visitData
emulates the source, medium, campaign, content and term data just like Google Analytics does it (ga.js).
Since there is no way to extract this information from ga.js directly, you need a library like visitData
to do it.
visitData is used on over 40 million page loads every week, just from the CDN:
If you have any questions for this, drop me an email at ilkkapel@gmail.com
Here's the file you can include in your web page directly from CDN: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.umd.js
- CommonJS: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.cjs.js
- UMD: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.umd.js
- ESM: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.esm.js
npm install visitdata
clone this repository and then
npm install
npm run build
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.umd.js"></script>
<script>console.log(visitData.get());</script>
<!-- or, and this you can copy into a javascript console without the <script> tag too for testing -->
<script>
await import('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/visitdata/dist/visitdata.umd.js')
console.log(visitData.get())
</script>
visitData.get()
will return an object like
{
"source": "google",
"medium": "organic"
}
You can also run visitData.rawData()
which will return a lot more information
The results are cached with sessionStorage, so subsequent page views in the same session will return the original result.
option | what it does | value |
---|---|---|
cache | disable caching |
true or false
|
url_parameters | pick custom url parameters | e.g. {campaign: ['campaign', 'utm_campaign'], urlparam_custom: ['custom']}
|
The first time visitdata
get()
or rawData()
is called, the library will store the results into sessionStorage
, so that subsequent pageviews in the same session will return the original results from cache.
During testing, or for some other reason, you might want to disable caching. You can do that by calling
visitData.setOption('cache', false)
By default, visitData
assumes your URL can have standard UTM parameters such as utm_source
, utm_medium
, utm_campaign
, utm_content
and utm_term
. However, you might want to pick custom parameters additionally.
For example, let's say you actually want to track a campaign_id
instead of utm_campaign
and sometimes your medium might be in a parameter called custom_medium
. You might do something like this:
visitData.setOption('url_parameters', {
'medium': ['utm_medium', 'custom_medium'],
'source': ['utm_source'],
'campaign': ['utm_campaign'],
'campaign_id': ['campaign_id']
})
note that the value of each key needs to be a list.
Now, calling visitData.get()
will return an object like:
{
'medium': 'cpc',
'source: 'google',
'campaign: 'My campaign',
'campaign_id': '1241234'
}