In this post I’ll show a method to measure file downloads in Google Data Studio. To be more accurate, I’ll show how to track file downloads in Google Tag Manager and how to monitor and measure the types of file that have been downloaded in Google Data Studio.

Below are examples of files you can download. Click on any of them if you like.

• Excel: Lorem-ipsum.xlsx
• Excel: Lorem-ipsum.xls
• Word: Lorem-ipsum.docx
• PDF: Lorem-ipsum.pdf
• Text: Lorem-ipsum.txt
• PNG: Lorem-ipsum.png
• Powerpoint: Lorem-ipsum.pptx

Below is a Data Studio report that shows the number of downloads for each file type. I’ll go through the steps needed to track these downloads in Tag Manager as well as display them in Data Studio.

How to track File Downloads using Google Tag Manager

I based this method of tracking file downloads on this video from Metric Mogul and taking a look at blog posts from Simo Ahava.

Start off to creating a new tag.

You’ll then need to click on Tag configuration.

And choose the Google Analytics – Universal Analytics tag type.

I’ve set up the tag in the following way;

Track Type = Event
Category = Downloads
Action = Downloaded File
Label = {{Click URL}}

And choose your Google Analytics tracking ID variable.

The next step is to create the Trigger to go with this tag.

Click to configure the trigger and then choose Click > Just Links.

Use the following setup for the trigger;

Click URL
matches Regex
\.(pdf|xlsx|xls|doc|txt|png|docx|ppt|pptx)$

You can add in any other document file extensions that you may need to track.

We now have our Tag which I will name GA – Downloaded File.

Making sure the tag is working using Google Tag Manager

Once we’ve created our tag and trigger, the next step is to make sure it’s firing correctly. To do this we can first check using GTM’s preview mode. Click on Preview and then go to a page with a downloadable file on it.

Click to download a file and you should see your tag fire, as shown below.

Making sure the tag is working using Google Analytics

Another way to make sure that the correct information is being sent to Google Analytics. Open GA and navigate to Real-time > Events.

You can then downloaded the file from your website a few more times. If it’s set up correctly you should see your files appearing under Events.

Now that we’ve confirmed the file downloads are being tracked properly, we can set up a report to monitor the downloads in Google Data Studio.

Building a report to track File Downloads in Google Data Studio

Choose Google Analytics as your data source and add it to your report.

Click on Add a Field and then use the following CASE statement. This will create a new Dimension based on file type.

CASE 
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*pdf") THEN "PDF"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*xls") THEN "Excel"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*xlsx") THEN "Excel"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*doc") THEN "Word"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*docx") THEN "Word"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*txt") THEN "Notepad text"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*png") THEN "png"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*ppt") THEN "Powerpoint"
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Event Label, ".*pptx") THEN "Powerpoint"
ELSE "Other"
END

Here’s what it should look like once you’ve added the statement.

We can then create a table with the newly created Downloaded File Type as our dimension and Total Events as our metric.

Depending on how many files you have downloaded, it should look something like this.

To get a breakdown of exactly which file was downloaded we created another table, but this time we choose Downloaded File Type and Event Label as our dimensions and Total Events is still our metric.

We then have a complete breakdown of which files were downloaded. You can choose to ‘apply filter’ to the first table, so we can filter the table below by file type.

Finally, in order to only show file downloads in these tables (and not other events) we create a filter for the tables that only includes the Downloads Event Category.

Hope you found this article about how to measure file downloads in Google Data Studio useful.

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