You can upload PDFs to your Media Library to make them accessible on your site. However, when someone views the PDF, it will be loaded using the browser’s built-in PDF viewer. Independent Analytics can’t record these visits because WordPress doesn’t get loaded.
To record analytics for PDF visits, you can install the PDF Viewer plugin by ThemeNcode.
PDF tracking also works with the paid version of this plugin, called TNC Flipbook.
Instead of relying on the browser’s PDF viewer, this plugin creates its own viewer that runs in WordPress.
Since WordPress gets loaded, this enables Independent Analytics to track the views.
Using this plugin, visits to your PDFs will show up automatically in the Pages report.
If there is another PDF WordPress plugin you’d prefer to use, please let us know about it so we can add an integration.