Hi folks, it’s been quite calm at Developer IT’s this summer since we were all involved in other projects, but we are slowly comming back.

In this post, we will present a simple way of tracking files download with Google Analytics with the help of jQuery. We work for a client that offers a lot of pdf files to download on their web site and wanted to know which one are the most popular. They use Google Analytics for a long time now and we did not want to have a second interface in order to present those stats to our client. So usign IIS logs was not a idea to consider.

Since Google already offers us a splendid web interface and a powerful API, we deceided to hook up simple javascript code into the jQuery click event to notify Analytics that a pdf has been requested.

(function ($) {
    function trackLink(e) {
        var url = $(this).attr('href');
        //alert(url); // for debug purpose
        // old page tracker code
        pageTracker._trackPageview(url);
        // you can use the new one too
        _gaq.push(["_trackPageview",url]);
       //always return true, in order for the browser to continue its job
        return true;
    }

   // When DOM ready
    $(function () {
        // hook up the click event
        $('.pdf-links a').click(trackLink);
    });
})(jQuery);

You can be more presice or even be sure not to miss one click by changing the selector which hooks up the click event. I have been usign this code to track AJAX requests and it works flawlessly.