Yesterday I wrote a post on the adCenter Blog for Advertisers which included some presentations and documents about Search & Display Research and adChamps Europe 2008.

Now we believe it's crucial to provide our customers with as much information, data and insight as possible, so uploading it to the blog makes the most sense as it's easily accessible and widely available.

Many businesses, large and small, provide their customers and prospects with brochures, white papers, reports and presentations is this way too.

But how do you know if users are actually taking advantage of all the hard work you've put into uploading it in the first place?

Well adCenter Analytics can help by providing you with a report to help you measure what, how many, and when files have been downloaded from your site.

Under the Pages & Content tab in the reports menu you'll find the Media & Downloads report.

You do need to insert and extra bit of code into your tracking script in order for us to start measuring downloads though.

By adding this code to your current tag you'll be all set up:

msAnalytics.EnableLinkTracking();

Your analytics script would then look something like this:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://analytics.live.com/Analytics/msAnalytics.js">
</script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
msAnalytics.ProfileId = 'ABCD1234';
msAnalytics.EnableLinkTracking();
msAnalytics.TrackPage();
</script>

In a few hours you'll be able to track downloads from the report and get a much better idea of how your users are engaging with media you are offering to them to download.

There are many reasons why this is a good idea. Besides the simple measurement of the number of downloads, it helps you plan your future bandwidth and server requirements, serves to let you know what is popular on your site so you can do more of it, and if you get a sudden drop off of activity, it could indicate a broken link or that something is awry and needs investigation.

Do check out our adCenter Analytics Help resource which has more information - including how to set up adCenter to track individual files you want to track if you want to be a bit more selective.