datalove · Features
Website analytics without cookies or a banner
Who came to your website, from where, and what they read, counted for everybody, not only for the people who accept a banner. Next to what those people later do in your product.
What you see
- Unique visitors, visits and page views per day, week or month, as a chart and as totals.
- Views per visit, bounce rate and visit duration. A visit ends after 30 minutes without a page view.
- Top pages and entry pages: what is read, and where visits begin.
- Referring sites by domain (a full search address becomes
google.com), and campaigns fromutm_source,utm_mediumandutm_campaign, counted per visit. - A goal next to the traffic: any event your product sends, such as
Signed Up, with its own chart and a rate per 100 visits.
How visitors are counted without cookies
Every request carries an address and a browser's user agent. We never store either. The server computes a SHA-256 of a random salt, your site, the address and the user agent, and uses that as the day's visitor id. The salt is replaced every day and the old one deleted, so the id cannot be traced back to an address and nothing links one day's visitor to the next. It is the method Plausible uses; the article on counting unique visitors without cookies goes through it step by step.
Next to your product, not instead of it
datalove is account-first product analytics: inside your product, people are signed in, so their events belong to a user and an account without any guessing. The website view shows the top of the funnel in the same place: how many people came, from which campaigns, and how many of them signed up. One API, one privacy notice, one place where the data lives, in Germany.
History that outlives the raw events
Raw events are kept for 30 days in the pilot. The website numbers are summarised per day, without any visitor id, so months of traffic stay available after the individual views are gone.
The same numbers through the API
GET /api/v1/website answers with the totals, the periods and the top lists, for a spreadsheet, a dashboard or an assistant.
Questions
Do I need a consent banner for this?
Not for the cookieless counting: nothing is stored on or read from the visitor's device, so §25 TDDDG does not apply, and the address is only used in memory for a hash that cannot be reversed or linked across days. Your privacy notice has to describe it, and people can object. This is our reading, not legal advice.
How are unique visitors counted?
Per day, from a SHA-256 of a random salt that is replaced and deleted every day, your site, the address and the browser. The same browser on the same day is one visitor; tomorrow it is a new one. The article on counting visitors without cookies explains it in full.
What does it not show?
Returning visitors across days, the same person on two devices, and which visit led to a sign-up days later. Countries, browsers and devices are not broken down yet.
How do page views get in?
As page calls with a path, through datalove's Segment-compatible API: from your server, as datalove.io and sumwerk.com send their own, or from Segment's analytics.js, whose page calls carry path and referrer. For cookieless visitors, the server sends the day's visitor id as anonymousId.
Is it available now?
datalove is in a closed pilot. The website view runs on datalove.io and sumwerk.com today; wider availability follows the pilot.