This guide describes how to use page tracking with analytics.js

Overview

Page tracking allows you to measure the number of views you had of a particular page on your web site. For a web app, you might decide to track a page when a large portion of the screen changes, for example when the user goes from the home screen to the settings screen.

There are 3 fields that can be sent with each tracking beacon to identify a page:

Implementation

The default JavaScript snippet for analytics.js contains a page tracking call, so on most sites, page tracking is already happening through the default snippet.

To send a pageview, you pass the ga function a send command with the pageview hit type:

ga('send', 'pageview');

When this command is executed, the analytics.js library sets the title value using the document.title browser property. The library also sets the location value using the following browser properties and logic:

var location = window.location.protocol +
    '//' + window.location.hostname +
    window.location.pathname +
    window.location.search;

Once calculated, the location value is sent to Google Analytics servers where the rest of the page values are set. The hostname value is set using the hostname portion of the location. The page value is set using both the pathname and search portion of the URL.

Overriding Default Values

If you need to override the default location information, you should update the title and page values directly.

To override the default page value, you can pass the ga command an additional parameter:

ga('send', 'pageview', '/my-overridden-page?id=1');

Alternatively, to override these values, the send command accepts an optional field object as the last parameter. The field object is a standard JavaScript object, but defines specific field names and values accepted by analytics.js.

ga('send', 'pageview', {
  'page': '/my-overridden-page?id=1',
  'title': 'my overridden page'
});

Finally, the hitType parameter has its own field name, so you can send a pageview using only the send command and a field object:

ga('send', {
  'hitType': 'pageview',
  'page': '/my-overridden-page?id=1',
  'title': 'my overridden page'
});

Read the Field Reference document for a complete list of all the fields that can be used in the configuration object.

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