Navigation

Last updated 22 May 2019: Added expiration of currently open tabs.

In this article, Jethro Nederhof of Snowflake Analytics fame and I will introduce you to some pretty neat web browser APIs. The purpose of these APIs is to find out more about how the user navigated to the current page, and what’s going on with their browser tabs.

There are so many things you can do with this new information. You can build proper navigational path reports, rather than rely on the fuzzy and often incoherent flow reports in Google Analytics. You can identify how visitors interact with your content using browser tabs - a crucial bit of information if you want to make heads or tails of Google Analytics’ time on page metrics, for example. You can see how many redirects were involved in the current navigation action.