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

We care a great deal about the privacy of your visitors. Cookies are something that can track visitors across multiple pages or even multiple websites. For us this is a hard no. This goes for all similar technologies like (but not limited to) local storage, session cookies, fingerprinting, and IP address hashing.

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

Our unique detection of visits is quite unique itself. Most services use cookies or IP addresses to see if a visitor has visited the website in the past, except we don’t use cookies or IP addresses at all. In the UK, for example, websites can’t use IP addresses (even hashed) without an active opt-in from each user. This is why Slymetrix Analytics is compatible with all existing privacy laws, including GDPR. You don’t need an opt-in for our service.

We detect a unique visit based on the hostname of the referrer of the page. When a user comes from one domain to another, their browser shares the previous domain with the next. If the current page’s domain is the same as the one in the referrer, we know it’s a non-unique visit.

We use timestamps to generate the graphs you see on your dashboard, which allows you to analyze changes in your website’s performance over various lengths of time.

We detect and exclude bots and spiders based on the visitor’s User Agent. We don’t use User Agents for fingerprinting, only for counting operating systems, device types, and browsers in your dashboard.

We allow customers to download these counts alongside the User Agent string itself. We do anonymize the User Agent string.

For example, when it has a very detailed version number we truncate it from Chrome/78.0.3904.108 into Chrome/78.0.0.0.

Referrers answer the question “Where did this visitor come from?”. We have two ways of checking the source of a user visiting your website.

In most cases, browsers send the URL of the previous website as a referrer. You can find a list of the most popular referrers in your analytics dashboard.

Secondly we check the source of the customer with the UTM-parameters.

We track these UTM codes:

• utm_source (e.g.: google.com)
• utm_medium (e.g.: search)
• utm_campaign (e.g.: get_customers_02)
• utm_content (e.g.: sidebar)
• utm_term (e.g.: privacy friendly analytics)

Website owners can add a URL parameter to links to their website, like ref=..., source=... or utm_source=..

Collecting the dimensions of a user’s browser window (innerWidth and innerHeight as viewport) and device dimensions (screen.width and screen.height) allows us to show you the most popular screen sizes. This is useful for making sure your website works great on all screens: phones, tablets, desktops, etc.