Receptional_Andy - 6:57 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Since GA relies on javascript code, you would need to include javascript within the PDF file, and rely on it being executed - i.e. hope to good fortune ;)

I believe you can include javascript in newer PDF documents, but frankly I wouldn't want to rely on that.

This is one of the situations where on-page tagging for analytics loses out to server log files.

The onclick suggestion is also somewhat inelegant and high-maintenance - it would be better if GA followed some of the other vendors in automatically tracking clicks on files like PDF, executables and archived files and recording them as downloads anyway.

You can't include onclick events within a sitemap. The only way you could possibly achieve something similar would be to have an interim page between the user and the PDF content which communicated to the GA servers - technically possible, but very messy since you would still need googlebot to access the PDFs directly for them to appear in search results.

Unfortunately, I'd say you're stuck with the imperfect suggestions offered by the Google knowledgebase, and perhaps look into whether you can embed the GA code successfully within a PDF file and get any useful stats back.