Document Tracking
Definition
Document tracking is any measurement applied to a file you have sent out. At the plain end it is a view count on a published address: you know the proposal was opened 14 times and the PDF was downloaded 3 times, and you know nothing about who did it. At the other end sit tools that issue a different link to each recipient, embed an invisible image in an email to fire on open, or run a script that reports scroll depth page by page and pushes a notification when a named person reaches the pricing section. The mechanism is similar in each case; what differs is whether the person on the other end could reasonably guess it was happening. That distinction is where the law and ordinary professional manners both sit.
Why It Matters
Knowing a proposal was opened changes how you follow up, and there is nothing underhand about it — the recipient asked for the document and you are counting requests for your own file. Per-person tracking is a different act. Under the GDPR a per-recipient link, an email open pixel or a device identifier is processing personal data, which needs a lawful basis and a privacy notice that actually describes it. Beyond the legal test there is a commercial one: clients who discover they were watched paragraph by paragraph rarely say so, they simply stop replying. The workable line is that aggregate counting needs no apology, and anything that identifies an individual should be something you would be comfortable stating in the covering email.
How It Works
Aggregate tracking happens at the edge. The CDN records each request for the address — timestamp, referrer, country, whether it was a page view or a file download — and reports totals with no cookie written and no identifier stored. Per-person tracking works by making the address itself the identifier: proposal-abc123 goes to one client and proposal-def456 to another, so the request log becomes a named log. Email pixels are a one-pixel image whose URL carries the recipient identifier, which is why so many mail clients now proxy or block remote images. In-document telemetry requires a script, so it works in an HTML page and not in a PDF opened locally. 99helpers gives you the aggregate side cookie-free — views, downloads, referrers and countries — and no per-person profile, which for most client work is the right amount.
Real-World Example
A studio sends a 4 MB scope document to five prospects at scope-q4.99helpers.site, one address for all of them, password protected. The dashboard shows 31 views across nine days and 7 downloads, so they know the document is being circulated internally somewhere and time their follow-up accordingly. They deliberately do not issue five separate links, because the question they need answered is whether the work is being discussed, not which director opened it at eleven at night.
Common Mistakes
- ✕Treating a per-recipient link as anonymous because no name is stored — the link is the name, and using it to identify someone is processing personal data
- ✕Reading an open event as a person reading — chat and mail clients fetch URLs to build previews, so the first hit is often software
- ✕Promising a client that a PDF reports reading progress — a PDF opened in a local viewer runs no script and sends nothing back
Related Terms
View Count
The number of times a page or file was successfully requested. It counts requests, not people — one person reloading four times produces four views.
Online Proposal
A pitch, quote or scope document published at a web address and sent as a link rather than an attachment. The client opens it in a browser; you keep the ability to correct it after sending.
Personal Data
Any information relating to a person who can be identified, directly or indirectly. The definition is broader than most people expect — an IP address counts, and so does an identifier that only becomes a name when combined with something else.
GDPR
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, in force since 25 May 2018, governing how personal data about people in the EU may be collected and used. The UK keeps a near-identical version in its own law.
Web Analytics
Measuring who visits a site and what they look at. The two methods — a script running in the visitor's browser, or counting each request as it is served — produce different numbers, and neither of them is wrong.
Put a file online in seconds
Drop in a document, an image, a page or a whole static website and share the link — free, with no build step and no server to set up.
Host a file free →