Find out who actually read the whitepaper

Tracked links inside the whitepaper you already give away, minted per recipient — so the download list becomes a reading list, ranked by which sections each lead actually opened.

When to run it

You gate a whitepaper behind a form, count the fills as leads, and hand the list to the same follow-up sequence. But a download only tells you the title worked. You don't know who opened the file, who stopped at the executive summary, and who sat with the pricing appendix — so the reader with a live buying question gets the same drip as the one collecting PDFs.

Why it works

A download is an intention; a click inside the document is behavior. The links are references the reader wants anyway — the case study, the docs, the pricing appendix — and because the tracking is a first-party redirect, it works from inside a PDF reader, where an open pixel can't. Which link they clicked is the real signal: someone leaving the document for your pricing page has a different question than someone checking a methodology footnote, and the follow-up can answer the actual question instead of re-introducing the company.

The play

1. Put the links a reader would want anyway inside the document, at the decision points: the case study, the docs, the pricing appendix.
2. Generate each recipient's links at delivery time, so a click resolves to a named person — you already know who they are from the form.
3. Score by section, not by click count. Pricing outranks methodology.
4. Route high-intent sections to a human follow-up the same day; everyone else stays in the nurture.
5. Cap it: one human follow-up per reader per month, however many clicks.

Ship it with Hogsend

Mint the links type: "personal" at delivery time — only personal links (carrying a distinctId) enroll journeys; a public link records stats but never fires into the event bus.

import { mintLink } from "@hogsend/engine";

// at delivery time, one per recipient per linked section
const pricing = await mintLink({
  db: client.db,
  baseUrl: client.env.API_PUBLIC_URL,
  url: "https://example.com/pricing",
  type: "personal",
  distinctId: lead.email,
  source: "whitepaper",
  campaign: "state-of-onboarding-2026",
});
// embed pricing.url in this recipient's copy of the document

The journey watches for the section that means a buying question:

import { days, defineJourney, sendEmail } from "@hogsend/engine";

export const whitepaperPricingReader = defineJourney({
  meta: {
    id: "whitepaper-pricing-reader",
    trigger: {
      event: "link.clicked",
      where: (b) => [
        b.prop("campaign").eq("state-of-onboarding-2026"),
        b.prop("linkUrl").contains("/pricing"),
      ],
    },
    // one follow-up per reader per month, however many clicks
    entryLimit: "once_per_period",
    entryPeriod: days(30),
    suppress: days(1),
  },
  run: async (user, ctx) => {
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "sales/whitepaper-pricing-follow-up",
      props: { section: user.properties.linkUrl },
    });
  },
});

A forwarded copy still credits the original recipient — read that as a warm intro happening inside the account, not as noise. The mechanics are documented in link tracking.

How you'll know

Read rate — recipients with at least one in-document click over total downloads — and the section breakdown, which tells you what the market actually wants answered. Then reply and meeting rate on section-routed follow-ups against your old everyone-gets-the-sequence baseline; clicks and sends are both events, so the comparison is one funnel.