30

Page

How it works

The page method represents pageviews. It helps you record the pages that people visit on your website. By recording page events, you can better understand the parts of your website that people use. You might even follow up with people who’ve visited particular pages to see if they’re still interested in a product, online class, and so on.

Our JavaScript source automatically captures page events on load, but you’ll need to invoke page calls manually if you use our server-side libraries, you have a single page app, or you want to augment the call with special properties. You’ll also send your own page calls if you use one of our server-side libraries.

A typical call

The page method changes significantly depending on whether you use our JavaScript source or send page calls another way.

If you use the JavaScript source, we’ll automatically capture page events on page load with the page URL and other common properties. You can invoke page calls manually if you have a single page app or want to override properties that we typically capture. By default, the call is simply analytics.page(). You can also send the page category, name, and so on. But, in general, page calls are relatively straightforward and, more importantly, automatic.

If you use one of our server-side libraries (NodeJS, Python, and Go), you’ll need to send your own page calls. You’ll need to include a userId or anonymousId in your call, and you can also include a properties object with information about the page—including a number of reserved properties that we’ve enumerated below. Below is an example from our NodeJS library, but you should check the documentation for the source library you install for more information about the page method.

analytics.page({
  userId: '019mr8mf4r',
  category: 'Docs',
  name: 'Customer.io Data Pipelines',
  properties: {
    url: 'https://customer.io/docs/cdp/',
    path: '/docs/cdp/',
    title: 'Data Pipelines',
    referrer: 'https://customer.io'
  }
});

The full payload

While your requests are typically short, our libraries capture much more information. This helps us provide context, not only for the person performing the event, but the source of the call. The example below shows the full payload as you’ll see it in Data Pipelines.

Customer.io and our libraries typically populate integrations and timestamp values as shown in the payload below. If you use our JavaScript or mobile libraries, they’ll also populate context for you. If you use our server-side libraries, you’ll need to populate context yourself.

See common fields for more information about context, integrations, and timestamps in source payloads.

{
  "userId": "97980cfea0067",
  "type": "page",
  "name": "Home",
  "properties": {
    "category": "string",
    "url": "http://www.example.com/page",
    "title": "Welcome | ACME, Inc.",
    "referrer": "http://www.google.com/search/?q=sfgiants",
    "path": "/page",
    "search": "?q=sfgiants",
  },
  "integrations": {
    "All": true,
  },
  "messageId": "022bb90c-bbac-11e4-8dfc-aa07a5b093db",
  "receivedAt": "2015-02-23T22:28:55.387Z",
  "sentAt": "2015-02-23T22:28:55.111Z",
  "timestamp": "2015-02-23T22:28:55.111Z",
  "version": 1.1,
  "context": {
    "active": true,
    "ip": "8.8.8.8",
    "locale": "string",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36",
    "channel": "browser",
    "campaign": {
      "name": "string",
      "source": "string",
      "medium": "string",
      "term": "string",
      "content": "string",
    },
    "page": {
      "name": "string",
      "path": "string",
      "referrer": "string",
      "search": "string",
      "title": "string",
      "url": "string",
      "keywords": [
        "string"
      ]
    }
  },
  "anonymousId": "507f191e810c19729de860ea",
  "channel": "browser"
}

Page properties

In page calls, you can send properties that describe the page. We have a number of reserved properties that we’ve defined below. For example, we always expect path to be a page’s URL path, and referrer to be the previous page’s URL. As with track calls you can also send custom properties beyond the reserved properties described below.

You should only use reserved properties for their intended meaning.