Custom data (custom properties) attached to pageviews

[davidfischer]

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Prerequisites

• I have searched open and closed issues to make sure that the feature has not yet been requested.

Feature request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I would like to be able to attach custom data (think GA custom dimensions) when sending a pageview. Then I would like to aggregate on those dimensions. I saw the documentation on custom events but I didn't see anything on attaching custom data to a pageview.

How would you like it to work
I'm pretty flexible here. Perhaps the custom data could come from custom meta tags or perhaps there would be an option to manually trigger a pageview with JavaScript and send the data that way.

Sorry if this feature is available somewhere else and I couldn't find it.

Update: We've now opened up a beta version of this to everyone. You can attach custom properties (also known as custom dimensions in Google Analytics) when sending a pageview to Plausible in order to create custom metrics. Instructions at https://plausible.io/docs/custom-pageview-props

[ukutaht]

Agreed, this would make the platform a lot more powerful.

One use-case we've been asked before is filtering articles by the author of the post. Instead of implementing specific fields like author, it would probably make more sense to allow flexible custom dimensions. See #302

I'm really open for suggestions on how the API for this could look. Some options off the top of my head:

1. Manual

In this case, to send a custom dimension you need to disable automatic pageview collection and instead send them manually along with your custom dimensions:

<script async defer data-manual="true" data-domain="plausible.io" src="https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js"></script>

... later

plausible('pageview', custom: {author: 'Uku Taht'})

2. Automatic via script tag

This option would probably be less flexible but more convenient depending how you render your page. Just set the custom dimension via html attributes on the script tag:

<script async defer custom-author="Uku Taht" data-domain="plausible.io" src="https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js"></script>

The tracker could check for any attribute following the custom-{key}="{value}" pattern and automatically send them along.

[gravelld]

This would be very useful.

For consistency, why not use the same JSON member name as custom properties in goals (so props rather than custom), i.e.

plausible('pageview', {props: {author: 'Uku Taht'}})

As per https://plausible.io/docs/custom-event-goals#using-custom-props

[ukutaht]

Totally. I think I wrote this comment before we implemented custom props for custom events. Now we need to extend it to pageviews as well.

[davidfischer]

Another option as I mentioned is to have custom meta tags that are sent. This could work in a somewhat similar fashion to something like opengraph. Think tags like

<meta property="analytics:author" content="David" />
<meta property="analytics:another_field" content="Another Value" />

Any tags with the appropriate prefix get picked up and sent as custom dimensions. These same pieces of data could get picked up for custom events as well.

Something like your manual proposal could work as well.

[ukutaht]

Right, that looks like a great option as well.

[janejuenyang]

Hello! Glad to see this feature request has already been raised. :) Chiming in to mention another use case for this feature: A/B testing. To make sure we have a large enough sample size for a test, we’d need to know how many visitors saw a particular variation.

FWIW on the API form, we’re also flexible but would prefer the data-attribute or meta tag forms over the manual configuration.

[ukutaht]

@janejuenyang Yeah thanks for bringing that up, we don't have a good way to segment visitors for A/B testing.

I think implementing custom props on pageviews will definitely be helpful. You can tag the pageview with the visitor's segment and also tag the conversion event. It will work for getting conversion rates but there's some manual work involved where you have to grab the numbers and plug them into a calculator.

A second phase could be full support for A/B testing. This would involve:

1. Adding a session-level segment property to capture which variant the user is shown
2. Making Plausible aware of A/B testing so we can calculate the conversion rates and confidence intervals for you

[morizyun]

Looks so great!!

This feature would help our marketing tremendously! I'd love to see you put this feature on your roadmap!

[ukutaht]

Thanks for letting us know!

May I ask what your specific use-case is so I can take that into account when building this feature?

[Adamkillander96]

The first suggestion @ukutaht provided looks great!

As for use cases, custom dimensions is great for many reasons.

Examples:

• You have a website where you can sign in. Having a dimension simply called login_status (a Boolean) to filter on signed in or out users.
• A user_role dimension, like guest, admin, subscriber, etc...
• Country and language dimensions, if your site/app does not have the country or language in the URL, dimensions helps with filtering on that.
• I personally like to track PWA usage. Having a dimension like visit_platform and populate it with 'app' for PWA visits and 'browser' for normal usage.

As previously mentioned, the author name example, page information is very important. Like:

• Page type: home, product, article, faq, etc...
• Page category: if you run a blog or something similar and want to see which category performs best
• Page id: something like page name can change and is not good practice if you have a multi language site. So identifying a post, page or product by ID helps filtering views and events across different URLs and languages.

Say you have 3 languages and a specific product you want to look at. If the url structure is something like this:

https://store.com/{language}/product/{product_name}

You are going to have to do some extra work to see how many visits product A has, because it has three different URLs.
With a page ID, we could see how many pageviews it has, regardless of language, country or it's translated name.

These are some of the offhand use cases I can think of with custom dimensions.

[ukutaht]

Hey @Adamkillander96 ! We're currently working on the custom pageview prop feature (will be named custom dimensions when we're ready). Just wanted to get your ideas on what the best way to send these props would be? Do you use Google Tag Manager or DataLayer?

