add option to avoid tracking on initialisation

[antonk52]

An extremely low size cost addon (+4b for gzipped) to allow avoid tracking on initialisation. Backwards compatible and particularly useful for SPAs that do not have server side rendering. Before with initial page load it would track a pageview event with default, in some cases incorrect document title. Will gladly discuss if you think this is a bad idea.

[lukeed]

Hey @antonk52, thanks!

I'm not sure that I really understand the need for this. Generally, the location/pathname is the only thing that matters for tracking -- the document.title is just there to match the official GA script, which means that it'd be "wrong" for a SPA app too. At this point, I think all that matters is being a tiny replacement for the official behavior.

I'll have to think about this a little bit more (brain not working today 😞) but feel free to try and convince me 😆

[antonk52]

Thank you for taking a look. There are two main reasons I believe this is a good addition

• Having the correct document titles as some people do use the page titles instead of page urls.
  If you visit an analytics page under BEHAVIOR / Overflow you can see that you can list top results with Page(url) or Page Title.

• Avoiding tracking routes twice.

I can not think of a more generic case, so I will share my specific one. I found there are 3 main ways to do tracking in p/react apps:

1. To listen on history change event, which sends a pageview event before one changes a page title
2. To have a renderless Tracker component inside a route component which sends pageview event on route render
3. To track in componentWillMount/componentDidMount method.

Regardless of which one I choose, using Ganalytics sends a pageview event when I first require it on new Ganalytics(...) to wrap in in a helper function, and then it sends another pageview event with any one of the three options I noted above.

A work around this could be to recreate ga on every route render and not to assign it to anything, but then when it comes to tracking a custom event it will send an additional pageview. Which does not seem like a good option.

I think it is a good tone to let a developer opt in or out whether one want to dispatch the initial pageview event or not.

Please let me know if this makes sense and it is not just me moaning 😅

[lukeed]

May I ask what router you're using within your P/React app?

[antonk52]

I am using React Router v4.2.0

[kaylanm]

Without this, there's also no way to sanitize the initial URL.

[lukeed]

Sorry for the super-delay on this.

I went into your branch to revert your initial commit & got the same functionality in here.

FWIW it's generally not good to (a) change version number; or (b) change built files in your PR.
The built files should not be in the repo, and that's my fault for part-(b).

Also included quick documentation.

Thank you! 🙌

[antonk52]

Thank you. Awesome job with documentation too!