PDF open in browser vs. downloaded

Tracy Arendt

7 years ago
updated 6 years ago

I am trying to determine if a click on a PDF url opens the PDF in your browser, will that show up as a download in the WLE access statistics? Or is that not an event that WLE would track as a download?

I have a PDF doc in which link was sent via email service with confirmed 98 clicks. There is also a data-capture form that must be filled out via an online form for those that come via our website.The form has captured an additional 90 users.

When I run WLE for the duration of this online campaign, it shows only 51 visitors, even though I can verfiy (short of unknown website outage) that 188 users clicked the link and should have accessed the pdf.

So could the discrepancy be that it was viewed in the browser, rather than traditionally downloaded?

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Michael

6 years ago

Quote from Travis Beltz

I'm also noticing that my WLE numbers are different from reality for PDFs. Can you verify that a browser view of the PDF the same as downloading the file?

Could you provide more information on it? Are you talking about number of hits or number of visitors shown, and is the number higher or smaller?

Generally viewing PDF in browser may cause more hits as the file may be loaded in chunks and not all at once, however it depends on browser/PDF viewer used.

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Travis Beltz

7 years ago

There shouldn't be a difference in how number of visitors is calculated if files are downloaded or viewed from browser, as in any case there are requests for these files.

However, if users may share the same IP addresses (that is common for corporate users from the same organization that may share the same public IP), fewer visitors may be reported as visitors are calculated according to IP addresses. If a request from an IP address came after some time (timeout) since the last request from this IP, it is considered to belong to a different visitor. The timeout is set to 30 minutes by default.