13-06-2012, 12:56 PM
Email tracking
Tracking pdf document use always sounds like a really neat idea. Monitoring pdf use should tell you who opened or printed a document, when it was, and where they did it. At least in theory.
There are normally two reasons for wanting to track pdf files. First is marketing analysis - which are the most popular pdf documents in terms of how often they are read rather than just numbers sold. If you are monitoring pdf use then you can see if a document is opened lots of times by the same person. Second is authorized use - did someone unauthorized try to open a document, or an authorized person open it from a 'strange' location. So when you have a question about document distribution you can track pdf files and see where they went.
Of course, to track pdf usage you have two choices for how you do it. You could be using either a page server, handing individual pages down to a client, or a reporting server that relays from the client when a document is opened (and maybe when it closes, but most likely not).
So the first thing to understand is when tracking pdf documents you are forcing recipients to always be online. Because the monitoring pdf technology needs to 'phone home' to tell you what is happening.
For a business proposition this could be a disaster. Many people need offline access to documents, but a pdf tracker cannot see that. So monitoring pdf ebooks and magazines may not be such a good idea.
Also, privacy is becoming a bigger issue. In many countries you must register what it is that you intend to collect if it relates to personal information - and in the EU the opinion is that anything linking a person to an IP address is personal data. You also have to register what you will use the data for, and ask the consumer for their informed consent to monitoring. So you may have to set up a raft of policies and procedures before you can track pdf use.
This does not apply to business users, but it may be a fine point. Plenty of institutions, such as banks, do not, as a matter of policy, allow pdf tracking of documents used internally. Some pdf tracker products cannot be used in those environments.
And where is the pdf document that is being tracked? Some theories say you can track pdf documents by IP address, but that doesn't mean much if you are seeing an ISP with thousands of customers. Also, pdf tracking by email address may not mean so much if it's not a company email address since many people use freemail accounts to avoid identification.
Finally, in pdf monitoring, who is the recipient? On a home PC or a laptop it is whoever is using it. You don't ever know who is actually sitting in front of the screen (although that might be an interesting and expensive research project). People are generally completely relaxed about letting others use their computers, so you may not be monitoring what you think
You send a newsletter to a select group of corporate clients. The email contains a link to a PDF document (call it P1.pdf) hosted on your web server. Within that document there is a link to another document called P2.pdf. This second document contains article summaries pointing to several external pages. Your boss asked you to provide the following information:
1. How many people opened P1.pdf?
2. How many people click to see P2.pdf?
3. How many click on external links from P2.pdf?
To make things a little bit more complex, you are sitting in marketing and you know the IT release cycle takes some time. You also only have access to an older implementation of Webtrends and would prefer to use Google Analytics.
Solution path
Here we are facing a classic example: it's very common to find older Webtrends implementation and a tendency to see the Holy Grail in Google Analytics.
Webtrends Analytics (not the On Demand service), because it uses logs, has a built in report to answer this need. But we can also instrument the email itself. Legitimate requests can become quite complex... so let's try to simplify that.
• Email tracking:
The starting point, which is easier, is to make sure your email is properly tagged as a campaign (suppose we will call it ABC) Email solution providers will tell you how many emails were sent, delivered, opened, and which links within those emails were clicked. Some solutions will even allow you to tag each email individually so you'll know exactly who opened it and clicked. It won't give a perfectly accurate picture but it will be precise enough - especially if you have a large subscriber base (which isn't the case in this scenario).
• Opens or downloads? People or requests?
In Webtrends you won't know how many people really opened P1.pdf or clicked to get P2.pdf - you will know how many devices requested a downloaded from your server [unless you use the unique tagging technique outlined above or have some other kind of authentication before allowing the document to download]. If the document is sent around internally you won't know it. Also, because of network caching and such, you will not get a perfectly accurate account of the downloads.
• P2 downloaded from P1 or somewhere else?
In P1.pdf, if you modify the link to P2.pdf to be something like P2.pdf?cid=ABC you will be able to make the distinction between P2 downloaded because of your campaign vs other reasons. But again, the picture won't be perfect but certainly good enough.
• The world beyond your control
You are left with external links... Those are within P2.pdf so tags won't work. They go to external sites so you can't just add ?cid=ABC to them... Here we won't have any other choice but using redirects. The concept involves creating a server-side script that will relay the query to it's final destination, capturing data at the same time [it's easy to find such scripts for various technologies, but you'll definitely need the help of IT to tweak it]. Instead of linking to http://othersite.com you would link to mysiteredir.php?dest=http://othersite.com. Again, if you are using Webtrends, you will get a server-log request and it will be easy to create a custom report just for that.