PDF Buyer tracking is a DPD premium feature for paid accounts.  Once activated, PDF Buyer Tracking automatically prints the purchaser's information at the bottom of each page of a supported PDF product.

The information that is attached includes:

• Buyer Name
• Buyer Email
• DPD Transaction ID

This information attached to the buyer's copy discourages sharing of your product after download without the use of intrusive DRM which could negatively impact your buyer's experience.  Also, this simple method removes the requirement for special plug-ins, EXE file downloads, and special passwords for each customer.

In order to use PDF Buyer Tracking, the following conditions must be met:

• Your product file must be a single PDF upload and not contained in a ZIP, RAR, ISO, or any other archive file.

The PDF Buyer Tracking function can not open and write buyer information to PDFs that are zipped inside other files.   

• Your PDF must be a Acrobat 5 compatible file

For DPD to open your PDF to write the buyer information to it it the PDF's compatibility mode must be set to "Acrobat 5.0 and later" when you save it.  This is a great practice anyway- it ensures your buyers with older Acrobat Reader versions can open your file.

• Your PDF must not have an edit password set in the PDF file.

DPD does not currently support encrypted PDFs and there must not be an edit password set on the file.  This is because DPD must actually open your PDF and write the customer information on your file when a customer purchases it.

• Your PDF file size must be less than 30 MB.

Using PDF files larger than 30 MB may create a long delay for your customer's download to start while the PDF file is being prepared with their information.  Using the PDF Optimizer function in Acrobat will reduce your file size and your customers download time, which is good for everybody.

Advanced Options

DPD allows you to customize how your PDFs are watermarked with the tracking information.

• Tracking Format allows you to customize the text that is displayed in your watermark. Merge variables allow you to specify where the purchase information goes.
  
  Available Merge Vars include:
  {customer_name}   The customer's name (supplied by the payment processor)
  {customer_email}   The customer's email (supplied by the payment processor)
  {transaction_id}     The DPD Transaction ID
• Tracking Page Limit will allow you to chose how many pages, starting from the first page, to apply the watermark. This is great for documents that are intended to be printed, but without a watermark.
• Font Color lets you choose the color of the watermark.

Testing PDF Buyer Tracking

After creating a new product or enabling PDF Buyer Tracking for an existing product it's easy to test how it will look to your buyers.   Simply send yourself a free delivery of the product from the product's Details page.   Download the product from the emailed link to see the tracking information added to the bottom of the file.  

Note:  Because free deliveries do not collect a buyer name this will be omitted from the tracking information, but the email you sent the free delivery to as well as the DPD transaction ID will be displayed.