All Collections
FAQ
Cookieless Tracking: All you need to know
Cookieless Tracking: All you need to know

Learn more about using Monsido Statistics without setting a statistics cookie in your visitors' browser

Updated over a week ago

Users of Monsido Statistics can gather data about their visitors without setting a cookie in their browser. We call it Cookieless Tracking.

What is Cookieless Tracking?

By default, when you use Monsido Statistics and have the Monsido script installed on your website, Monsido sets a cookie in your visitors' browser. This cookie allows us to track information about visitors' browsing behavior, geographical location, device information, and a lot more.

With Cookieless Tracking, we track all of the same things but without setting a cookie. We rely on other pieces of information such as visitors' operating system, browser, browser plugins, IP address and browser language to assign a unique ID to each visitor in our systems so that we can tell them apart. The unique ID is only valid for 24 hours and visitor IP addresses are, of course, fully anonymized until deletion which makes the solution completely privacy-friendly while avoiding any sort of fingerprinting.

What are the advantages of using Cookieless Tracking?

One advantage of using Cookieless Tracking is the practical and symbolic value of not setting a cookie. In these privacy-conscious times, the fewer tracking technologies you force on your audience, the better. With Cookieless Tracking, you do not leave any files (cookies) in your visitors' browser.

Cookieless Tracking also sets you up for a future that looks to be moving away from using cookies as a tracking mechanism. Google launched the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019 which aims to create a standard for websites to access user information without compromising privacy. Part of that initiative involves moving away from allowing third-party cookies.

What are the disadvantages of using Cookieless Tracking?

There are few to no disadvantages of using Cookieless Tracking. Since the unique visitor ID that Cookieless Tracking is based on expires after 24 hours, it makes it hard to track returning visitors and build visitor profiles over time. However, Monsido Statistics does not rely on such data. In other words, you can expect to be able to get the same quality of visitor data without having to set a cookie.

How to set up Cookieless Tracking

It is very simple to enable Cookieless Tracking on your website. First of all, you will need to make sure that you have Monsido Statistics enabled on your account and toggled on in the Script Setup Guide.

Then you'll need to toggle on Enable Cookieless Tracking and paste the script on to your website.

Once you publish your website, you're running cookieless!

For existing users of Monsido Statistics

Existing users of Monsido's Statistics module can switch over to using Cookieless Tracking at any time. Once you start tracking cookieless, analytics data will be added to your existing dataset so you won't end up with two separate datasets (one for cookie-based tracking and one for cookieless).

Did this answer your question?