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To monitor downloads using google analytics, adwords conversion or other tools, it is much simpler to have a “Thanks for downloading” page. There are ways with Google Analytics to monitor downloads but a page view is much more simple to track.

What I call a “SourceForge style download page” is a web page where the download starts automatically once loaded. On this page you will usually find a “thank you” message along with a link to start the download if the automatic download doesn’t work.

This can be done using a <meta> tag like this:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2; URL=http://www.somewhere.com/file.zip”>

The first parameter of the “content” attribute is the time in seconds before the download starts. The URL parameter of the “content” attribute is the URL of the file to download.

That’s simple you say! Of course it is but there are so many peoples suggesting over designed and complex solutions on the web that I decided to make this post for the glory of simplicity.