Control the path that's sent to GoatCounter

Sometimes you want to send a different path to GoatCounter than what appears in the browser’s URL bar; removing one or more query parameters are a common scenario.

Using a canonical URL

The easiest way to ensure that /path always shows up as /path is to add a canonical URL in the <head>:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/path">

The href can also be relative (e.g. /path).

This will only work if the canonical URL is on the same domain (with allowance for the www subdomain); for example setting the canonical URL to:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://my-other-site.com/path">

And then loading this page as https://example.com/path will mean GoatCounter just ignore this value. This is because some people publish things on multiple sites and then point at one as “canonical”. This can be good for SEO, but not good for tracking things in GoatCounter.

Be sure to understand the potential SEO effects before adding a canonical URL; if you use query parameters for navigation then you probably don’t want to do this.

Using data-goatcounter-settings

You can use data-goatcounter-settings on the script tag to set the path; this must be valid JSON:

<script data-goatcounter="https://s.jarv.org/count"
        data-goatcounter-settings='{"path": "/hello"}'
        async src="//zgo.at/count.js"></script>

You can also set the title, referrer, and event in here.

Using window.goatcounter

Alternatively you can send a custom path by setting window.goatcounter before the count.js script loads:

<script>
    window.goatcounter = {
        path: location.pathname || '/',
    }
</script>
<script data-goatcounter="https://s.jarv.org/count"
        async src="//s.jarv.org/count.js"></script>

This is useful if you want some more complex logic, for example to add some individual query parameters with goatcounter.get_query():

<script>
    window.goatcounter = {
        path: function() {
            return location.pathname + '?page=' + (goatcounter.get_query('page')) || '/'),
        },
    }
</script>
<script data-goatcounter="https://s.jarv.org/count"
        async src="//s.jarv.org/count.js"></script>

Note this example uses a callback, since goatcouner.get_query() won’t be defined yet if we just used an object.

See the JavaScript API page for more details JS API.

Questions or problems?

Feel free to get in touch if you’ve got any questions or having any problems; a lot of times they can be resolved without too much problems.

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