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Getting started with privacy-first web analytics

nogeek · Founder of webanalytics.run

What webanalytics.run measures without cookies, what it deliberately avoids, and how to read the resulting traffic reports.

Privacy-friendly analytics is not a promise to know nothing. It is a decision to collect the smallest useful set of signals, keep their purpose narrow, and be honest about the remaining trade-offs.

What the tracker does

The webanalytics.run tracker records pageviews and explicitly configured events. It is SPA-aware, so route changes can be measured without a full reload. It does not set an analytics cookie, store a raw IP address, or reuse an identifier across customer sites.

For a daily visitor estimate, the collector derives a short-lived pseudonymous value from request signals and a Site/day-isolated secret. That value rotates by day and Site. It is therefore useful for counting approximate daily visitors, but it is not a durable identity and must not be described as one.

When a browser sends DNT: 1, the tracker sends no analytics event. Global Privacy Control is respected as an opt-out from sale, sharing, and targeted advertising uses. Core first-party aggregate measurement may continue because GPC is not a universal request to disable every measurement request.

What the reports mean

Pageviews count accepted pageview events. Daily Visitors are an approximation within one Site and UTC day. Sessions group a sequence of accepted events under the published session rules. Browser privacy settings, blockers, connectivity, bots, and statistical sampling can all create differences from server logs or another analytics product.

The short-term reporting layer can sample writes or queries, so reports expose coverage and quality instead of claiming perfect event-level reconstruction. Long-term rollups are aggregates, not a hidden replay of every visitor action.

A practical installation sequence

  1. Create a Site and add its script to the document head.
  2. Confirm that the Site receives a valid pageview.
  3. Check the published Pageview, Visitor, and Session definitions.
  4. Add only the Goals that answer a real product question.
  5. Compare channel quality with conversions or revenue, not traffic volume alone.

The result is intentionally narrower than a behavioral surveillance suite. It should answer which pages and acquisition sources work without building a cross-site visitor profile.

nogeek · Founder of webanalytics.run