Export format

The GoatCounter export is a CSV export of all pageviews of a site.

There is no “standard” CSV; the export is created with the encoding/csv package. Some notes:

• The first line is the header.
• Blank lines are allowed; lines may end with \n or \r\n.
• Optionally quote fields with ": hello,"world"
• Escape a " inside a quoted field by doubling it up: hello,"""world"""
• Newlines inside quoted fields are allowed.

CSV format

The first line is a header with the field names. The fields, in order, are:

2,Path	Path name (e.g. /a.html). This also doubles as the event name. This header is prefixed with the version export format (see versioning below).
Title	Page title that was sent.
Event	If this is an event; true or false.
User-Agent	Always blank since the User-Agent is no longer stored.
Browser	Browser name and version.
System	System name and version.
Session	The session ID, to track unique visitors.
Bot	If this is a bot request; 0 if it's not, or one of the isbot constants if it is.
Referrer	Referrer data.
Referrer scheme	h – HTTP; an URL; g – Generated; e.g. all the various Hacker News interfaces don't add a link to the specific story, so are just recorded as “Hacker News”; c – Campaign; text string from a campaign parameter; o – Other (e.g. Android apps).
Screen size	Screen size as x,y,scaling.
Location	ISO 3166-2 country code (either "US" or "US-TX")
FirstVisit	First visit in this session?
Date	Creation date as RFC 3339/ISO 8601.

Versioning

The format of the CSV file may change in the future; the version of the export file is recorded at the start of the header as a number. It’s strongly recommended to check this number if you’re using a script to import/sync data and error out if it changes. Any future incompatibilities will be documented here.

Version 1 documentation

The first line is a header with the field names. The fields, in order, are:

1,Path	Path name (e.g. /a.html). This also doubles as the event name. This header is prefixed with the version export format (see versioning below).
Title	Page title that was sent.
Event	If this is an event; true or false.
Bot	If this is a bot request; 0 if it’s not, or one of the isbot constants if it is.
Session	The session ID, to track unique visitors.
FirstVisit	First visit in this session?
Referrer	Referrer data.
Referrer scheme	h – HTTP; an URL; g – Generated; e.g. all the various Hacker News interfaces don’t add a link to the specific story, so are just recorded as “Hacker News”; c – Campaign; text string from a campaign parameter; o – Other (e.g. Android apps).
Browser	User-Agent header.
Screen size	Screen size as x,y,scaling.
Location	ISO 3166-1 country code.
Date	Creation date as RFC 3339/ISO 8601.

Importing in SQL

If you want to run analytics on this, you can use e.g. SQLite:

sqlite> .import --csv gc_export.csv gc_export
sqlite> select
   ...>   count(*) as count,
   ...>   substr(Location, 0, 3) as location
   ...> from gc_export
   ...> where location != ''
   ...> group by location
   ...> order by count desc
   ...> limit 20;
┌────────┬──────────┐
│ count  │ location │
├────────┼──────────┤
│ 113144 │ US       │
│ 27092  │ DE       │
│ 24131  │ GB       │
│ 13269  │ CA       │
│ 12977  │ FR       │
│ 9785   │ NL       │
│ 8150   │ IN       │
│ 7487   │ AU       │
│ 6864   │ PL       │
│ 6760   │ SE       │
└────────┴──────────┘

Or PostgreSQL:

=# create table gc_export (
    "2Path"             varchar,
    "Title"             varchar,
    "Event"             varchar,
    "UserAgent"         varchar,
    "Browser"           varchar,
    "System"            varchar,
    "Session"           varchar,
    "Bot"               varchar,
    "Referrer"          varchar,
    "Referrer scheme"   varchar,
    "Screen size"       varchar,
    "Location"          varchar,
    "FirstVisit"        varchar,
    "Date"              varchar
);

=# \copy gc_export from 'gc_export.csv' with (format csv, header on);

Feel free to get in touch if you’ve got any questions or having any problems; a lot of times they can be resolved without too much problems.

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