Metrics

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Here is a list of metrics we collect.

Want a more general overview? Go to our general overview of what we collect.

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.

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.

Unique

Very important

If a page view is unique or not. A simple yes or no. No data from the browser, cookies, or IP-addresses are used to determine this. Read more on how we collect this metric.

Country / time zone

Somewhat important

We collect the time zone of the browser. For example, Europe/Amsterdam. From this time zone, we derive the country. Every country has at least one time zone, and devices automatically update to the local time zone.

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

The first ID, data point ID, is a technical ID. When a visitor lands on a page, we send a request to our server. When we measure time on page we need to send a request at the end of a page view. To link those two requests together we match them with an ID. The data point ID. If time on page is not relevant, we can drop this ID.

The second ID, page ID, is used to link multiple events (if a customer collects them) together. Let’s say you have 2 events on the same page, you can then combine them together. This is not used by most customers. This page ID will be reset after every page.

The last ID, session ID, is used to link multiple events and pages into one session. It’s the same as a page ID, but with multiple pages. When a customer has a SPA (Single Page Application), the session ID is reset when the website is closed. If the customer doesn’t have a SPA, the session ID is reset with every navigation. The session ID is only needed when you need to use sequential events. Not so much for the amount of visitors. We measure that with the referrer of the page.

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

Scrolled percentage & time on page

Somewhat important

We collect those numbers to know how far visitors scrolled (for example, 80%) and how long they were on the page (for example, 45 seconds). The “The ID of the page view” is required.

The data point ID is required for time on page.

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. See below.

Script settings

Somewhat important

We send some script settings along with the page view. To identify the embed script and check if the page view comes from a robot. The script settings include things like version: script_version_2, robot: true.

Dimensions

Less important

We collect the dimensions of the screen of the device. 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.

That's it!

UTM codes explained

UTM codes are bits of text you can add to a link that tell Simple Analytics (as well as other analytics tools) a little bit more information about each link. Here’s a sample of what one looks like:

https://example.com/landing-page?utm_source=company-x&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=march

Read the UTM guide at Buffer.

User-agent strings

Browsers or devices identify themselves to websites. They give themselves some kind of name. For example, a user agent can look like this (wiki):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B40598

It’s not needed, privacy-wise, but we replace long numbers with zeros. After cleanup, it looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_0) AppleWebKit/531.21.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B40000

In some browsers we collect browser name and operating system name without the user agent but via the user agent client hints.