# Collecting Pageviews on the Server Side

Segment believes that client-side collection is appropriate for collection of basic pageviews.

If you'd like to track `page` calls from your server to Segment, Segment recommends doing it in addition to any client side tracking you're doing with analytics.js, and doing it in a separate "source" so that you can configure where to send the (probably redundant, albeit higher-fidelity) data.

With this approach, you might use a request "middleware" to log a `pageview` with every page load from your server.

There are a few things to be mindful of if you want to make sure you can attribute these (anonymous) page views to the appropriate user in your client-side source (eg, for effectively joining these tables together to do down-funnel behavioral attribution). You'll want to ensure they share an `anonymousId` by respecting one if it's already there, and setting it yourself if not. To do that, you can read and modify the `ajs_anonymous_id` cookie value in the request.

Be sure to pass through as many fields as you can in Segment's [Page](/docs/segment/connections/spec/page/) and [Common](/docs/segment/connections/spec/common/) spec, so that you get full functionality in any downstream tools you choose to enable. Segment recommends specifically ensuring you pass the **url, path, host, title, search, and referrer** in the message `properties` and **ip and user-agent** in the message `context` .

Here's an example of an express middleware function that covers all those edge cases:

If you have any questions or would like help generally adopting this method for other languages and frameworks, be sure to [get in touch](https://segment.com/help/contact/).

```js
import express from 'express'
import Analytics from 'analytics-node'
import { stringify } from 'qs'

const app = express()
const analytics = new Analytics('write-key')

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  const { search, cookies, url, path, ip, host } = req

  // populate campaign object with any utm params
  const campaign = {}
  if (search.utm_content) campaign.content = search.utm_content
  if (search.utm_campaign) campaign.name = search.utm_campaign
  if (search.utm_medium) campaign.medium = search.utm_medium
  if (search.utm_source) campaign.source = search.utm_source
  if (search.utm_term) campaign.keyword = search.utm_term

  // grab userId if present
  let userId = null
  if (cookies.ajs_user_id) userId = cookies.ajs_user_id

  // if no anonymousId, send a randomly generated one
  // otherwise grab existing to include in call to segment
  let anonymousId
  if (cookies.ajs_anonymous_id) {
    anonymousId = cookies.ajs_anonymous_id
  } else {
    anonymousId = = uuid.v4()
    res.cookie('ajs_anonymous_id', anonymousId )
  }

  const referrer = req.get('Referrer')
  const userAgent = req.get('User-Agent')

  const properties = {
    search: stringify(query)
    referrer,
    path,
    host,
    url
    /* ++ any custom props (eg. title) */
  }

  const context = {
    campaign,
    userAgent,
    ip
  }

  // send a call to segment
  analytics.page(
    anonymousId, // either random (matching cookie) or from client
    userId, // might be null
    properties,
    context
  )

  // proceed!
  next()
})
```