Analytics not showing stats for resource downloads?

Hello, my site name is mimestream (https://mimestream.com)

I have a few resources on my site (.xml, .dmg) that are downloaded, and I would love to see stats for number of downloads, but they aren’t reported anywhere. Any plan to add this?

I’d love for stats to be included, but if they’re not meant to be, can they be excluded from the Top sources counts. The stats I’m seeing on my site don’t make a lot of sense to me:
Analytics spanning 30 days
Total pageviews: 8,861
Total unique visitors: 2,243
Top sources: Direct Traffic - 20,812

(I presume many of the direct traffic sources are pointing to one of my resource downloads)

1 Like

Hi, @njhaveri. Thank you for asking about this and we do have an open issue tracking this.

Page views only counts HTTP responses which return a Content-Type header of text/html. As you have noticed, the referrers counts the Referer header for all HTTP responses.

Again, we are tracking this and if/when this behavior is changed we will post an update here to let you know about it. If there are other questions, please let us know.

Could you clarify your response here. It sounds like the original question was asking to see non-html page requests. It isn’t clear from your response if you plan on allowing that or if you want to make the referrers count also exclude non-html pages.

There are many questions about additional features in the forums. I notice you don’t even use your own analytics package yourself. Would it possible to get a raw server log so users can do some of there own analytics, as part of the service?

@sutter,

Hey! Firstly, we use the data which feeds in to our Analytics tool. We serve our analytics in a palatable format whilst we work with the raw data.

Unfortunately, we’re not permitted to provide server logs given data protection guidance.

We’re always open to receiving feedback so if you have any desirables then please – do share! :slight_smile:

For a record - in a project we just finished, we were really disappointed to find that there is no way of directly tracking pdf file downloads. It was our key metric to asses success of a project, and we discussed different analytics solution and unfortunately we ended up on estimating downloads based on total website traffic.

Appreciate the feedback, @marcin-wosinek – I’ll get this added to our internal analytics product feature tracker.

Hey @marcin-wosinek, if it’s possible for your project, you can setup a database to count the number of clicks on the link to download the PDF. This would definitely be more accurate than the estimates you’re currently having.

I agree that it’s not the most ideal solution, but it can work.

Thanks @hrishikesh! Yeah, that would work - but we have frontend only; and it would be a bit of a hassle to build backend to count events - I think before that we would move analytics to other provider.

I double checked after finding this issue, and the analytics landing page:

conveniently don’t mention:

  • lack of statistics outside of 30 days window
  • lack of data on files downloads, nor way to add some custom counters

for us, even one of those issues would be enough to decide on another provider.

Right now, for the the netlify’s analytics use case is limited to:

  • getting some data from the before you decided to set up analytics
  • getting ‘file missing’ info

btw, I’m very happy with netlify building & hosting - i just see I need to be more careful with features that are slightly off the core business.

Any update on the issue you are tracking?

Thanks!

Another thought on how to do this… create a hidden form and send an ajax request as described in Forms setup | Netlify Docs

1 Like

Ouch, I’ve loved netlify so far, this is my first major road block.

I also would really like to see analytics for all resources, not just page views. In particular my website has a .xml feed used for software updates. I would like to know how many requests that feed is getting so that I can get an idea of how many people are using my app.

Surprised and disappointed this isn’t available. Really happy with rest of netlify so far.