High numbers of PDF Downloads -> crawler and bots?

Support & Bugs
1

Hello,

we have been working with piwik for a couple of month now. Everything works just fine (goals, campaigns, 404, etc.)
The download-statistic is kind of new for us, since we couldn’t really evaluate these downloads effiently before.
But the download numbers which piwiks shows just seem rather high.
So, we were wondering whether crawler and bots are tracked too, when following the links to the pdf documents.
Since the documents don’t have any piwik code in them, this could be possible, correct?

Thanx for your opinions!
Kitty

2

Most crawlers/bots are excluded automatically because they don’t execute javascript (which is used by the download/outlink tracking).

Google and Bing smart bots are detected by the server and then excluded.

Ignoring the possibility of web scraping tools, I’d say the majority of your download clicks are likely real.