Unique visits explained 
At Simple Analytics we do things a bit differently. We put the privacy of your visitors first. At the same time we comply with strict (and necessary) privacy laws. This has an impact on our statistics, like unique visits. We record page views (which is very easy to do without invading the privacy of your visitors). With unique visits it’s easier to invade the privacy of your visitors. Traditional analytics tools will show you unique visits based on a cookie they place on the visitors computer. This can be extremely invasive to privacy because a visitor can be tracked for a longer period of time. Most privacy analytics tools use hashes from the IP address of visitors. Combined with a date this is a bit better for privacy. We do it even better.
No cookies or fingerprinting
We do not use cookies (or any kind of storage), fingerprinting, or PII data.
With the new ruling of the European court it’s forbidden to have pre-ticked cookie consent forms under GDPR. In the UK it’s already clear in PECR (the UK’s privacy directive). In these directives it’s also forbidden to fingerprint a visitor. Other analytics businesses use this technique (for example based on IP address). This seems privacy friendly but is considered fingerprinting. For which, you need consent.
No consent needed
With Simple Analytics you don’t need consent. It’s one of our core values.
We don’t want you to ask for consent ever. Our service is targeted at companies that want to get the big picture. Tracking customers is not part of that. That’s why we came up with our unique way of tracking unique visits.
How it works
When a visitor navigates from website to website the browser sends a referrer along. If you for example visit website randomwebsite.com and navigate to yourwebsite.com it sends the referrer randomwebsite.com to yourwebsite.com. This referrer is very useful to figure out where traffic is coming from. We use the referrer to calculate if a visit is unique.
When a user lands on your website without visiting another website (direct visit) we record it as a unique visit:
SPAs
If you have a single-page application we automatically see all visits after the first visit as a non unique visit. For the first visit we use above functionality to detect if a visit is unique.
If you have any questions about legal aspects or anything else, please shoot us a message.
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