We Don't Even Track Page Views

August 29, 2017

All analytics tools I know of track pageviews in a way that—to put it bluntly—simply doesn’t work for a growing number of websites today and is completely incompatible with the direction the web is heading.

For the most part, these tools assume (by default) that each pageview corresponds to a full page load, and that each page load runs some analytics tracking code, and sends a pageview to a back-end server. Anything that deviates from this model requires extra work on the part of the site developer—work most developers don’t have the time or expertise to do.

The reality is the web has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years, and more and more websites don’t fit this traditional model. Our analytics tools haven’t kept up.

The problem

To give you a specific example, consider mail.google.com (Gmail). Most people who use Gmail in their browser keep it open in a background and switch to it every once in a while to see if they have any new messages. When they do, they click on the message to read it. The vast majority of Gmail users almost never reload the page, which raises a few important questions from an analytics point of view: