Introduction

This document provides instructions on how to set up the Cookieless Tracking feature.

The Statistics module normally applies a cookie to the browser of the visitor. It is possible to remove this, and still allow us track the same data from visitors who refuse statistics cookies on the cookie banner.

The data tracked includes browsing behavior, geographical location, device information, and more.

How it works

To gather the same data without a cookie, we rely on other pieces of information such as operating system, browser, browser plugins, user IP address, and browser language to assign a unique ID to each visitor in our systems.

The unique ID is only valid for 24 hours and visitor IP addresses are made fully anonymous until they are deleted.

This makes the solution privacy-friendly and prohibits fingerprinting.

Advantages

• Practical: When users refuse statistical cookies through the cookie banner, you can gain valuable information and not place a cookie on their browser.
• Symbolic: Show your audience that you care about their privacy.
• Privacy: Visitors can rest assured that no unwanted files (cookies) are placed on their browser.
• Legal: While not prohibited yet, cookies are becoming more and more unpopular as a tracking mechanism. In 2019, Google launched the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to create a standard for websites to access user information without compromising the privacy of their visitors. Part of that initiative involves a move away from the use of third-party cookies to gather data.

Disadvantages

There are few to no disadvantages with Cookieless Tracking.

• Returning visitors: Since the unique visitor ID that Cookieless Tracking is based on expires after 24 hours, it makes it hard to track returning visitors and build visitor profiles over time. However, our Statistics feature does not provide visitor profiling. You can expect the same quality of visitor data without a cookie.

Instructions

This section provides instructions on how to set up Cookieless Tracking on your website. 

• Navigate to the Domain Overview page.

• Click Action on the same row as the domain and select Script Setup Guide from the expanded list of options.

  The system opens the Set up your domain page.

• Click Enable Statistics to turn it on.

  

• Click Enable Cookieless Tracking to turn it on.

  
• Click Save at the bottom of the page.

• Copy the script and add it to the HTML code of the website. In the HTML editor, paste the script into the HEAD tag on every page.

  Note

  If Consent Manager is activated, the script must be in the HEAD tag in order to catch the cookies.

  For more information, visit ​How to add the script.

Existing Statistics users

Existing users of the Web Governance Statistics feature can switch to Cookieless Tracking at any time. Follow the steps above to create a new script to publish.

When cookieless tracking is enabled, the analytics data merges seamlessly with your existing dataset to avoid the problem of two separate datasets (one for cookie-based tracking and one for cookieless).

Advanced setup

To set up Cookieless Tracking manually, see the instructions in:

• Developers>  Settings

Additional resources

For more information on the topics covered in this article, visit:

Cookieless tracking user guide.

Developers advanced help for developers.