Tracking downloads

[MelanieB]

A question for designers & anyone who offers free downloads on their website!

Is there any way to track exactly how many people download something from your website? Do you use a hosting service that can tell you how many times something has been downloaded?

I know there are workarounds you can do to get an estimate, like setting up goals or events in Google Analytics, but this is complicated!

(I have a website completely unrelated to scrapping & I want to offer a free download, but I want to track how popular (or unpopular!) it is.)

Thank you so much!

 

[Sara]

I use a download manager on my website..there are free and professional versions available. But before I implemented that system I often utilized bit.ly to track hits/downloads. Sometimes I still make use of bit.ly if my plug-in is being finicky or if it's a super high traffic volume kind of time. HTH!!

 

[MelanieB]

Oh thank you so much Sara!!!! I hadn't thought of using bit.ly or looking for a Wordpress plug-in! I don't know why that didn't occur to me. Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction!

 

[Karen]

On the rare occasions I've down a quickpage or something like that to give away as part of a site CT, I'd upload it to 4shared.com and that will keep track of the times it's been downloaded.

 

[lorryfach]

I don't download from 4shared unless I really love it, because I find it too annoying to deal with. I have used bit.ly even though my host has a way to do it built-in, because I can never remember where to find it on my host and I never forget where bit.ly is.