Switching to cookieless analytics: what you lose, and how to get it back

Without a cookie, a tool can't tell that today's visitor is the same person as yesterday's. Each tool works around that in its own way, and the method decides what its "unique visitors" figure means.

So a "unique visitor" means "a visitor on this day" in Plausible and Fathom, and "an arrival from outside the site" in Simple Analytics. Expect the totals to differ from the users figure in Google Analytics, and when you compare the two tools, compare page views, not visitors.

Plausible, for example, keeps the page URL, referrers, campaign parameters, browser, operating system, device type, and an approximate country, region and city worked out from the IP address without storing it. Across the tools that gives you:

If your weekly report is "which pages got read, where the readers came from and whether they clicked the button", nothing you need goes missing.

Everything that links one visit to another goes:

Go through this list and mark only the reports that fed a decision in the last six months. That is usually one or two of them, and they are the only ones worth replacing.

Rebuild each report you marked as a total per page or per step, so nothing has to recognise a reader. Two of the replacements are questions on the page, which also give you what no analytics tool ever had: why a reader left. A reader who found the answer in 20 seconds looks the same in any dashboard as one who gave up after 20 seconds. "Did this page answer your question?" tells them apart, and the answer belongs to a page, not a person.

Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive requires consent to store information on a visitor's device or to read information already stored there, unless it is needed only to send a communication or strictly necessary for a service the visitor asked for. The European Data Protection Board's guidelines say the rule can apply without any cookie: when JavaScript instructs the browser to send information, when HTTP headers such as the user agent are used for fingerprinting, or when an IP address from the visitor's device is used to track them. Falling under Article 5(3) doesn't automatically mean consent is needed, though. Whether an exemption applies is decided case by case, under each country's law and its regulator's guidance.

France is one example. The CNIL, the French regulator, exempts audience measurement trackers from consent when all of these hold:

The CNIL also says most large audience measurement offerings don't qualify, whatever their settings, and the GDPR still applies to any personal data the tool handles, an IP address included. So before you remove the banner, read your tool's data policy for what it stores and reads, check every other script on the site, and talk to your DPO or lawyer.

Asklet is the asking part. You embed one iframe snippet, it shows a short survey on the page, and results are grouped by website and by page path, such as /guides/*. A Yes / No first question gives each page a "found it useful" figure, and free-text answers show up as anonymous comments next to it.

It uses no cookies, no tracking identifiers and no fingerprinting, so it doesn't need a consent banner, and it stores only the answers, the page path and the time. That also means it can't tell you who came back, and as it doesn't count widget loads, take page views from your analytics for the same dates. The free plan covers one website and up to 100 responses a month.