April 1, 2025
Where to Find File Download Data in Google Analytics 4?
Updated: April 1st, 2025
Google Analytics 4 is capable of tracking additional events, not just page views. This is all possible thanks to Enhanced Measurement. But finding that data in GA4 reports is trickier than you might think. In this article, I will explain where to find file download data in Google Analytics 4.
Video tutorial
Prefer video content? Here’s a tutorial from my Youtube channel.
Check if you have file download tracking enabled
First, go to the admin panel of your Google Analytics 4 property. Then (in the Property column) click Data Streams. Select web data stream.
This will open the settings of your web data stream. Check if Enhanced Measurement is enabled. If yes, check if File downloads is visible.
If not, then click the gear icon and enable File Download tracking.
If you have just enabled that, you will need to wait for ~24 hours to start seeing that data in standard and custom reports.
Standard Reports
In standard reports, it’s easy to find file download events. They are called file_download and you will see them if you have enabled Enhanced Measurement.
You can find them by going to Reports > Engagement > Events.
Note: The GA4 sidebar is highly customizable. The location of the “Events” report in your property might differ, so keep looking.
But the problem with this is the granularity of the data. If you click the file_download event, it will open a report where you won’t see what kind of files were downloaded. At least, that’s how things work now when I am writing this blog post.
By the way, when I say “file downloaded” it means that a visitor clicked a link on your website that opens/downloads files such as .pdf, .docx, etc.
If you want to see what file links were clicked and how many times that occurred, you will need to create a custom report in the Reports section or the Explore section.
Customized report
Go to Reports > Library > Create new report > Create detail report.
Select Blank. Then:
- add Link URL in the Dimensions section
- add Event count and Total users in the Metrics section
In the Report Filter section, add the following condition:
Apply all changes. If you want, you can also hide unwanted charts (e.g., Bar chart). The report should look like this:
Save the report (its name could be something like “File downloads”). Then go back to the Library and click “Edit” (where you want to add this new report).
Then, drag your new file download report to the topic of your choice.
Save the collection and that’s it! Now you have a report where you can see all the downloaded files. Other users with access to this property will also see this report.
Custom Reports (Explorations)
On the left sidebar of your GA4 interface, click Explore. Then select Blank.
We’ll need to import two dimensions into that report. Click the Plus icon.
Then select Event name and File name dimensions and click Import.
In the metrics section, click the Plus icon and add the metrics that you want to use, for example, Event count and Total Users.
Double-click the File Name dimension and also all metrics that you have imported to the exploration. Or just drag-and-drop them.
Now you will see the list of all files that were downloaded. But it’s very likely, that the first row in the table will be empty. Why?
That’s because your current report shows the data of ALL events in your property, not just file downloads. Thus you need to narrow it down. In the Filters section, click Drop or select dimension or metric and then choose Event name. Enter the following condition:
- Event name exactly matches file_download
Save the filter.
Now you will see the report consisting only of file_download events and the first column of the table will show the list of files that were clicked/downloaded.
To see the full value of the File name, you will need to hover your mouse over that particular link URL. Hopefully, in the future GA4 will allow us to resize the width of each collumn.
At the moment, the File name dimension shows the full URL, not just the last part of it (where the actual file name is stored). There is no way (at the moment) in GA4 to change this. Alternatively, you would need to build your own custom solution with Google Tag Manager and use a variable that takes the last part of the URL.
Find File Download Data in Google Analytics 4: Final Words
That’s it! You have now configured a File Download report in GA4. By default, the report will show the top 10 rows. But if you want to see more, change the number here:
If you want to learn much more about GA4, how to use it, and how to benefit from it, take a look at my in-depth Google Analytics 4 course.
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11 COMMENTS
Thanks for this very clear explanation. I have found that if you right-click on a filename in the download list you can select 'View users' to get a list of users that have downloaded that file. What I was wondering is can you then find a list of files that a particular user has downloaded?
Hello Julius!
I have installed GA4 yet it does not track downloads of pdf files. It's a proprietary CMS, is it possible that the way GA4 tracks it is not compatibile with the CMS?
And yes, in case you'd ask, the Enhanced Measurement is enabled.
Hi Julius!
I used this article to create some reports for my clients and we noticed that starting on July 11, if we add in the total user metric, we see this message:
No data for this combination of segments, values, filters, and date range. Try editing the variables or settings or remove them.
When we remove it and just show total events, it works fine.
Have you seem anything like this?
I just learned what is causing the issue - I had enabled Google Signals and that enabled data thresholding. All of reports were sampled and there wasn't enough data so that's I why I received the error message.
I changed the reporting identity to device-ID only and that solved the thresholding issue for me.
I will be really careful before I enable Signals on new GA4 properties
I'm having the same issue that Steve described. Is the only work around to change the reporting identity to device-ID per what worked for him?
When I went to try that route, I received a notice saying, "Analytics is estimating user activity where identifiers such as cookies or User ID aren’t fully available. If you stop using blended identity, your reports may only reflect a subset of your users."
I'm nervous to turn it off and not capture all potential user data. But I always want to be able to utilize reports like the one outlined above. Does anyone have any additional recommendations or feedback by chance? Thanks!
Don't worry. You can turn it off. And later if you want, turn it on. This setting is retroactive.
Don't worry. You can turn it off. And later, if you want, turn it on. This setting is retroactive.
Thank you! Very clear instructions that provided the exact end result I was looking for. Wish they had this exploration available OOB.
Hi Julius,
I have set up the report according to your instructions - thank you so much. :) But I noticed that some of the downloads cannot be seen it this reports. I have checked in debug mode and the file_download event fires when I click on on link with .pdf extension but then I do not see that file in the report. Do you know why that may be?
Difficult to say without seeing the situation and auditing your setup