Measure pageviews

Whenever someone loads a page of your website or their browser history state is changed by the active site, an enhanced measurement event called page_view is sent from your website to Google Analytics. Since the event is sent automatically, you don't need to send pageview data to Analytics manually.

However, when you want to manually control how pageviews are sent (e.g. single-page applications or infinite scrolling), you can disable pageviews and then manually send them from your website. Learn how to Measure single-page applications.

This document describes the default pageview behavior and then how to send your own pageviews manually.

For information about how to measure screenviews on a mobile app, see Measure screenviews instead.


This guide assumes that you've done the following:

It also assumes that you have the following:

  • Access to your website source code
  • The Editor (or above) role to the Google Analytics account

Default behavior

When you add the Google tag (gtag.js) to your site, the snippet includes a config command that sends a pageview by default. You can include additional <parameters> with information about the pageview in order to specify how Google Analytics is initialized:

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

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.

If you override page_location, the value must start with the protocol followed by the full URL; for example, https://www.example.com/contact-us-submitted.

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

For example, the following overrides the page_title values:

gtag('config', 'TAG_ID', {
  'page_title' : 'homepage'
});

Manual pageviews

When you want to manually control how pageviews are sent (e.g. single-page applications or infinite scrolling), do the following:

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

Disable pageview measurement

To disable the default page_view event, set the send_page_view parameter to false in the Google tag snippet.

gtag('config', 'TAG_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.

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>'
});