Have you ever found yourself bookmarking a website URL that contains a heap of tracking parameters in the URL? Generally they’re Google Analytics campaign referral data (e.g. http://example.com/?utm_source=SomeThing&utm_medium=email).
I use browser bookmarks a lot, mostly as a collection of references around particular topics. The primary source for most of my web development-related bookmarks is a variety of regular email newsletters. My current list of subscriptions is:
- HTML5 Weekly
- JavaScript Weekly
- CSS Weekly
- SVG Weekly
- Web Animation Weekly
- Codrops Collective
- Responsive Images Community Group newsletter
What many of these have in common is the addition of Google Analytics tracking parameters to the URL. This is great for the authors of the content, as they have the option to see where spikes in traffic come from. When I’m saving a link for later, though, I don’t want to keep any of the extra URL cruft. It would also be giving false tracking results if I opened a link with that URL data a year or two later.
So I wrote a quick snippet to strip any Google Analytics tracking parameters from a URL. I can run this just before bookmarking the link:
/**
* Strip out Google Analytics query parameters from the current URL.
* Makes bookmarking canonical links easier.
*/
(function () {
var curSearch = location.search;
if (!curSearch) {
return;
}
var curParams = curSearch.slice(1).split('&');
console.log('Stripping query parameters:', curParams);
var newParams = curParams.filter(function (param) {
return param.substr(0, 4) !== 'utm_';
});
if (newParams.length === curParams.length) {
return;
}
var newSearch = newParams.join('&');
if (newSearch) {
newSearch = '?' + newSearch;
}
var newUrl = location.href.replace(curSearch, newSearch);
history.replaceState({}, document.title, newUrl);
})();
I have saved this snippet in my browser’s devtools. See github.com/bgrins/devtools-snippets for more details of how these work.
However, some people prefer to use bookmarklets, without fiddling around in browser devtools. I’ve converted the above snippet into a bookmarklet as well. If you’re using a desktop browser, you can drag the following link to your bookmarks area to save it:
