Koko Analytics now supports cookieless tracking!
Just a few moments ago, we pushed version 1.8 of Koko Analytics (free) to the WordPress.org plugin repository. This release will go down in the history of the plugin as an important one as it includes changes related to one of the core principles of the plugin.
A new tracking method was introduced: cookieless tracking.
Why cookie-based tracking in the first place
For years, we stood by our initial conviction that cookie-based tracking was the best solution out there as it follows the spirit of the law as closely as possible.
Yes, it may require a cookie policy on your site or explicit consent before use, but it does allow for some powerful privacy-improving features:
Every browser comes with great tooling to automatically manage and inspect cookies.
Nothing has to be stored on the server.
Cookies come with built-in expiration.
While this all still holds true and we still believe that cookie based tracking is the best solution for most sites, we are now also offering an alternative method that does not require the use of a cookie in order to detect returning visitors and unique pageviews.
Cookieless tracking
What is it and how does it work exactly?
Once you enable cookieless tracking, Koko Analytics will store a list of visited pages for each individual visitor on your server. To identify which list belongs to which visitor, a one-way hash is created consisting of the following components:
A secret “seed” value which changes every 24 hours.
The visitor’s IP address
The visitor’s user agent
This way, the plugin does not have to store the user agent or IP address itself and can not link information from separate days to the same visitor.
The big upside to all this is that it doesn’t use any cookies. The downside is that it is slightly less accurate and requires some storage on your server. For more information about the pros and cons of each tracking method, please see cookie vs. cookieless tracking in our knowledge base.
Let us know your thoughts on this new release
Please let us know your thoughts on this new feature by replying to this email.
And as always, if you have any feature suggestions, don’t hesitate to let us know either (or vote on previously suggested ideas here).