In this video, I want to show you a very quick and easy way, to track download links in Adobe Analytics using Launch. Now, since we can’t put the code on a Word document, or an Excel file, or something like that, we need to actually track the click to download these files. I’ve got a little test page here, that has a link to download a Word document and then, a link to download a .Bob file, whatever that is. So let me show you where we set that up in Launch.

I’m going over to Launch here, and I have the Adobe Analytics extension installed. I’m in the extensions installed area and I go in to Configure the Analytics extension, and then I’ll scroll down to Link Tracking.

And here we are in Downloads, and this is where this is controlled. Now if this is enabled here, Track download links, most of the time you’re done and it’s fine because, you can see we have a number of standard extensions in here. So if you click on these file types, it will treat it like a download link and it will track it. And so, we do have docx in there, so that’s good. But our other one was a .Bob file. So I’m going to put Bob in here. So if you have other extensions that are not in this list, you can simply add them. I’ll Save that and then of course, I need to Save it to my Library and Build. And that’s done. So now I can go back over to my file and I will refresh it and I get my hit on this file. So I have my page regular page load hit here, and this is a page view hit. I have my page name and this is just that page load hit. But now when I click on this Word document, I’m going to get another hit, right there. And I went to download the file there, but I have another hit. If I look at that I can go down here and I can see that, wait for it. This is, did I pass it? There it is. So pe: which is page event link or lnk_d, means this is a download link, and then pev1 or page event 1 is the link to that file, right there. And so, I will also have one now from my .bob file.

Click on that and scroll down and see the same thing. Where I have pe: lnk_d and on my link to my test .bob file and so that’s tracking as well, since I added it in Launch. And that’s it, we’re good to go. We can go into our reports, and we can see the test .bob and test .docx, which I have already clicked on before. So that’s why they’re in here so fast. And this is the old school report and you can get there by going to Site content, Links, File Downloads. But of course, this is also available to you in workspace. So that you can just add that to your workspace project. That’s all there is to it. So once you have that in here, then you can see how many clicks on those different downloads are happening. Now, if you want to have a little more control over what shows up in your reports. Then, you definitely can use Custom link tracking and still treat it as a download, but you could set other variables, you could give friendly names, those kinds of things. But this is just the way to do it very quick and easy, with one easy setup and Launch. And it’ll show up in this Download report or Download dimension and you’re good to go. But again, if you want to get a little more elaborate, use Custom links and we’ll talk about that in another video. Good luck.