We have software data sheets in the File Manager that we link to on our site for customer download. We need to have the ability to track how many times these pdfs are downloaded for viewing, as well as being able to see what web pages these linked documents can be found.
I have to say that after using HubSpot for about 4 months I'm constantly amazed at the things that it is NOT capable of! For a product that is touted as best in class, its the simple things like this - tracking document downloads from its own servers where HubSpot completely falls apart!
We purchased HubSpot to do exactly this type of function and we were sold that it could do this with "ease!"
Instead we find out that we have to build a complicated process to simply track the downloaded documents our customer are asking for.
Come on HubSpot Product managers you can close the gap on this one easily!
While you at it please make the download or the view of a file in file manager an Enrollment Trigger so we can build automations based on the files a customer looks at!
Here is a simple example of what we are trying to do:
1) Customer wants to download a datasheet from our website
2) We put a form in place to collect their information and their consent to contact them.
a) Oh yeah that form asks a series of questions to direct the customer to the right datasheet so we use the SAME form to access 100's of files in file manager since this is a lot more efficient than creating 100's of forms and landing pages, etc.
3) We direct them to the right file in file manager upon successful completion of the form.
4) once they have accessed the document then we want to enroll them in an automation that basically populates a field in the contact record that says "Hey this person looked at this document!"
This all sounds SOOOO easy, but nope - because HubSpot doesn't track views of files in file manager you can't do this! Instead you have to build a Form that directs to CTA and then to a file! All that extra work just because we can't track a file that HubSpot ALREADY is hosting!
Does anyone have a solution to this problem they have come up with? We have gated and ungated (form fill + CTA v. CTA only) pages for each asset. My current process is tracking the CTA clicks and form fills in an active list but when we take out inactive contacts the numbers are affected. Looking for any advice.
How is this still an issue 3 years later? It is so frustrating that I have to create another list in order to get simple reporting in Hubspot and how a list is always the response. A huge misstep here that you cannot track who is viewing files that are in Hubspot. How, as a marketer, am I supposed to show my team the value in gated content when I can't even track my gated content.
I agree. We have a software platform, and it would be great to link out to different PDFs and be able to see ON THE CONTACT REOCORD what/when they viewed the content.
There are a lot of use cases listed in the comments that state stacking CTAs is not feasible or looks silly - we have been using CTAs for all document links since we converted our website to HubSpot back in 2016. I hope our use case is helpful to some while this is still in review.
There is a "plain text link" CTA choice that you can setup that does not look like a button, image, etc. and matches the CSS styling for a link on your website.
I know CTA data is not ideal, but we manage 15-20 documents per community (we sell homes) and sell in upwards of 20 locations that change regularly (sold out and coming soon) - we manage hundreds of documents that feed out to our website and we do it safely & easily with CTAs - that all pull into a campaign as well for further reporting. Thanks to HubDB, we can also manage all of these CTAs in one location that feed out to dynamic website pages.
Once you setup your basic CTA structure, you can clone it for additional documents fairly easily and while it might take time to get setup, once you do, it is really easy to maintain if you incorporate it in the loading process for your document.
Would having data about files in the actual file manager be helpful? Yes, I absoultely agree this would be amazing.
One additional level of information about files (instead of just what pages they're used on or emails) would be to see which are used in CTAs.
HubSpot Files has changed a lot over the years and definitely still has room for improvement - especially for those of us where Sales Documents does not work for our use case.
Hi @mfinocchiaro and others looking for this feature,
This can be done through the CloudFiles app. It is a native app and an enhancement over HubSpot Documents that shows up in your deal/contact/company page. Any files uploaded can be stored in HubSpot file manager (or any other external cloud storage of your choice). You can generate links, get analytics and use these in automations. It also lets you set security settings / download disablement etc... on your documents so the access restriction can be customized as per your need.
Not being able to track file views and clicks is a huge hole in the sales and marketing tools. How will we know what to optimize if we don't know how many people are viewing certain links in our emails, or who is clicking on it?
I see we are still waiting 4 years later? I came from Lead Liaison and was super excited to use HubSpot but I'm finding more and more that HubSpot is actually more restrictive because they want you to do / track things their way.
This is basic. How do I know what documents are being used vs not? I should not have to dig for this information, it should be intuitive.
Here is another advantage of adding file tracking instead of relying on CTA's. CTA's cannot be sent via email, but files are constantly sent via email by sales teams. Currently those email sends are completely untracked in Hubspot unless we have our web devs build a custom webpage template to embed the 1-pagers into a webpage. Without that workaround, the data stays siloed in Sales' MixMax/Yesware/email tracking accounts. So in sum, using Hubspot leads to Sales and Marketing disalignment, in this case. That's a bad look for the "everything hub".
If Hubspot could just track interactions with files like a regular webpage (e.g. host files on barebones webpages that look like PDFs), then Hubspot could deliver significant value by bringing sales and marketing closer together, and eliminating the need for web developers to complete this task.
