You can gate your content and collect personalized analytics for lead generation & qualification with your marketing campaigns using CloudFiles

Secure file sharing & tracking is a core offering of CloudFiles. However the app also offers a number of useful little features that can help collect personalized marketing analytics based on content performance. This makes CloudFiles a great marketing analytics tool. In this article, we discuss how to use CloudFiles to collect marketing analytics using gated file links. This form of collecting document tracking data is suitable for social media campaigns, CTAs in website etc... 

While sharing content on such places, you cannot know who will be viewing that content. So the only way is to collect that information from the viewer themselves. This is where the simple soft content gating feature of CloudFiles comes in.

The process of collecting content marketing analytics through gated content has been illustrated in the infographic below. For a more detailed explanation, refer to the steps below.

Step 1: Gate document links using ID validation feature

Creating gated assets is easy in CloudFiles. You can enable soft/hard gating which only asks for an email. You can also enable hard gating which will require the user to login. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use the hard validation feature. The following graphic illustrates how to enable hard ID validation on your file links. Learn secure file sharing with CloudFiles. Click the CloudFiles Security Features Tutorial .

Step 2: Access the file link

In order to test out the analytics, access the document link a few times. When you open the file link the first time, it will ask for an email (soft validation). Refreshing window will register multiple views for same email.

Step 3: Check your content's analytics

Once you have accessed the file link a few times, go back to CloudFiles account and check analytics. Use CloudFiles as a marketing analytics tool to gauge buyer interest. Learn more in the article Gauging Buyer Interest Using CloudFiles. You can see the total number of views, unique views, downloads, total time spent and time spent in each page of your document. You can view the total content statistics or statistics for each individual, and each session of that individual.

Step 4: Share document link to collect analytics

This feature is highly suitable for file links which are shared such that you have no idea who might look at it. This includes sharing document links on social media, as CTAs on websites etc... You can simply share the link generated above on any platform.