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Analytics without cookies or a consent banner

VisitWatch counts visitors without storing anything on their device. There is nothing to ask consent for, which keeps your site free of a banner and your numbers free of gaps.

Start freeRead the guides

What a consent banner costs you

  • Visitors who never answer the bannerA large share
  • Sessions missing from your reportsAll of those
  • Banner to build, host and maintainOne
  • Delay before the first script runsUntil they click

This is for you if

  • You would rather not put a consent dialog in front of a first-time reader.
  • You want the visitor count to include everyone who arrived, not only the ones who accepted.
  • You need to be able to say plainly what is recorded, because somebody will ask.
  • You want the analytics script to be small and to run immediately rather than after a consent decision.
  • You are measuring your own website, not building an advertising audience.

And not for you if

  • You need to recognise a returning individual by name or account across sessions. The counting key rotates daily, by design, so this is not a setting.

  • You need to build remarketing audiences to export to an ad network.

    See /google-analytics-alternative

  • You need session replay, heatmaps or anything that reconstructs what happened on the page.

    See /website-visitor-tracking

  • Your legal position requires consent for analytics regardless of what is stored. That is a question for your own counsel, not a feature.

Cookieless is a constraint as well as a claim. It removes the banner and it removes cross-day identity, and the second one is not recoverable later.

What maps to what

Most of what a cookie was used for has a direct equivalent. The rows in grey are the ones that genuinely do not, which is the honest half of the comparison.

In a cookie-based toolVisitWatchWhat actually differs
First-party cookieNo device storageNothing is written to the visitor's browser, which is why there is nothing to ask consent for.
Client IDRotating daily keyDerived per day, so a visitor is countable today and unrecognisable tomorrow.
SessionSessionA run of pageviews from the same visitor within a day. Ends with the day rather than carrying over.
Returning visitorRetention cohortsReturn behaviour is measured across a cohort, not attached to a person.
Geo from IP storeCountry at request timeResolved as the request arrives and never stored as a coordinate.
Cross-device identity—Not available at any plan. Two devices are two visitors.
Cross-site audience—There is no advertising network behind this, so there is nothing to build an audience in.
User-ID join—Nothing links a pageview to an account you hold elsewhere.

Three of these eight have no equivalent, and saying so is the point of the table.

The reports, in the order you would actually open them

Not the full product tour. This is the sequence somebody in this situation works through, and what each step is for.

1

What is actually being recorded?

Settings → Data

Every field the tracker collects is listed on your own settings screen, in the app, with what each one is used for. Read it before you install rather than after.

2

Are the numbers complete?

Overview

There is no consent gate in front of the script and no sampling behind it, so the figure is every visit rather than the share who clicked accept.

3

Where did they come from?

Traffic → Sources

Referrer and UTM campaign, both of which arrive with the request. Neither needs anything stored on the device.

4

Do people come back?

Retention

Daily cohorts, averaged across the cohorts that have actually reached each day. The honest version of a returning-visitor number when nobody is being followed.

What you can tell your legal team

The claims below are the ones the product actually supports. Nothing here depends on a configuration you have to remember to set.

1

Nothing on the device

No cookie, no local storage, no fingerprint gathered to stand in for one. The tracker sends the request and keeps nothing behind.

By construction

2

No identity that outlives a day

The key used to count a visitor is derived per day. Yesterday's visitor cannot be matched to today's.

By construction

3

Your data stays yours

No advertising network sits behind this, so nothing is enriched, resold or joined to a profile held somewhere else.

By construction

Questions people in this situation ask

These are on the guides index too, alongside every other question the site answers.

Do I still need a cookie banner?

Not for VisitWatch, because nothing is stored on the visitor's device. If other scripts on your site set cookies you may still need one for those. Whether your jurisdiction requires consent regardless is a question for your own counsel.

What data is actually recorded?

The page, the referrer and campaign, the country resolved at request time, and the device, browser and system reported by the request. The full list is on your settings screen with what each field is used for.

Can I identify an individual visitor?

No, and that is not a limitation you can lift. The key used to count visitors rotates daily, so nobody in a report can be followed into the next day or matched to an account.

Other solutions

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Measure without the banner

One script tag, no cookies, and no consent flow to build around it.

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