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.
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.