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Tracker setup

caution
You are reading documentation for an outdated version. Here’s the latest one!

There are two distributions of the JavaScript Tracker:

  • sp.js is fully featured and is bundled with the majority of the available plugins.
  • sp.lite.js is a smaller distribution with no bundled plugins. Included is Page View, Self Describing and Structured Event tracking as well as Activity Tracking and Anonymous Tracking. All other features can be loaded as separate plugins.

Use the following tag to your page to load sp.js:

<script type="text/javascript" async=1>
;(function(p,l,o,w,i,n,g){if(!p[i]){p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace=p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace||[]; p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace.push(i);p[i]=function(){(p[i].q=p[i].q||[]).push(arguments) };p[i].q=p[i].q||[];n=l.createElement(o);g=l.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];n.async=1; n.src=w;g.parentNode.insertBefore(n,g)}}(window,document,"script","{{URL to sp.js}}","snowplow"));
</script>

Note: We recommend self hosting sp.js by following our Self hosting snowplow JS guides here. The latest versions are currently available at GitHub.

We also recommend renaming sp.js as this file name is commonly blocked by adblockers. Renaming to a random string will help ensure the JavaScript Tracker is loaded as expected.

Important note regarding testing: If the URL to sp.js is protocol-relative i.e. beginning with // when fetching sp.js. It will work if the your web page is using the “http” or “https” protocol. But if you are testing locally and loading your page from your filesystem using the “file” protocol (so its URI looks something like “file:///home/joe/snowplow_test.html”), the protocol-relative URL will also use that protocol, preventing the script from loading. To avoid this, change the URL to "http://.../sp.js" when testing locally.

As well as loading the JavaScript Tracker, this tag creates a global function called “snowplow” which you use to access the Tracker. You can replace the string “snowplow” with the function name of your choice. This is encouraged: if there are two JavaScript trackers on the same page, there won’t be any conflict between them as long as they have chosen different function names.

note

The rest of the documentation will assume that the function is called “snowplow”.

Once the tracker is loaded via the tag, you can move on to initializing the tracker.