Document Analytics -Think of it as Cookies for PDF

We've all been there. You find an interesting document like a white paper or other PDF on a seemingly interesting topic only to find that you have to fill out your life's history to download it for free or fork over enormous sums of cash.

But a Vancouver-based company called Vitrium Systems is aiming to help eliminate that conundrum for end users - while still providing marketers the feedback they are looking for - with a new Web-based tool they describe as providing document analytics.

Just as Web analytics tools are advancing beyond traditional feedback mechanisms like gauging hits, document analytics is going beyond its first iterations.

Vitrium's new Docmetrics software - which it is launching next week -is an Adobe Flash application that works inside of Acrobat to capture metrics about what readers are doing with the PDF documents they download.

For example, companies can be alerted in real-time about the number of times a particular PDF is downloaded, the number of pages read, time spent on each page, if a document was printed and if a document passed to another user, noted Peter Nieforth, the company's CEO and cofounder.

"There are hundreds of millions of documents floating around out there," he noted. "You have no visibility into what happens to that doc once you send it to someone. It's a black hole. What we have done is opened up the possibility of providing visibility and details on how people are engaging with that content."

Docmetrics is aimed at allowing PDF publishers to eliminate the Web forms that users are required to fill out to access PDF content. In addition, Docmetrics can also ask those downloading PDFs or other content questions about themselves. If they answer, their answers can be used to provide marketers with additional insight about the effectiveness of their electronic content, he added.

If this type of tracking sounds a bit too Orwellian to anyone, don't despair. Nieforth notes that users are always alerted that the software will be used to track their use of the PDFs unless they willingly offer up data about themselves like their names and the name of their employer.

"When people provide those answers and hit the submit button they know that information is being collected," he said. "We've taken a very end-reader friendly approach to this."

In addition, for readers who download a PDF and then read it on an airplane or at another time when they are not connected, the data about their habits is collected and then sent back to the application when they reconnect.

In other instances where readers are reading PDFs when they are connected, metrics are sent back to the marketer in real-time so they can make any needed adjustments to their content.