Evening all,

On the Test Site I have added a new and still slightly experimental cookieless, GDPR-compliant, real time traffic monitor to every website. Please have a play around with it and see what you find.

You can find it at Reports > Analytics in the admin menu.

You should see that there are almost no hits on your site (it is the test site after all!), but if you go and browse to your site then go to the Analytics page you should see visits/hits appearing straight away. (hit refresh on the stats page to update - it isn't "live").

The way it works is similar to Google Analytics and other javascript-snippet based tracking. HOWEVER we don't use cookies and don't track IP addresses or personal information, so you don't need a cookie consent banner.

Also it's FREE, just like everything else on Voice. So there's that.

First some notes/gotchas:

• It is set up to NOT track logged in site admins. So if you want to see your visit appearing then you'll need to log out first or use a different browser to the one logged in! (hence it also doesn't track admin pages!)
• It tracks visits not hits. So if you look at the same page twice it will only register it once. (unless you come back to it later of course)
• Browsers that block trackers, or use ad blockers will probably not register their visits. That's just the nature of it and nothing I can do about that.
• It only tracks pages, not images/assets. This is correct and the way it works - it adds javascript to the page that records the visit. Images and assets don't have javascript on them!
• It tracks the browser, computer type, language, referrer, location, and screen size.

Bonus features

If you share your marketing campaigns with your links to social media etc, you can add utm_campaign (and optionally also utm_source) as URL variables and the we'll track it under Campaigns. You don't need to create the Campaign first, just go ahead and use them.

e.g., if I shared the e-voice site to Facebook I might use a link like http://e-voice.org.uk?utm_campaign=My+Lovely+Campaign&utm_source=Facebook

These UTM variables are pretty much industry standard and the Web is full of info on how to use them.

Obviously I don't recommend you share links to your test site on Facebook! But you can do a test of it just by typing it into the browser.

How does it work

Under the hood it uses the unusually named GoatCounter. This is a fully open source privacy-focused application, which I'm self-hosting on the Voice servers. So the visitor data isn't being shared with anyone.

Live?

I would like to play around with this on the test site for a little while before it goes live. So please give it a go and share your thoughts and comments.

Thanks!

Joe

As it stands, the analytics in the private area is independent of that in the public area of the site. So yes a member going to both would be counted as a visit in each.

We could make it so that there's just a single analytics page for the entire site, covering all public and private areas, if you think it would be better that way? (although this is not the way the "old fashioned" web stats work)

Thanks

Joe

Hi Joe

This looks vert useful - thank you!

A couple of queries please.

Referrers - would this be links via other websites / social media etc? Thinking yes...

To confirm - data will only be collected from when you installed analytics. So if we want historical data, we should download and store? i.e google analytics. Or run both concurrently until we are ready to drop google?

Many thanks,

Sue

Thanks - interesting article - and I will be doing similar comparisons for 6 months or so.

Thank you Jo - this is v. useful for us.

Sue