Pageviews & SPAs

The first pageview

Unless data-auto="false" is set, the tracker sends one pageview as soon as it can: immediately if the document is already parsed, otherwise on DOMContentLoaded.

It is held — along with anything you queued — until the identity probe answers or 1500 ms elapse, whichever is first. That wait is what keeps the landing hit, and therefore the campaign that produced the visit, filed under the same visitor as everything after it.

Single-page apps

The tracker patches history.pushState and listens for popstate, so any router that navigates through the History API is tracked with no extra code. That covers:

• Next.js (App Router and Pages Router)
• React Router, TanStack Router, Wouter
• Vue Router, Nuxt
• SvelteKit
• Astro View Transitions
• Angular Router

Hash routers

Hash-only navigation does not touch the History API. Opt in:

<script defer
  data-site="pk_live_xxxxxxxx"
  data-hash="true"
  src="https://ingest.tracing.tools/t.js"></script>

With data-hash="true" the tracker also listens for hashchange and includes the hash when deciding whether the path changed.

replaceState is not a pageview

Only pushState and popstate trigger one. Replacing the URL to keep a filter or a scroll position in sync — which is what replaceState is for — correctly does not count as a new page.

Deduplication

A pageview is skipped when the computed path is identical to the last one sent:

location.pathname + location.search + (data-hash ? location.hash : "")

So a router that fires twice for one navigation produces one pageview, and pushState to the same URL produces none.

Note that the query string is part of that comparison, even though the dashboard groups by path. /search?q=a then /search?q=b are two pageviews that both appear under /search.

Manual pageviews

tracing.pageview();

Useful when you set data-auto="false" because you need to wait for something — a consent decision, a locale redirect, an A/B assignment — before the first hit. Deduplication still applies, so calling it twice for the same URL sends one hit.

What is recorded

Stored as	From
Path	location.pathname, / if empty
Query	location.search with utm_*, ref, source, via, fbclid, gclid, gbraid, wbraid, msclkid and ttclid removed; null if nothing is left
Title	document.title
Hostname	the host of the URL
Referrer	document.referrer, plus a bare referrer domain with www. stripped, null when it is your own host
UTM	utm_source/medium/campaign/term/content, with ref, source or via as a fallback for utm_source
Language	navigator.language
Screen	window.innerWidth × innerHeight
Browser, version, OS, device	parsed from the user agent server-side
Country, region, city	resolved server-side — see Geo

Splitting the query off the path is what keeps /pricing?utm_source=hn and /pricing the same row on the dashboard, while /search?q=cookies keeps its term for the Query dimension.

Time on page

Two mechanisms fill in how long a page was looked at.

On the next pageview. The tracker measures the gap since the last pageview and sends it as d on the new hit. That figure lands on the session total.

On page hide. When visibilitychange fires with visibilityState === "hidden", the tracker sends a duration hit by sendBeacon with the elapsed time. Coming back to the foreground resets the clock, so time spent in a background tab is not counted, and an elapsed time under one second is not sent at all.

A duration hit is not an event

The duration hit is bookkeeping. The collector adds the milliseconds to the pageview they belong to — the visitor’s most recent one on that path, falling back to their most recent one anywhere within 30 minutes — and rolls the same milliseconds into the open session. It never creates a row.

An earlier version of the tracker flushed this as a pageview named $duration, which double-counted every view, turned every real bounce into a two-view session and put a phantom step in every journey. The collector still accepts that shape from old installs, but files it as a duration.

A flushed duration is clamped to between 0 and 30 minutes, the same idle window that ends a visit.

What “bounce” means here

A visit is a bounce while it has one or fewer pageviews. It stops being one the moment a second pageview arrives. Custom events, outbound clicks and revenue events do not clear the bounce flag — which is deliberate: a single-page visit where somebody converted is still a single-page visit, and Sessions has a Converted chip for exactly that case.

Related

• Script configuration
• How visitors are counted
• Outbound links