This article will explore cookieless analytics, a new, privacy-first approach to user tracking. We will analyze how privacy regulations are reshaping the industry and how cookieless tracking is a fully compliant solution for your marketing needs.
We will also explain how mandera can help you optimize your pages while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations without jeopardizing user experience.
Before we analyze cookieless tracking, we must first explain what (third-party) cookies are and why privacy regulators are trying to restrict their use.
For decades, one of the default methods for tracking user behavior was via third-party cookies.
Cookies are small pieces of code installed on users’ browsers. They track user behavior and remember how they interact with websites.
Using this information, gathered via tools such as Google Analytics, you can analyze website traffic and see how users interact.
You will also gain valuable insights into user preferences and overall behavior. These insights allow you to serve targeted strategies, significantly improving the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, that comes at a cost, one of which is jeopardizing user privacy.
The key problem with third-party cookies is that user behavior and preferences are tracked across websites, and many companies are monetizing personal data.
You know the famous maxim: “If you are not paying for a product, you are the product.”
And let’s be honest: Google (Analytics) is powerful, yet you don’t have to pay anything to use it. The central reason it’s free is that it tracks user behavior as well as personal data and offers it to advertisers, who pay for advertising space, Google’s primary source of income.
Of course, Google is not the only company that does this. The same goes for Facebook, other social media platforms, and many data brokers that buy and sell data on the market.
In fact, most tech giants that offer free products (not just limited free versions or trials) are likely to exchange valuable user information for advertising purposes, especially if they also provide advertising platform services.
While attempts to regulate this field were made, significant progress was lacking until the EU introduced the famous GDPR.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) revolutionized cookie-based tracking. Before GDPR, cookie consent banners were rare. Now, users have detailed explanations and options for deciding what personal data will be shared.
GDPR only applies to EU residents, but other markets soon followed, with the crown example being the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Tech giants followed the approach—Apple’s Safari is famous for implementing its Intelligent tracking prevention (ITP), while Google also announced the end of third-party cookie support for Chrome in the future (although they are constantly pushing the implementation date).
Besides the apparent privacy issues, traditional cookie-based website analytics have a few other disadvantages:
Privacy and cookie regulations stipulate high penalties. Non-compliance with GDPR can cost you as much as €20 million or 4% of your global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
After Brexit, the UK has its own GDPR and is issuing hefty fines for non-compliance. In fact, privacy regulations are becoming tighter worldwide as more countries synchronize their legislatures with GDPR standards.
But it’s not just about the cost of fines—being penalized for violating personal data regulations can have lasting consequences for your company’s reputation.
Not only are cookie notifications and consent banners distracting, but they also interfere with the user experience.
You work hard to present your company and products in the best light possible—only to disrupt the experience with intrusive cookie pop-ups that divert attention from the content.
Instead of looking at your offerings, users have to navigate confusing checkboxes and fine print, which can lead to further issues and compliance fines.
While cookie-based solutions are powerful, they have some limitations that can lead to inaccurate results.
Regulations like GDPR are not the only ones against this type of tracking—users are doing their best to combat it. Ad blockers, Do Not Track requests, private web browsers, VPNs, and incognito modes are some methods to cloak web traffic.
These tools interfere with cookie installation and performance, causing cookie-based tools to give inaccurate information.
So, not only are there reputational concerns about offering the personal information of users who visit your website (yes, IP addresses and any data that can be used to identify a person are personal data, not just names and addresses), but you are also doing it more and more inefficiently.
While many privacy-friendly solutions try to better protect user privacy, the only way to prevent personal data processing is to eliminate privacy infringement by implementing privacy-by-design technologies.
One way to do this is through cookieless tracking, a form of user tracking that does not rely on personal data processing and storage but still allows you to analyze user behavior and optimize campaigns.
The key principle of true privacy-first cookieless tracking is eliminating personal data processing.
Regarding privacy regulations, personal data is information of any form that can be used to identify a person. This can be based on the data itself (such as a personal ID number or an IP address) or by combining that information with other data (which is the case for usernames and similar).
Instead of processing personal data, privacy-first digital analytics tools such as mandera rely on data that can not be used to identify a person. Because of this, no personal data is being processed, making this type of cookieless tracking solution fully compliant with privacy laws by design.
