Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Track File Downloads in Google Analytics Using MooTools

By  on  

A while back I wrote an article detailing how you can use forced downloads via PHP to track downloads. What if you could get that same data into Google Analytics? Using some simple MooTools and advanced Google Analytics tactics, now you can.

The HTML

	
	<a href="/media/video.wmv" class="download">Download This Video!</a>
	<a href="/media/document.pdf" class="download">Download This PDF!</a>
	<a href="/media/document.doc" class="download">Download This Document!</a>
	<a href="/media/archive.zip" class="download">Download This Zip File!</a>

Any download I want tracked, I add the "download" CSS class to.

The MooTools 1.2

window.addEvent('load', function() {
	if(pageTracker) {
		$$('.download').addEvent('click',function() {
			pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/' + this.get('href').replace('http://',''));
		});
	}
});

Just like tracking AJAX clicks and outbound links, we direct Google Analytics to record the event.

Now you get download counts and it gets lumped in with the rest of your Google Analytics stats.

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools 1.2

    As you can probably tell, I try to mix some fun in with my MooTools madness but I also try to make my examples as practical as possible. Well...this may not be one of those times. I love movies and useless movie trivia so naturally I'm...

  • By
    Using jQuery and MooTools Together

    There's yet another reason to master more than one JavaScript library: you can use some of them together! Since MooTools is prototype-based and jQuery is not, jQuery and MooTools may be used together on the same page. The XHTML and JavaScript jQuery is namespaced so the...

Discussion

  1. Clinton Montague

    Wow, didn’t know that this was possible, this is a great trick! Thanks!

  2. Staicu Ionut

    Thanks man! Even i’m not a big fan of Moo, i will surely use this with jquery :P
    Thanks again ;)

  3. Jason Huck

    A while back, I wrote a jQuery plugin that automatically adds tracking for external links, downloads, and mailto’s:

    http://devblog.jasonhuck.com/2007/11/19/google-analytics-integration-with-jquery/

    Rather than adding specific classes for each of these items, I based the tracking on the characteristics of the URL.

  4. Joomlapanel

    Thanks man.. I don not know the MooTool can do this.

  5. garaj kapısı

    Thanks David :) everyday i learn different things from you. Thanks lot.

  6. TVD

    Recently, I extended Google Analytics to add download tracking for Google’s new Asynchronous Google Analytics Model. I call the extension Entourage.js:

    http://techoctave.com/c7/posts/58-entourage-js-automatic-download-tracking-for-asynchronous-google-analytics

    One of my goals was a small footprint, so it’s narrowly scoped to track file downloads only – no mailto or external links. Also, it’s framework agnostic. I wanted developers to have the freedom to use the extension and still use whatever JavaScript framework they want.

    I love jQuery, but I’ve always had much respect for the MooTools and Prototype.js community too.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!