How to Track Image Downloads on Your Artist Website

I met Eugen Oprea inside of the Third Tribe Marketing forum. He’s a sharp guy, and I enrolled in his Web Analytics Blueprint class. I’ve been consulting on websites and search engine marketing for some time, and I learned a bunch from his course. I asked Eugen to write a guest post about this topic because I always have artists asking me how they can stop people from downloading their images illegally. The short answer is that you can’t do it totally, and you certainly can’t do it without crippling peoples’ ability to share your work across the web – but Eugen’s post here can show you exactly how big of a problem it is on your site.

Today’s featured artist is Shannon Henry from Portland, OR. If you know and like Cthulhu, this is hysterical. Otherwise…well, it’s my blog and I can feature what I like.

Having a website is not enough to make money with your business.

I agree that you’ve put some work into building it, but that is just the start of your way to achieving success online.

Once you have an website you need to help people find you, you need to optimize your website and track it’s success.

I am not going to dive into optimizing your articles for search engines right now, but I will tell you more about tracking your success.

The most used tool for tracking success is Google Analytics, which is free and I am sure that you are already using it.

But if you haven’t started to use it yet, go and create an account on the Google Analytics website and then get my Google Analytics course to help you get started.

You can use Google Analytics to track your conversion goals, see how many visitors you have, where they come from, how engaged they are and better understand what they want from your website.

One great way of using Google Analytics as an artist is to help you track the downloads of your images.

Depending on what exactly you want to track, there are a couple of ways to do this:

• Using a “Thank you page”
• Using link tagging

1. Using a “Thank you page”

This method works really well if you send everyone after they download your images to the same thank you page or if you have less than 20 images to track.

That is because you will need to setup a goal for this in Google Analytics and you are allowed to setup a maximum of 20 goals for each website.

In order to create a goal in your Google Analytics account, click on the [Admin] link from the top right hand of the account screen.

But before that, make sure that you use the latest version of Google Analytics by clicking “New Version” from the top of the screen.

Then, once you are in the Settings section of your Google Analytics account, click on [Goals] and then [+ Goal].

From this screen you need to add a name for your goal, select [Active] to activate it and [URL Destination] because this is the goal type that you need to use.

Next, add the URL of your thank you page, but just the part of the URL that is after your domain name.

For example, you need to use ì/thankyou.htmlî if your page is: http://www.mywebsite.com/thankyou.html.

Finally, select as a Match Type, [Exact Match] and add a value for your goal so you can track it in the Google Analytics reports.

To make this more easier, here is an example of how the goal setup should look like:

2. Using link tagging

In case you have lots of images for download/sale and you want to track all of them, you can use a simpler method: tagging your download link/buttons.

You will have to dig a little bit into the HTML code, but if you follow the instructions below, you should be just fine doing it.

This method uses Event Tracking from Google Analytics and you can read the basics about it in this Google Analytics Event Tracking article over at EugenOprea.com

Then, once you get familiar with this method apply it to your links.

Say for example that you have an image available for download that can be accessed with a click at the link below:

<a href=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png”><img src=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png”/></a>

In this case, you will need to tag your image like in the example below:

<a href=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Images’, ‘Download’, ‘My Image’])”><img src=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png”/></a>

If you want to track how many people are Right Clicking on your images to download them, try this:

<a href=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png” onmouseup=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Images’, ‘Download’, ‘My Image’])”><img src=”https://theabundantartist.com/my-great-image.png”/></a>

If you have a download button that looks like this one:

<input id=”button” class=”btn” name=”download” type=”submit” value=”Download Now!” />

… use the following HTML code:

<input id=”button” class=”btn” name=”download” type=”submit” value=”Download Now!” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Images’, ‘Button’, ‘My Image’]);”/>

Then, once you apply this to your links, you should be able to access the reports from the [Content] section > [Events] > [Overview] in your Google Analytics account.

From here you can see different metrics for your top events.

You are able to see the total number of events by [Event Category], [Event Action] or [Event Label].

Additionally, you can setup an Event Goal just like in this example.

Takeaways

Essentially you can use this to track the total number of downloads for your images.

But if you will also setup goals for your events (the most important ones), you will be able to see exactly who is sending you traffic that converts into subscribers or customers (or downloaders), what are the websites that send you valuable visitors and where to put more efforts to promote your business.

Analyzing your data can give you powerful insights about your visitors and it’s something that you need to start doing RIGHT NOW.

Your Turn

Now that you know how you can implement this, I would love to see it implemented on your website.

Use the comment section below to link to your downloads page or ask questions if you have any.

Eugen is an online entrepreneur who blogs about Web Analytics, SEO and WordPress at EugenOprea.com. You can get his Google Analytics course for free or check his latest product, the Web Analytics Blueprint. He also shares great content on Twitter.

Must Read: Do check out our definitive guide to an artist’s website for further insights, The Ultimate Guide to an Artist’s Website.