A note on changing urls on Same Page Interactions

The simplest analytics implementation is to only track pageviews.

You check when the url changes and report it to the analytics suite.

This approach works fine when you have simple navigation and few Same Page Interactions.

However, some sites change the url on Same Page Interactions.

Typical actions are sorting or filtering.

This is a good practice, as it allows customers to share the url with others.

But, some sites abuse these to track conversions.

They change the url on the same page to track it in the analytics suite.

This is a bad idea, as the analysts will have to filter these our when they want to count pageviews.

Your analytics suite will not differentiate an interaction from a pageview.

Which means your metrics will be wrong.

Typical cases is when you click on an interaction that opens a modal for either login or checkout cart.

If you track interactions, you won’t need to alter the url for Same Page Interactions.

You should only count pageviews when the user perceives a navigation.

That is when the content of the page changes.

– Samy