How to track how often specific PDF's are hit/accessed on the website?

To track how often specific PDFs are accessed on your website using Clarity, you can utilize event tracking features. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Set Up Event Tracking: Implement event tracking for PDF links on your website. This involves adding an event listener to the links that point to your PDF documents. When a user clicks on a PDF link, you can send an event to Clarity to log that interaction.
2. Use Clarity’s Analytics: Once the event tracking is set up, you can view the analytics in Clarity. The analytics will show you how many times each PDF was accessed based on the events you logged.
3. Analyze the Data: Use the Clarity dashboard to analyze the data collected from the event tracking. You can filter and segment the data to focus on specific PDFs and see their access metrics over time.
4. Make Data-Driven Decisions: Based on the access metrics, you can determine which PDFs are frequently accessed and which ones may need to be revised or removed based on their usage.

By following these steps, you can effectively track the usage of specific PDFs on your website and make informed decisions regarding their content and availability.

Thanks for sharing the details, Van! If your website is hosted on IIS, Apache, Nginx, or cPanel, your server already tracks every PDF request automatically.

What you can see:

• How many times each PDF was accessed
• Which IPs accessed it
• Date/time of each access
• Referring page
• Whether the PDF was downloaded or viewed

How to get the data:

• Open your hosting control panel (cPanel, Plesk, Azure, etc.).
• Go to Raw Access Logs, Analytics, or Web Server Logs.
• Search for entries containing: .pdf
• Export to Excel to count how many times each file was hit.

This avoids all tracking scripts and is fully accurate, even if users share the direct link outside your site.

See if this helps. If you need further assistance just let me know.

Best regards,

Kimberly