Tracking external downloads with Sitecore analytics

Question

I am using Sitecore 9.1.1 with SXA 1.8.1. I have a set of pdfs stored externally but I would like to use Sitecore Analytics to register download page events when someone is downloading the documents.

What would be the easiest way to do that? It is quite straightforward to track documents that are stored inside the Media Library but are there any OOTB solution to track external links or it requires custom development?

The links to the documents are rendered on the sitecore pages either in Rich text or General link fields but the documents they are pointing to are stored on external hosting which I do not own/have control over.

Answer 1

Depending on the approach this would require some custom development as ootb it is not possible. Since the pdfs links are shown in your pages, one solution would be to track the click event on them.

You could handle this from javascript and then do an ajax call to register the page event on the sitecore side, you can take a look at a step by step approach described on https://sitecorescientist.com/2019/03/26/click-tracking-with-goals-and-page-events-using-sitecore-analytics/. If you don't want to use a handler to register the event, instead build a simple api which will handle this. See the sitecore documentation on registering events https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/91/sitecore-experience-platform/en/page-events.html

Another option would be to enable FXM for your website and use the API to track the click event.

SCBeacon.trackEvent(“Page visited”)
SCBeacon.trackEvent(“Page visited”, { data: “custom data”, dataKey: “custom data key” })

You can take a look at the sitecore documentation on how to activate FXM and use the API https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/sitecore-experience-platform/en/fxm-javascript-api.html