You’re offering downloads of valuable content to bring your target audience into a conversion funnel. You’ve set up the tracking for file downloads on your website so you know what kind of files are being downloaded and how often.
Now you’re looking for that data to uncover insights from what your target audience is downloading.
There are a couple ways you can find the data depending on your Google Analytics set up. Whether you want to use Google Analytics, be it the Universal Analytics version or the GA4 version, or you want to use Google data Studio, you can easily find the data, create a report, or create a dashboard.
This video will guide you how to do that:
HOW YOU CAN USE DOWNLOAD DATA
By tracking file downloads, you can get a deeper understanding of the kind of content on your site your audience is looking for. If you have a file library of downloadable PDFs, you can see what kind of content is being downloaded the most or if a specific type of content is being viewed more than others.
You can also analyze your user behavior data in other ways.
ANALYZE DOWNLOAD DATA BY AUDIENCE SEGMENTS
You can see what segments of your audience are viewing the content and if it’s being viewed by a targeted audience.
Click on +Add Segment at the top of any Google Analytics report, and choose from an out-of-the-box segment or create your own:
For example, if you have a PDF on how to get a job in a specific industry, you can see if it’s being viewed by a targeted audience of people who are actively seeking employment in your industry.
ANALYZE USER BEHAVIOR OF USERS WHO DOWNLOAD FILES
You can create an audience segment of users or traffic that download files. Make sure your dimension values match the values that you configured in your tracking.
In the case below, the audience segment is defined by the event category exactly matching “Downloads”:
Apply this segment to your Google Analytics reports and you can see how users who download files engage with your website. This includes the pages that they view most frequently, how they navigate through your website, whether they convert according to the goals that you configured, and other insights.
CONCLUSION
Make sure that you have download tracking set up properly. Once you realize how to work with Google Analytics or Google Data Studio, and where you can find the file download data, you can uncover a lot of insights.
This article originally appeared on Growth Learner and has been republished with permission.