[brandonburkett]

While not Adam, I would use it like this in UA: ga('set', 'dimension1', 'Free Member'), then all pageviews / events, etc get the custom dimension association without having to manually set it.

[anderstp]

I think this option would help a problem I am facing with our usage of plausible.

We are building an app where users signs up they choose a username and then using that as part of the url, ex. would be maelt.co/anda (my co-founder)

The thing is, we want to offer (already do in beta) to point your domain to our server, and just show the profile page as the root of the domain - in this case it would be anda.co (not working) and in plausible it then shows as "/"

By being able to add a custom user-id tag to the plausible tag, we would be able to see the difference between visitors to our homepage and to users pages on custom domains.

[ukutaht]

@anderstp We already collect hostname information on each pageview but we do not surface it in the UI. This could be used to discern between a user on maelt.co/anda vs anda.co/.

More info and discussion: #160

[anderstp]

I agree, that would solve my headache :)

[justrealmilk]

For PWA apps, I'd love a way to track users' upgrade journey. Sending the app version along could help me monitor when users are stuck on an old version for example.

[metmarkosaric]

"we set up the following Google Analytics Custom Dimensions on our story pages, via variables provided by our CMS. This allows us to segment traffic based on the content itself. We'd like to continue to segment our content as we move away from Google Analytics.

Dimensions:

1. Author Byline
2. Program Taxonomy
3. Publish date
4. Tags
5. Categories
6. The internal classification for the story
7. The story template style"

(one more vote for this feature today via email)

[OriginalEXE]

+1 from me.

I have recently implemented dark mode on my website and would love to track how many people use it. Enriching automatic page views
tracking with something like darkMode: true/false would be great.

I could of course track toggling of the dark mode, but that doesn't really give me an accurate representation of how many people use light vs dark mode.

Another info I would like to track is whether my visitors are logged in or not, so again a boolean/string attached to all page views.

[FiloSottile]

Same here, I wanted to track how many users have dark mode enabled system-wide to decide if it's worth supporting.

[janegbert]

I would also +1 this idea. It is something we do in Google Analytics with content groups and custom dimesions. I would like to be able to label pageviews by:

• page type (index, singular, etc.)
• field of knowledge
• industry vertical
• content type
• author
• year of publication

The big advantage of this is that it allows us to easily report on developments in analytics for these custom properties. Making it much easier to make data-driven editorial decsision.

[ukutaht]

Thanks @janegbert! We are finalizing this feature so soon you should be able to send these dimensions. What would be the most convenient way to send it for you? Do you use GTM or dataLayer?

[janegbert]

@ukutaht Thanks for working on this feature. In our case I would like to send the dimensions straight from the page HTML / tracking script because we would like the implementation be independent from Google services.

[itsmatteomanf]

I am going to add my support for this feature. My use case is the same as some of the above.

• Multi-language websites, with same products.
• Seeing per language traffic or other stat.

[metmarkosaric]

WordPress related but feels like it fits for this feature request: "We’re using WPML to translate our site. Somehow Plausible should be able to separate between languages used on the website. Could be done over hreflang or similar. So we can filter the data based on languages and additionally see which languages get used how often."

[aresundnes]

+1 from me on this! Would help us out with AB testing

[metmarkosaric]

Another request for this via email with this use case:

"I don't see a way in Plausible Analytics to group pageviews, as done with content groups in Google Analytics. On our web site, we want to count pageviews for pages like site.com/name2 and site.com/something-else together, because these are of the same page type. But we also want to count each of these urls separately.

In GA it is done like this:
ga('set','contentGroup1','name of content group')

Basically I just want to set a parameter that describes what type of page it is.

This way we can set a name for each type of page. We have millions of pages, and it makes sense to count them as one type of page."

[mquandalle]

We have the same use case

[rmens]

+1 for this. I'm responsible for some dashboards for a large publisher and use lots of custom dimensions in GA. The option to also have them in Plausible would make it a more 'enterprise ready' GA alternative.

This are some of the dimensions I work with daily.

• Author
• Pubdate
• Categories
• Tags
• Words
• Type
• PostID
• IsAdvertorial

[ukutaht]

Hey @rmens thanks for your input! Could you also share how these publishers implement these dimensions? Do they use GTM or dataLayer? What would be the most convenient way for you to send these to Plausible?

[rmens]

@ukutaht Currently it's mostly implemented as a dataLayer.

[ukutaht]

@rmens We're finalizing some of the early work we're doing on this feature. I have a question – can you send a list of values as a dimension in Google Analytics? I would imagine that things like 'categories' and 'tags' are lists, but as far as I can tell you cannot send lists to GA: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36360165/how-to-send-an-array-as-google-analytics-custom-dimension

[ukutaht]

I suppose one can send a comma-separated string instead and use the contains filter as proposed here?

[repolevedavaj]

We want to do something similar: We do not want to track the users itself but the organization they work for. It would be helpful if we could configure a callback to attach additional props to the pageview event. This would allow us to configure the pageview event as goal and then check the calls by organization. This seems only to be possible by patching the js.

