Configure easy download link tracking in Experience Platform tags

Transcript

Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Doug. In this video, I want to show you a quick and easy way to track download links from your site. Now, the reason why we’re doing this is because, you know, if you have a Word document or say an Excel spreadsheet or whatever kind of file that’s not really a web file that we can’t actually put tracking code in for your site, but you want to be able to know how often people download those from your site. What we can do is we can track the click on the link for the download, right? So we’re not really tracking how many times the document opens, but we are tracking how many times somebody clicks on the link to download it from your site. So I’ve got a few windows here open. I have one with a little test page and then I have a debugger down here on the left and then over here I have experience platform tags where we can actually then configure the analytics extension for this easy download tracking. So you can see I’ve already gone in here. So when you go to the extensions list and you’ve probably already installed it and maybe done some configuration in these other sections. So in this main configuration area, you just go down to the link tracking section and you make sure that it’s checked right here where it says track download links and then you make sure that the extension of the file that you want to track is in this list. So this is just a big list of ones right out of the box. So if they’re there, you know, like doc or docx or any of these other ones, then you’re done. You don’t have to really do anything and it will automatically track those again as long as that box is checked to do this. Now you can see over here in my little file, I have a link to a word document, which is actually like test.docx and then I have a link to download a .bob file, whatever that is. So I wanted to choose one that was not in here. And so if we click on the word document link, then it will record that. And so I can show you that, right? So let me just refresh this page and you can see that there is code on this page to track it because that did track that right there and I’m getting that hit right there, that page load hit. Let me go ahead and clear that. And now if I click on this word document and click on that, well then you can see that that fired as well. And if you go down here at the bottom, you’ll be able to see that this is a download link. This lnk underscore d is a download link for the link type. And then here’s the URL right there, which is actually this test.docx. Okay, right there. So it is tracking that. Let me close that. I’m going to go up and I’m going to clear that. Now over here, I’m going to select this working library. I’m going to choose this build for library right there. And we’re going to go ahead and add this .bob file because if I click on this file right now, I guess I didn’t show you that yet. If I click on that, I’m sure it’ll download the .bob file. There you go. This test.bob file. But it didn’t track it. Nothing happened down here in this debugger. As you can see, it didn’t really track it. So let me hit back. Of course that loads it again. Let me clear that. And so what we can do is we can go over to tags and then we can add that, right? So if I add bob and you don’t have to add .bob, just bob, and we’ll go add. And then we’re going to save that. So I’m going to save that to the library and we’re going to build. Oops, build right there. Okay. And that was successful. And so now we can go back over here. I’m going to reload that page again. We’ll clear that. And now when I click on that .bob file, boom, it tracked. There we go. So we go down to the bottom where we see our LNK. Where are you? Right there, underscore D, right for the link type. And now you can see here that it did in fact download or track, I should say track that download. And so there’s our test bob file. And so we can close that. And so that’s tracking now, that link. And so where you find those and where you can use those and see the results of your download links, I’m going to go into analysis workspace here. And when you bring over a freeform table, then you can drag download link into that freeform table and then download link instances as the metric. And you can see I’ve done this already before. This wasn’t just from right now. I’ve clicked on this before. And because it takes, you know, a few minutes to get in, et cetera. So anyway, so there’s the test.bob file right there at the top. And you can see there’s my test.docx and I’ve done a couple other ones here as well into this report suite. But then you can see that, you know, these will be tracked there and you’ll be able to see how many times these different links have been clicked on to download these files. Now let’s go back into our analytics extension. And so that again, that was just really easy to go into the analytics extension and go to link tracking. But what I wanted to mention here is that you saw what this gave me. This gave me, you know, which files are the, you know, the file name and then it gave me how many times it was clicked on. If you need to do other things, you want to change the name of it. You want to also, you know, trigger another event or you want to do other things like that. You want to do it in the code. Then you can also use more elaborate custom link tracking code, which we’re not going to talk about in this video, but I just wanted to let you know that there is, you know, other stuff available if you want to have more control over what happens when you click on any link on your site. So you can, you know, go find the video about custom link tracking. But in this case, it was just, you know, quick and easy and really kind of out of the box because, you know, that I believe that that is, you know, clicked and checked out of the box and we already have a lot of those in there. So should be working for you and hope this helps. Gonna be good luck.