Ionic 5 — pageview tracking without Tag Manager script

2 min readJun 7, 2019

When you are building a hybrid application or Single-page applications (SPAs), you will notice that pageview tracking won’t work out of the box like a normal website.

Data layer push isn’t working
GTM triggers won’t work
Debugging is a hassle
Or Ionics Tag Manager plugin isn’t working in the latest version of Ionic

Code that won’t work

Before reading this article you may have attempted triggering page views with tag manager or by listening to your router in the AppComponent and tried triggering virtual page views with datalayer push.

Guess what, nothing is happening and your there is not activity on your Google Analytics dashboard. You have no easy method or way to debug and figure out what is going wrong.

Thinking up with a solution

The solution I applied was, by analyzing existing pageview requests from a normal website.

This is what i noticed

The domain-name is www.google-analytics.com
The query string parameters; the Google analytics code, title and path
The method name = GET
Wait, this is really just a generic Ajax request ?
…

My conclusion was that sending pageview event requests, without datalayer was very simple to implement…

Description of the query parameters

These are the query parameters that are of most importance to enable tracking.

tid: Google Analytics code
t: the type of request (pageview, event, …)
cid: random number that serves as the client id
dl: the url
dt: Document title in the HTML tag (Home | Company name)
el: page title or event label

Documentation: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters

Solution to page view tracking (code)

The quickest solution I came up with, was by performing a simple Ajax call to Google Analytics . Remove the Tag Manager script and increase page loading.