PDF Success Metrics

Offering PDF downloads is a great way to distribute certain types of information, and the act of downloading a file is a good 'success metric' that tells you something about a users level of interest. Unfortunately it's sometimes difficult to track downloads, and requiring an email registration before enabling the download severly reduces the number of people who will download your file.

A new service from Remote Approach allows you to tag your PDF files in a way that will allow you to distirbute them freely and yet get notified when people open and read it. You'll even find out if they send it around themselves and how many subsequent readers the document gets to. (more from Yahoo News)

As a reader I might not love the idea of what documents I open being tracked - that's certainly not how we think about PDF files today. Apparently the Remote Approach software neither documents nor transmits anything personal - just the fact that 'someone' opened and read the document. But it's not hard to imagine more intrusive versions of this technology.

But while it's innocent, as a publisher or marketer I'm hungry for the data, and plan to give it a try.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at April 16, 2005 12:38 AM