Cookieless Tracking | Monsido Help Center

This document gives instructions on how to set up the Monsido Cookieless Tracking feature.

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Introduction

How it works

Advantages
Disadvantages

Instructions

New Monsido Statistics users
Existing Monsido Statistics users

Additional Information

Introduction

The Monsido Statistics module normally applies a cookie to the browser of the visitor. It is possible to remove this, so that Monsido can track the same data from visitors who refuse statistics cookies on the cookie banner.

Note: If Cookieless Tracking is enabled, the statistics from the cookie consent banner are not shown. This means that if you switch from cookie banner only to Cookieless Tracking, you might see a jump in the figures because the data is counted in a different way.

The data tracked includes browsing behavior, geographical location, device information, and more.

How it works

To gather the same data without a cookie, Monsido relies on other pieces of information such as operating system, browser, browser plugins, user IP address, and browser language to assign a unique ID to each visitor in our systems. The unique ID is only valid for 24 hours and visitor IP addresses are made fully anonymous until they are deleted. This makes the solution privacy-friendly and prohibits fingerprinting.

Advantages

Practical: When users refuse statistical cookies via the cookie banner, Monsido can still gain valuable information without placing a cookie on their browser.
Symbolic: Show your audience that you care about their privacy.
Privacy: Visitors can rest assured that no unwanted files (cookies) are placed on their browser.
Legal: While not prohibited yet, cookies are becoming more and more unpopular as a tracking mechanism. In 2019, Google launched the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to create a standard for websites to access user information without compromising the privacy of their visitors. Part of that initiative involves a move away from third-party cookies to gather data.

Disadvantages

There are few to no disadvantages with Monsido Cookieless Tracking.

Returning visitors: 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 provide visitor profiling. You can expect the same quality of visitor data without a cookie.

Instructions

This section gives instructions on how to implement Cookieless Tracking on your website.

New Monsido Statistics users

Click Settings (gear icon) at the top of the Monsido Domain Overview (globe icon). The Admin Settings page opens.

Note: The Settings button is only available to site admins.
Click Action on the same row as the domain to scan.
Select Script Setup Guide in the drop-down list. The Domain Setup page opens.
Enable Monsido Statistics.
For more information, see the User Guide article:
Statistics.
Turn on the Enable Cookieless Tracking switch.
Configure the Monsido script as usual.
For more information, see the User Guide article:
Add the Monsido Script.

The script should look something like this:


<script type="text/javascript"> 
window._monsido = window._monsido || { 
token: "your-token-here", 
statistics: { 
enabled: true, 
cookieLessTracking: true, 
documentTracking: { 
...

Paste the script to the website HTML and then publish the site.

Existing Monsido Statistics Users

Existing users of the Monsido Statistics module can switch to Cookieless Tracking at any time. Follow the steps above to create a new script to publish.

When cookieless tracking is enabled, the analytics data merges seamlessly with your existing dataset to avoid the problem of two separate datasets (one for cookie-based tracking and one for cookieless).