How to track file downloads in Google Analytics to Boost Downloads

  Hi friends in this article we are going to see, How to track file downloads in Google Analytics to Boost Downloads


Offering Valuable Free Downloads is like a magnet that pulls visitors to a website. You have valuable things for free but how to make this valuable opportunity for your website/business. Track it! . Yes tracking file downloads is one the valuable opportunity for your website/business. Whether is online  /  offline, tracking means a way to improve your goals. Also helps to know whether it was downloaded or not.

Let we see some statistics,

In United States in the year 2019, the number of downloaded digital music singles were ~335 million .

From Statista,

In the second quarter of 2020, a total of 15.2 billion mobile games were downloaded globally across both app stores, out of which 12.4 billion downloads were downloaded on Google Play.

Everybody is using google analytics but problem with Google Analytics it is not easy as we think and it will not automatically detect how Many times people downloaded files like pdf ,music, video and so on. 


To make it simple try monster insights paid plugin. 


MonsterInsights Plans:

Before  the MonsterInsights Wordpress Intallation Guide , First we see the plans of MonsterInsights.

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MonsterInsights has Free Plan and Pricing Plan

Pricing Plan comes with 3 options.

1.Plus - For small businesses and publishers who want to do more

2.Pro-For eCommerce sites and Businesses who want quick and maximum sales (Best and Popular Plan).And it has all features!

3.Agency- For web development agencies and marketing agencies to speed up their flow.


1.Plus – $99.50/year (Regular Price $199/year) – Upto 1 site

2.Pro – $199.50/year (Regular Price $399/year)- Upto 5 sites

3.Agency-$399.50/year(Regular Price $799/year)-Upto 25 sites

MonsterInsights doesn’t have trial plan but you don’t need to concentrate on that.Because they are giving fully protected 100% No-Risk-Double-Guarantee. If you don’t like MonsterInsights over the next 14 days, then they will refund 100% of your money. No questions asked. 

The steps to track downloads of documents from your wordpress website using MonsterInsights is very easy.Because  MonsterInsights have a settings which contain File extensions.To understand better a Sample Page was created and added a pdf file in a button.

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If your file format is not pdf type, we can also add that type.

Goto MonsterInsights Settings .Click Engagements .Scroll down and look for File Downloads.

Add the extension you want. To add more extensions use commas to separate them.


Now we have to click Reports in MonsterInsights Plugin to track file download .



Now in Publisher Tab we can find the Top Download Links .This list shows the download link your visitors Clicked the Most.

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When we click View All Download Links Report it will open Google Analytics website. We don't have to do anything we just have to view which files are downloaded.


Suppose if we have enabled downloads tracking as pageviews, we can easily find out the downloads report. 

It will be available in the All Pages report. Not only with All Pages Report but also includes posts and pages.


This report can be viewed in Google Analytics by following the below methods

In the left side bar click Behaviour. In the behaviour dropdown menu choose Site Content .Under the Site Content drop down menu

"All Pages" will be found.

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Suppose if we have enabled downloads tracking as events, we can view the downloads data in the events report.

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This report can be viewed in Google Analytics by following the below methods


In the event reports, go to Behavior (which can be found at left side bar) dropdown and choose Events in the left side. 

Now it will display four options.

Overview: It gives you a summary of top events data of your site

Top Events: It's about showing a list of events that keep  visitors engaged on website.

Pages: Here list of pages will be shown, where download hosted details included. Actually, it is a list of posts and pages where the events occur on your site.

Events Flow: The events flow report helps you discover which events keep your visitors engaged with your site. It also visualizes the path users take from one popular event to another.

For detailed reports click Top events



Next, click downloads to get a detailed report.


The Anatomy of File Downloads Tracking With MonsterInsights

In your events report, we can see that all file downloads are being categorized as download.

For demo purpose, kindly check at the file downloads tracking report in Google Analytics below.


It is a screenshot of real-time Analytics stats, so we can easily find out how downloads data are being shown in Google Analytics.

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There are several important components in every event report whether it be downloads, ad clicks, video play or any other. They are:

Event category: As mentioned, every file download is categorized as downloads.

Event action: It is the full URL of the file you’d like to track. For example:

<a href="http://example.com/my-ebook.pdf”>Download My Ebook</a>

Here, the event action is: http://example.com/my-ebook.pdf.

Event label: It is the label of a href attribute. In the above example, the event label is Download My Ebook.

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