Web Governance
What is Cookieless Tracking
This article answers the following questions:
How does Cookieless tracking work?
Is cookieless tracking good?
What are the advantages of cookieless tracking?
What are the disadvantages of cookieless tracking?
Users who have our Statistics feature can gather data about their visitors without putting a cookie in their browser. We call it Cookieless Tracking.
By default, when you use the Statistics feature and have the script installed on your website, we set a cookie in your visitors' browser. This cookie allows us to track information about their browsing behavior, geographical location, device information, and much more.
With Cookieless Tracking, we track all of the same things but without setting a cookie. We rely on other pieces of information such as their operating system, browser, browser plugins, IP address, and browser language to assign a unique ID to each visitor in our systems so that we can tell them apart. The unique ID is only valid for 24 hours and visitor IP addresses are, of course, fully anonymized until deletion, which makes the solution completely privacy-friendly while avoiding any sort of fingerprinting.
One advantage of using Cookieless Tracking is the practical and symbolic value of not setting a cookie. In these privacy-conscious times, the fewer tracking technologies you force on your audience, the better. With Cookieless Tracking, you do not leave any files (cookies) in your visitors' browser.
Cookieless Tracking also sets you up for a future that looks to be moving away from using cookies as a tracking mechanism. Google launched the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019 which aims to create a standard for websites to access user information without compromising privacy. Part of that initiative involves moving away from allowing third-party cookies.
There are few to no disadvantages of using Cookieless Tracking. 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, Web Governance Statistics does not rely on such data. In other words, you can expect to be able to get the same quality of visitor data without having to set a cookie.
It is very simple to enable Cookieless Tracking on your website. First of all, you will need to make sure that you have Web Governance Statistics enabled on your account and toggled on in the Script Setup Guide.
Then you'll need to toggle on Enable Cookieless Tracking and paste the script on to your website.
Once you publish your website, you're running cookieless.
For more information, see the user guide article:
Existing users of the Statistics feature can switch over to using Cookieless Tracking at any time. When you start tracking cookieless, analytics data is added to your existing dataset so that you won't end up with two separate datasets (one for cookie-based tracking and one for cookieless).
For more information, see the user guide article:
Web Governance