Measure pageviews

There are two ways to send a pageview to Google Analytics:

  1. Use the default behavior of the gtag.js snippet
  2. Send manual page_view events

Default behavior

When you add gtag.js to your site, the snippet includes a config command that by default sends a pageview. You can include additional parameters to configure this behavior:

gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID', <parameters>);

where <parameters> is an object used to configure how Google Analytics is initialized. When customizing the pageview behavior, the following keys may be used:

Name Type Required Default value Description
page_title string No document.title The title of the page.
page_location string No location.href The URL of the page.
page_path string No location.pathname

The path to the page. If overridden, this value must start with a / character.

send_page_view boolean No true Whether or not a pageview should be sent.

For example, the following overrides the page_title and page_path values:

gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID', {
  'page_title' : 'homepage',
  'page_path': '/home'
});

Multiple properties

To send pageviews to multiple Google Analytics properties, specify each property in a gtag('config') call:

gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID_1');
gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID_2');

This is not a persistent setting and must be repeated on every page of your site using the gtag.js snippet.

Manual pageviews

For most Google Analytics implementations, the default snippet does not need to be modified. However, in cases where you want to manually control how pageviews are sent (e.g. single page applications or infinite scrolling), you should do the following:

  1. Disable pageview measurement
  2. Send the page_view event when appropriate

Disable pageview measurement

To disable the default pageview hit, set the send_page_view parameter to false in the gtag.js snippet.

gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID', {
  send_page_view: false
});

The send_page_view setting does not persist across pages. This setting must be repeated on every page of your website where you want to disable automatic pageviews.

If your snippet is configured for multiple properties, disable the pageview for each config command:

gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID_1', {
  send_page_view: false
});
gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID_2', {
  send_page_view: false
});

Manually send page_view events

Where appropriate, make the following gtag call, replacing placeholder values as necessary:

gtag('event', 'page_view', {
  page_title: '<Page Title>',
  page_location: '<Page Location>',
  page_path: '<Page Path>',
  send_to: '<GA_MEASUREMENT_ID>'
})