How we track

At mandera analytics, we collect the necessary information to provide you with valuable insights while maintaining the highest privacy standards for your visitors. Here’s a comprehensive overview of what we do and don’t collect.

Our Privacy-First Promise

Privacy isn’t just a feature – it’s our foundation. We’ve built mandera analytics with a strict privacy-first approach that ensures:

• No cookies or tracking technologies
• No collection of personal data
• No IP address storage or hashing
• Full GDPR, PECR, and CCPA compliance by default
• EU-based infrastructure and operations (German company and German server location)

What We Do Not Collect

No Cookies

We never set any cookies or use similar technologies. Cookies can track visitors across multiple pages or even multiple websites – this is a hard no for us. This includes:

• No local storage
• No session cookies
• No fingerprinting
• No IP address hashing

No IP Addresses

We drop the IP address from every single request. Period. We don’t save them, we don’t collect them, and we don’t hash them with cryptography. Your visitors remain completely anonymous.

What We Do Collect

Unique Visits

Our unique visit detection is truly unique. Instead of using invasive methods like cookies or IP addresses, we detect unique visits based on the referrer domain. When a user comes from one domain to another, their browser shares the previous domain. If the current page’s domain matches the referrer, we know it’s a non-unique visit.

Timestamps

We collect timestamps to generate your analytics graphs and allow you to analyze changes in your website’s performance over time. This data is completely anonymous and cannot be tied to individual visitors.

User Agents (Anonymized)

We collect anonymized user agent data only to:

• Detect and exclude bots
• Count operating systems, device types, and browsers
• Provide aggregated device statistics

We automatically anonymize user agent strings by truncating version numbers. For example:
Chrome/78.0.3904.108 becomes Chrome/78.0.0.0

Country Detection

Unlike services that use IP addresses for geolocation, we determine a visitor’s country based on their timezone. This provides country-level insights without compromising privacy. We can’t and don’t track cities or regions within countries.

Device Information

We collect basic device dimensions (viewport and screen size) to help you understand how your website appears across different devices. This information is purely technical and cannot identify individual visitors.

Time on Page

We measure actual engagement time, not just open tabs. Our time-on-page metric:

• Excludes time when the page is hidden
• Uses median instead of average to avoid outlier skew
• Provides more accurate engagement data than traditional analytics

Referrers and UTM Parameters

We collect referrer information to show you where your traffic comes from. For UTM tracking, we collect:

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_campaign
• utm_content

Additional Features

Single Page Applications (SPAs)

For SPAs, we automatically handle unique visit detection and page transitions without compromising privacy.

Do Not Track

We respect the Do Not Track browser setting by default. While we never track individual users anyway, we exclude these visits entirely from your analytics when Do Not Track is enabled.

Why Choose mandera analytics?

1. True Privacy by Design: We built our entire system around privacy, not as an afterthought. This means:

• No need for cookie banners
• Automatic GDPR compliance
• Zero personal data collection

1. Data Ownership: You own your data, and we make it easy to:

• Export your data at any time
• Access raw data through our API
• Control your data retention

1. Accurate Insights: Our privacy-first approach delivers:

• More accurate visitor counts (no ad-blocker losses)
• Real engagement metrics
• Clean, actionable data

1. Technical Excellence: Our implementation is lightweight and performant:

• 3kb script size (vs 45kb for Google Analytics)
• Improved Core Web Vitals
• Better SEO performance

Technical Details

Script Implementation

Our tracking script is lightweight (3kb) and designed for maximum performance. We send minimal script settings with each page view to:

• Identify the embed script version
• Detect robot visits
• Maintain privacy standards

Data Processing

All data is processed with privacy in mind:

• Immediate IP address dropping
• User agent anonymization
• Referrer cleaning
• UTM parameter standardization

Data Storage

Your analytics data is:

• Stored on EU servers
• Fully encrypted
• Never shared or sold
• Accessible through our API

By choosing mandera analytics, you’re not just choosing an analytics tool – you’re choosing a privacy-first approach to understanding your website’s performance. We believe in providing valuable insights without compromising visitor privacy, and every feature we build reflects this commitment.