[davidmondok]

We are very much looking forward to such a feature in Plausible. The dimensions that we are working with are basically the same as @rmens listed in his last comment.

[tf]

This issue is marked as "in progress" on the roadmap. Some related commits appear to already be on master. Is there already an ETA for this feature?

[metmarkosaric]

hi @tf! that's right. the development is in progress and we're already testing things. sorry but i don't have an ETA at the moment. as soon as it's ready, we'll post in this thread. thanks for your patience!

[daffyquack]

This feature would allow to record personal data in your database, right? Nothing prevents from storing email adresses, user ids etc...
Wouldn't this damage the privacy-friendlyness of the service?

[metmarkosaric]

thanks for the feedback @daffyquack! the site owner would be responsible to ensure that it doesn't happen. this feature would work the same way as custom dimensions that people can already attach to custom events. you can read more here: https://plausible.io/docs/custom-event-goals#using-custom-props

[jlivak]

We're currently migrating our site from GA over to Plausible and custom dimensions for pageviews would be great to have. Our use case is the same as people mentioned above, distinguishing between free/paid/unregistered users.

[brandonburkett]

With GA4-mageddon incoming, this is one (of three) features we are looking for as we review privacy focused options. The others are funnels and events.

Our dimensions use case is pretty simple, segmenting page views / metrics by anon, free, subscriber user roles.

Looking forward to an ETA (looks like it has been a roadmap feature for a long time) so I can help make the case for plausible!

[irtimood]

Same here, this feature is necessary too let us migrate to plausible

[ivmilicevic]

I see that pull request #1816 (#1816) was merged and referenced in changelog for v1.5.0.

Is this feature now usable or is there more work to do?

[sptv2reg]

Frantically watching this issue. Saw a related commit the other day - are we getting close :-) ?

[florentdestremau]

Very interested too here. My use case: I have a multi-tenant SaaS so I want to track visits grouped by company (customer company). I would want to have 2 data visualisation possible (by querying or in the dashboard):

1. A filter per attribute on the main dashboard. Here I would choose a company
2. A cumulated graph by attribute on the metrics graph. A stacked graph of page visits per company for me, this would help me notice very active companies during a peak usage.

[ThomasTr]

Is this feature included in the v2.0.0-rc.0 release?

[NinjutsuSunrise]

My company would love to see this as well. Ideally, with GTM and dataLayer methods / docs available.

Thanks for all your hard work!

[danielfigueiredoff]

Is this feature included in the v2.0.0-rc.0 release?

No info on changelog... Maybe under a feature flag?

[metmarkosaric]

We've now opened up a beta version of this to everyone. You can attach custom properties (also known as custom dimensions in Google Analytics) when sending a pageview to Plausible in order to create custom metrics. Instructions at https://plausible.io/docs/custom-pageview-props

[metmarkosaric]

@brandonburkett perfect, thank you for the update!

[sptv2reg]

Is it necessary (now or in the future) to actually add them to the dashboard in order for them to be registered? Or is this only a prerequisite for having them displayed on the dashboard?

[metmarkosaric]

hi @sptv2reg! it works the same way as custom events work. it is only a prerequisite for having them displayed on the dashboard. if you don't need the props displayed in the dashboard, you can simply start sending them our way without adding them in site settings

[SemaphoreOxalis]

@metmarkosaric Thanks for the clarification.
Since yesterday we have some weird issue on one of our client mixing page goal and custom goal+properties) . How could I send you the information about it ?

[metmarkosaric]

@SemaphoreOxalis you can contact our customer support with details https://plausible.io/contact

[mattcameron]

Hey team, great job in getting this feature out! 🙏

I'm testing this out via the API and having trouble applying multiple filters for different custom properties - (adding an additional (AND) filter returns more page views than with the single filter)

Is this supported yet? I can see in the dashboard that you can only select one at a time.

[metmarkosaric]

thanks @mattcameron! yeah, this is unfortunately not supported at this stage. it's something we plan to work on in the future but i cannot make any promise around when it may be ready. we'll update this thread as soon as we have some updates on our progress #846

[mattcameron]

Okay, thanks @metmarkosaric!

[k9ordon]

Fantastic addition! I was curious to know if there are any plans to integrate this feature with the plausible-tracker?

[Jelledb]

I would really love to use this. Is this available for the self-hosted variant of Plausible?

My use cases are:

1. Track which customer name the pageview came from (multi-tenant SaaS use case)
2. Track whether the respective user is an admin or a regular user., just as a simple true/false.

[timcole]

Yes, this was made available in self-hosted v2.0.0

[SemaphoreOxalis]

Hi,
After many clients review we want to share a common feedback : we need the goal attachment name after the properties name. For example we have a "Search" goal with a "Terms" properties. Many clients appreciate to have something like "Terms (Search)" in the properties dropzone.
The new Goals/Properties/Funnel views are quite confusing (they really dislike this new one) and they understand they have to select goals for filtering properties but the addition of the Goal after the properties terms permit them to review all properties corectly and understand the use of each of them.

Thanks for this.