SPA measurement – single page application

If your website is built on Angular.js, Node.js or another JavaScript solution, where the entire page does not reload after the user navigates, it is necessary to approach differently to measuring data for web analytics and retargeting codes for advertising systems. This is because it may not be clear to the measuring code which parts of the application to treat as their own pages and which not. 

We are talking about the measurement of the so-called Single Page Application (SPA).

Especially for tools such as Google Analytics, it is necessary to implement the measurement of so-called virtual pageviews, which carry information corresponding to the page reload in the case of “static HTML”. Modern analytics systems already abandon the measurement of pageviews (the so-called page load in the browser), but we still believe that these events should be retained and measured in analytics systems. They are not necessarily called PageViews, but it is appropriate to measure these interactions.

If you don’t measure virtual pageviews, you’re missing out on a large sample of information, and sessions may expire unexpectedly. What does this mean? Your data may look like a page loads, nothing is happening for a long time, and then it only sends e.g. a transaction or some final interaction in the application you are measuring. Even though the user is active on the page and makes many interactions, the knowledge of which is valuable for you. But you don’t have this data in the system because the basic measurement codes are not able to measure these interactions without customized settings.

For the clients where we set up Single Page Application measurement, it turned out that up to 5 times more information can be obtained from the website or application. This means that a lot of business and marketing valuable information was not being measured.

If you start measuring other interactions and virtual pageviews in your SPA, you can better segment active users by interaction types and target key marketing messages to these segments.

Are you launching a new SPA website or do you have an active application you want to measure properly with? Let us know and we’ll take care of setting up the analytics just for you.