Cookieless web analytics: how we measure without a banner

For years, measuring a website has meant setting cookies and, in Europe, showing a banner asking permission to do it. You know how that ends: consent fatigue, low acceptance rates and incomplete data. Anonymetrics starts from a different premise: measure without identifying.

The rotating daily identifier

Instead of a persistent cookie, we compute an ephemeral identifier from the site, the IP address and the user agent, combined with a secret salt that rotates every day and is then thrown away. That has two important consequences:

• Identifiers can't be linked from one day to the next: we don't build a profile that follows anyone over time.
• The IP address is never stored: it only feeds the hash and is discarded immediately.

That's enough to count daily unique visitors, page views, traffic sources, geography and technology accurately, with bots filtered out so the numbers add up.

What if I want to recognise returning visitors?

Some sites want to tell a returning visitor apart. For that we offer a consented mode: if your site already has a banner and the person accepts, we enable a first-party cookie of our own. It's opt-in and optional; the default stays cookieless.

Less friction, better data

With no cookies by default, most sites need no banner for our analytics. That means zero friction for your visitors and complete data for you: you don't depend on people accepting in order to measure.

Privacy and good data aren't at odds. In fact, once you stop following people around, you measure better.