) are not captured.

I have also tried with vanity and redirect link.

https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/company/investors/agm

It is not tracking

Any thoughts how to capture the click on the ics link?

Also, is it possible to used UTM with this link?

Thanks

N.

Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted Answer

Did you add "ics" to the list of extensions to track as downloads?

And no, adding UTMs to this won't do anything... this is a file not a website with tracking on it to read parameters, it doesn't trigger tracking.

There are two things you can do:

1. Add "ics" as a file extension to let Adobe automatically track this as a download like other files

2. Add your own custom click tracking to the file when people click on it...

However, if users don't click directly on the ics file from a page with Adobe Tracking on it (i.e this is triggered to download via script based on some other action, or it's a link from an email that opens the file directly) this won't work...

If it's JS triggered, you can fire some custom code to track that the file was triggered to download... if it's direct from an email there is nothing you can do... you cannot track that... unless you create a "man in the middle".. send people to an "empty" page with tracking, collect tracking there, then redirect people to the file (it should look seamless to the user, but you can collect data on the page before the sending people to the file)

Your vanity URL solution might work, if you had adobe on the page before redirecting.. but it looks like its a server side redirect, so the page doesn't actually load... you would need to do a script redirect with enough of a delay to allow tracking to actually be captured before redirecting the user to the file.

Hemang35 · Answer

Tracking clicks on a link (especially for downloads or outbound links) is a common requirement for many analytics implementations. If the regular tracking doesn't capture these interactions, you might have to use custom event tracking.

Adobe Analytics provides ways to manually track link clicks using custom JavaScript. Here is a common approach:

First, you need to set up a new event in Adobe Analytics for tracking these clicks. Go to your Adobe Analytics Admin panel, then go to "Report Suites" -> Choose your report suite -> Go to "Edit Settings" -> "Conversion" -> "Success Events". Here, you can add a new event for tracking your link clicks.
Then, in your webpage HTML or JavaScript, you need to add an onclick event to the link that you want to track.

<a href="https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/global/ics/BlackBerry-Annual-General-and-Special-Meeting-2023.ics"
onclick="s.trackLink(this, 'eVar1', {'events':'event1'})">Download Link</a>

In this example, 'eVar1' should be the eVar you want to set for this link (you can choose the appropriate eVar based on your implementation) and 'event1' should be the custom event that you set up in step 1.
This code will send a hit to Adobe Analytics when the link is clicked. It will send the eVar and event information, which you can use to track these link clicks in your reports.
As for the use of UTMs with the link, you generally use UTM parameters for tracking inbound traffic from other sites (like social media or email campaigns). If you're looking to track the traffic outbound from your site to the .ics link, then the UTM parameters won't be helpful in this case. You should use the custom event tracking method described above.

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