Custom properties

A custom property labels everything a page sends with something the page knows about itself, such as its author or type.

Properties let you read your stats by what an address doesn’t say, such as a page’s author, language or type: which author was read most last month, and where their readers came from. Each is one attribute on the tag, filled in by the template that already knows the value, and gets a pane of its own once pages send it.

Adding one

Give the script tag a data-property- attribute for each property, named after it:

<script async data-domain="example.com" data-property-author="Ada Lovelace"
  data-property-type="article" src="https://fiveb.ar/js/tally.js"></script>

This page is counted with the author Ada Lovelace and the type article. Have your templates write the values in, so each page gives its own.

A property describes the page, and goes with every pageview and event it sends. To describe one event instead, give that event data of its own: see Custom events.

On the dashboard

Each property the site sends gets a pane of its own under Properties, headed by its name, with its values ranked by pageviews. Click a value to filter the whole dashboard by it, or the pane’s heading to see all of them.

Under a filter, each pane counts the pageviews that match, and under a goal the conversions, each value with its conversion rate, which is how to compare the variants of an A/B test. fivebar has kept each pageview’s properties since 19 September 2026.

Names and values

• Browsers lowercase attribute names, so data-property-pageType arrives as pagetype. Write names in lower case, with - or _ between words: page_type heads its pane Page type.
• A name is up to 32 characters of lower case letters, digits, - and _.
• A value has the spaces at its ends trimmed, and is cut to 255 characters. An empty value is dropped.
• Up to 8 properties are counted from one tag, the first 8 as written.
• Values are kept exactly as sent, so never put anything about the visitor in one: no names, email addresses or account numbers.

A property that breaks these rules is dropped on its own, and the page is counted with the rest.

Read once, when the script loads

The properties are the ones the tag had when the script loaded. In a single-page app, every page the visitor moves to carries the properties of the page they arrived on.