Tracking Software Downloads...

[BrightSparke]

January 3rd 2006

Happy New Year to you all.

I am writing in the hope that someone knows the solution to this problem which has proved beyond my knowledge.

Our software product is available as a trial download http://www.personal-software.com/Download.asp.

I am currently using Google and LiveSTATS to monitor conversions (with good results in general), however, despite my best efforts I have been unable to figure out how to track those visitors who actually click on the download link itself (i.e. where it says "Click here to download Cortege".

This requirement surfaced after I did a (manual) analysis of my logfiles. I discovered that while LiveSTATS has a section where you can apparently see how many files have been downloaded from your site, what it is ACTUALLY showing is the number of GET commands and NOT the number of complete downloads. My analysis showed that downloading a .exe or .pdf file to a given IP address could take from 1-12 GET commands.

The result? I thought we were getting many more downloads than was actually the case!

I have tracking code in the Download page so can see who visits the page, but NOT who actually downloads the software.

I recognise that even this is not 100% (people could still Cancel the download) but it would still be a big leap forward.

Here's hoping.

Peter

 

[crus]

OK,

a simple way to do this would be have the link go to a scsript which logs the details of the user downloading the file eg session, source, ip, time.
Then redirect the user to the download, making sure you have a way to allow users direct to the file.

eg (php) something like http://www.mysite.com/download.php which processes the user data then uses header redirects to push the user to the download, but don't forget to set the mime type to correctly identify the file you are downloading.

Get really flash and you could utelise the adwords systerm to see exactly how much each download was costing you!

D

Mac, flame away!

 

[DotNetWebs]

Hi

I normally take a similar approach to crus, either record the user's session information or require the user to fill in a registration form. These details can then be recorded in a database before redirecting the user to the download.

I have just looked at your website, an interesting product. As you are obviously Windows developers yourselves do you not have some one on your team who can do server-side programming?. What you want to do is quite straight forward using ASP.NET. As crus says you can obviously do it in PHP but as you are already using the Windows platform you may wish to consider this option.

 

[lyndonw]

Check out olate.com - their free download manager is great - I've used it on clients sites in the past.

Lyndon