Voice Online Communities includes a built-in, real-time traffic monitoring tool for every website. It is cookieless and GDPR-compliant, meaning you do not need to display a cookie consent banner to your visitors.
You can access it via in the admin menu.
How It Works
Analytics tracking works similarly to Google Analytics and other JavaScript snippet-based tools. A small piece of JavaScript is added to each page of your site, which records visits as they occur. Unlike many tracking solutions, this system does not use cookies and does not record IP addresses or any personal information.
Key Behaviours
There are a few important things to be aware of when interpreting your analytics:
- Admin visits and admin pages are not tracked. The system is configured to exclude logged-in site administrators from tracking. If you want your own visit to appear in the stats, you will need to log out, or use a different browser in which you are not logged in.
- Visits, not page hits, are counted. If a visitor views the same page more than once in a session, it is recorded as a single visit. Return visits at a later time will be counted separately.
- Ad blockers and tracker-blocking browsers may not be counted. Some visitors using ad blockers or privacy-focused browsers will not be recorded. This is an inherent limitation of JavaScript-based analytics and applies equally to tools such as Google Analytics.
- Only pages are tracked, not assets. Images, stylesheets, and other static assets are not tracked. This is by design — tracking is triggered by JavaScript embedded in pages, which assets do not include.
- Data collected per visit includes: browser, device type, language, referrer, location, and screen resolution.
Campaign Tracking
If you share links to your site as part of marketing campaigns, you can append utm_campaign and optionally utm_source as URL parameters. These will be tracked automatically under the Campaigns section — there is no need to create a campaign in advance.
Example:
https://e-voice.org.uk?utm_campaign=My+Lovely+Campaign&utm_source=FacebookUTM parameters are an industry-standard convention and are widely documented online.
Custom Events
Voice analytics automatically tracks all page views on your site, but you may also want to track custom events or actions within that. For example you might want to track how many times a link to download a document is used.
The official documentation for custom event tracking is provided by GoatCounter.
The key is that any html element with data-goatcounter-click="My Event" will be tracked in the analytics as My Event (you choose the event name!). This can be a link or a button, or anything you like really!
So for example, to track clicks on a link to download a document, first add the link to the document in the normal way (Using the Insert/Edit link button, then clicking the button to the right of the URL input field, and select the document from the popup). Then in the editor go to View -> Source Code so that we can edit the source of the link.
Add data-goatcounter-click with a suitable event name to the link, for example:
<a title="Example PDF" href="/demosite/assets/documents/example-pdf" data-goatcounter-click="Example PDF Download">Example PDF</a>
Now all clicks on this link to download the document will be tracked as Example PDF Download in the analytics.
If you're testing, remember that we don't track logged in administrators - so use a different browser if you want to see your clicks show up in the stats!
Technical Details
Under the hood, analytics are powered by Goat Counter, an open-source, privacy-focused analytics application. It is self-hosted on Voice servers, so visitor data is not shared with any third party.