Data Collection

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Not collecting any information would be silly and unrealistic for an analytics tool. We collect information necessary to show you simple analytics, but unlike other analytics tools, we don’t collect more than is absolutely necessary. Here is a list of what we do and don’t collect from your visitors.

With every page view, we collect some metrics. We never track visitors, so the data below is never linked to one specific visitor.

You can limit the metrics we collect via our ignore metrics-feature.

Metrics we collect

Here is a list of metrics we collect:

URL of the page

Very important

For example, https://simpleanalytics.com/contact

We store this URL in parts in our database.

Referrer

Very important

To know where customers come from, we store the page’s referrer. This means that a customer can see where a visitor is coming from—for example, duckduckgo.com.

UTM codes

Somewhat important

For example, https://simpleanalytics.com/?utm_source=newsletter

The part after the ? is called URL parameters. We only keep the UTM codes (utm_source/ref, utm_medium, utm_content, utm_campaign) and drop all other URL parameters. The UTM codes are something that the customer adds to the URLs. By nature, these UTM codes don’t include personal data. They are generic terms like “newsletter_may” or “twitter_campaign_2”. See below.

Time zone

In contrast with most services that collect countries based on IP address, we collect them based on the visitors’ time zone. This way, we don’t have to touch their IP address and still can define their country. Every country has its own time zone, and modern devices automatically update the time zone when the device travels. The time zone is limited to a country, so we can’t get data about a city or region within a country. Test this for yourself.

IDs

We collect three IDs:

1. ID of the data point Somewhat important
2. ID of the page Less important
3. ID of the session Less important

These IDs are not linked to a person or personal data. It’s linked to only a page view, page, or session. IDs are also not stored on the device. Meaning, that if a visitor reloads the page (with F5, for example), the IDs will all be reset.

We never, ever collect or create an ID for a user, browser, or device.

Scrolled percentage

Somewhat important

We collect scrolled percentage to know how far visitors scrolled (for example, 80%).

User-agent

Somewhat important

To know which type of device the visitor used, we store the user agent. This is a metric that is the same for many visitors. It shows the browser used, the operating system, and the type of device.

Device Dimensions

Less important

We collect the device’s screen dimensions. There are two dimensions: the viewport and the screen. The viewport is the part where the website runs in; the screen is the dimensions of the complete screen of the device.

Language

Less important

The language of the browser, for example, en-US.

What we don’t collect

Here is a list of metrics that we don’t collect:

Cookies

We do NOT set any cookies (or use similar technologies)

We care a great deal about the privacy of your visitors. Cookies can track visitors across websites or even devices, and that’s a hard no for us. The same goes for any tracking technology, including local storage, session cookies, fingerprinting, and IP address hashing.

IP addresses

We do NOT collect or store IP addresses

We drop the IP address from every single request. Period. We don’t save or collect them. We don’t hash them with cryptography.

Do Not Track

By default we do NOT collect or store any data if a visitor has Do Not Track enabled

The Do Not Track browser setting asks a web application to disable either its own tracking or third-party tracking of an individual user. We never track your users anyway, but by default we also ignore visits with Do Not Track enabled and do not add them to your dashboard. Read more on how to disable this behavior.