Besides the regulatory compliance, cookieless tracking provides you with more benefits:
We have already discussed how cookie-based solutions don’t always give accurate results, primarily due to ad blockers and settings that users adjust to protect their privacy. Because cookieless tracking doesn’t process personal information in the first place, these types of tools and settings won’t affect the results they show, giving you more accurate readings.
Since there is no personal information processing, there is no need to show intrusive cookie banners that ruin the user experience. Instead, the users will only focus on the page content, increasing your chances of making a conversion.
The fact that you don’t offer the personal information of your users and potential customers to third-party data brokers will speak volumes about the ethical standards your company maintains.
We are not talking about just a cosmetic difference in terms of not having the cookie notification pop-ups; it’s a genuine effort you make to preserve sensitive personal information.
Users will recognize your effort as it demonstrates compliance and reinforces your commitment to user experience and trust.
While the benefits of cookieless tracking solutions are apparent, there are a few limitations you should be aware of:
Traditional third-party-based tools allow you to track users across websites and see individual details that will enable you to optimize campaigns to the finest degree. This granular tracking is not possible without cookies.
While tailoring your campaign for each based on fragile personal information can be effective, it raises ethical concerns and poses risks to your business’s reputation.
Privacy is becoming increasingly important, and more and more tools claim to be privacy-friendly and cookieless.
However, actions such as collecting detailed information about browsers and hardware and creating unique identifiers for each user (a.k.a. fingerprinting) are still problematic regarding privacy laws. The same goes for processing and storing IP addresses.
Therefore, it’s essential to distinguish between privacy-friendly tools that implement some privacy-aware options and privacy-first cookieless tracking that is private by design.
Some cookieless tracking tools have issues distinguishing new and returning visitors, giving false traffic estimates. This lack of precision can cause headaches when assessing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
To prevent this issue, it is important to use tools that have reliable identifiers that don’t infringe privacy, which will prevent the same user from being counted multiple times.
For example, mandera uses a referrer-based detection method to distinguish unique and returning visitors while ensuring full compliance with privacy regulations:
mandera provides valuable information about website traffic while fully respecting user privacy and ensuring compliance with the GDPR and CCPA. Here’s how:
You can find other web analytics tools on the market that claim to respect user privacy. However, that is only partially true. While they may try to minimize it, they still process personal data.
For example, they use user hashing and similar attribution tactics. Yes, this is not raw personal data that can identify a person directly, but hashing is still personal data processing, which also requires consent and carries risks.
mandera does not process any personal data. None of the information we collect can be traced back to individual users, even when in combination with all other data we track.
For example, we rely on time zones and time stamps instead of IP addresses and locations. We collect device information, but only essential elements that allow us to differentiate unique visits.
If you are only using mandera, you will not need to disrupt the user experience with cookie consent banners, as no personal data is processed.
As a result, you also don’t need to sign a DPA to use our cookieless solution, which can often slow things down and introduce additional legal questions and costs.
mandera and its servers are based in Germany, with all data fully encrypted. This ensures that data remains within the EU, fully complying with the privacy standards outlined by GDPR.
With mandera, your data belongs to you. We never share or resell your data; no third parties or resellers are involved. You pay us to use our service exactly because we don’t resell user data.
As already shown, mandera only counts unique visits based on the referred domain—if the current page’s domain matches the referred, then the visit is not unique and won’t be counted. Combined with our other tracking methods, this results in more reliable traffic measurements.
mandera estimates where the visitor will go once they land on one of your pages. That will allow you to make changes based on our probabilistic tracking and optimize your content.
With a straightforward setup, you will have mandera running in a few minutes. The dashboard is minimalistic and intuitive, giving you all the essential information in a glimpse. Plus, the script is super lightweight, ensuring it won’t slow down your website.
Instead of making traffic estimates based on the information you don’t have in advance, you pay mandera by domain, with each subscription giving you up to 500k monthly visitors. That makes mandera ideal for businesses that want to know expenses in advance without worrying if added traffic will cause extra costs.
As you can see, intrusive third-party cookie tracking is followed by various challenges. Instead, more privacy-aware businesses rely on cookieless website tracking solutions for their marketing efforts.
mandera’s lightweight yet sophisticated approach to cookieless tracking enables you to gain valuable insights about user sessions across all domains and make data-driven decisions while fully complying with privacy regulations.
Our service is a perfect combination of quality user analytics and privacy, allowing you accurate tracking to optimize your pages for conversions without hurting users’ privacy.
Start your free trial today, and embrace the cookieless future of digital marketing now!
