Privacy-friendly Website Analytics
What is privacy-friendly Website Analytics?
With our privacy-friendly Website Analytics we try to bridge the gap between data protection needs of your website-visitors and the wish for gathering usage-information of website-owners. Here we combine the two components that we are particularly good at: Real data protection and great reporting.
The advantage of our new privacy-friendly website analytics lies primarily in data protection and the simplicity of the system:
With our privacy-friendly website analytics, we would like to try to offer a simple alternative to complex analysis systems: No
sophisticated visitor tracking, but a simple overview, without detours and straight to the point. Find out at a glance:
- How many visitors does my website have?
- How many page views did I have in a certain period of time?
- Where do the visitors come from?
- Which websites refer visitors to me?
- How are my marketing campaigns going?
- and much more
The tool is now available to all customers as a basic version (up to 5000 page views) - if you want to use more, you will find
corresponding upgrades. Test it now: Simply click on Menu > Website Analytics in the interface and get started!
What does it measure?
The analytics dashboard will show you:
- Visitors, Pageviews, Sessions, pages per session on a timeline
- Sources (also known as referrer, websites from which the visitors came from) by visits and session
- Pages (single pages/articles on your website that were viewed by the visitors) by pageviews and entries
- Systems
- Browser your visitors used by pageviews and visits
- Device types your visitors used (e.g. mobile, desktop, tablet, smart-TV) by pageviews and visits
- Operating System your visitors used (e.g. Windows, Linux, Android, ...) by pageviews and visits
- Origin
- Countries your visitors are located in
- Languages your visitors have activated in their browser (primary language)
- Usage of the website by weekday and hour
- Marketing sources: UTM source, UTM medium and UTM campaign by pageviews
Why is it privacy-friendly?
We consider the website analytics tool privacy-friendly because it does not do a lot of things that other analytics tools do. For example we try to follow all principles of processing personal data defined by GDPR:
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Lawefullness, fairness and transparency
- A consent banner may not be required (see below)
- The system does not collect personal data besides what is actually necessary.
- It does not create user profiles and does not "follow" the user through the website or across multiple websites.
- It does not try to analyze the user behavior or gain any other information about the user.
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Purpose limitation
- Data is only collected so that the website owner can gain insights in the usage of the website (e.g. in order to determine whether server requirements need to be adjusted and everything is working properly).
- Data cannot be re-purposed for targeted advertising or other specific uses that single out individual users since the data is only stored in a grouped/summarized way.
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Data minimisation
- Only minimal data is collecte (see below)
- All stored data is always grouped/summarized into categories so single users cannot be identified
- Data that is potentially user-specific, such as URL-parameters or anchors, are removed before storing the dataset
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Accuracy
- The system only stores what it observes, it does not try to determine user-behavior or any other information from it.
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Storage limitation
- It does not store cookies, localstorage or other data on the users device in order to identify the visitor.
- Data is stored for only 60 days (Note: Depending on package type, data may be stored longer) and is archived afterwards. During archiving we remove all detail levels and only report the number of pageviews, visits, sessions (...) by day but no longer the detail data for browsers, countries, hours, pages, sources, utm and so on.
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Integrity and confidentiality
- All data is stored only in the EU and we do not use any US-cloud provider or similar server provider.
- Data is not shared with anyone: Every client has an existing data protection agreement (DPA) with us. All data belongs to the client and not to us.
Do I need consent for this?
Several data protection authorities across Europe have issued guidelines on the use of Analytics tools. It is important to note, that there are differences in how authorities see the legal framework and therefore allow/disallow the use of tools like ours without consent. In addition, the views of the data protection authorities may change over time. We therefore recommend to always check with your data protection officer or legal councel to verify whether consent is needed or not.
What data exactly does it process and how?
Data is collected in the following way:
- The website owner inserts the analytics code snipped into their website.
- The visitor visits the website and therefore the analytics code snipped is triggered.
- The visitors browser starts downloading the analytics JavaScript code
- The JavaScript code measures the website URL, referer/source and language and sends it to our servers
- Our servers collect the data, transform it (e.g. remove unwanted data) and put it into the database for reporting
The following datatypes are collected:
-
IP-address
IP is used during transmission and in order to determine the country of the visitor. The IP-address is not stored. -
User-Agent string
During transmission, the browser sends a so called user-agent string which tells the server what type of browser, operating system and device it is. The tool takes the user agent string to determine the categories of browsers, device types and operating system (e.g. Windows, Linux, Android). The user agent string is not stored. -
Time of the access
The system will store the time of the event grouped by date and hour (not including minutes/seconds and smaller) -
Language
The browser indicates a prefered language that it likes to receive the website in. Our code that is inserted into the website, will collect and store this information. Languages are stored as 2-character ISO codes (e.g.de,fr,enand so on) -
Source/Referer
The browser indicates which website was visited when the visitor switches from one website to another. The URL will be sent to our server. The system will truncate the URL and only store the refering domain (e.g. "google.com") and no further details. -
Pages
Our code on the website will read the currently visited URL and send it to our server. The system will remove information that is potentially personal data and truncate the URL to the first 1-2 path segments (e.g.http://www.mywebsite.com/sports/soccer/somearticle.htmlwill become/sports/soccer/*) and store the result without further details. -
UTM parameters
From the currently visited URL (see above) the system will search for the typical marketing-parameters&utm_source=...,&utm_medium=...and&utm_campaign=.... If these parameters are found, the system will store the values of these parameters.
