Cookies VS Cookie-less tracking: A brief overview

GDPR compliance has thrown the world wide web into a "please accept this cookie" hole and frankly, we don't see a better option right now. Should you go down the cookies route? or is it worth the sacrifice?

Basically, it depends on your website / app, how valuable is the accuracy of metrics like unique visitors, new & repeating visitors etc for your app? Anything that requires providing an ID to a visitor / user and tracking them wherever they go on your site. This clarity of requirement will help decide if you should have cookies or not on your site.

Cookie-less tracking

The most popular analytics platform that complies with GDPR and CCPA is plausible (we also have Vercel catching up pretty fast). Everyone loves their simple interface and it just gets the job done.

In the most simplest terms, they use a sophisticated method to generate a

random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day.

In a more technical term

Every single HTTP request sends the IP address and the User-Agent to the server so that’s what we use. We generate a daily changing identifier using the visitor’s IP address and User-Agent. To anonymize these datapoints and make them impossible to relate back to the user, we run them through a hash function with a rotating salt.

Don't worry about the technical terms if you do not understand it, whatever "string of letters and numbers" are generated they are deleted in 24 hours and makes it impossible to track a visitor.

As you might guess it, retention based analysis is harder cause "if a visitor visits your site five times in one day we will show that as one unique visitor. But if the same visitor visits your site on five different days in a month we would show that as five unique visitors."

Source: https://plausible.io/data-policy#how-we-count-unique-users-without-cookies

Cookie based tracking

Now obviously with cookie based tracking you get all the retention analysis goodies, but it won't be GDPR compliant and will need to show a consent banner to the user for being valid in the EU. If you do however go ahead with this approach, then I approve of posthog cause they offer a variety of features right off the bat

• Building a react cookie banner

• Oh no, do you have to go back to being cookieless? Here's how you can do that with posthog (got to admit, that is some impressive versatility)

• Like automation? set it up with zapier

• Ad blockers messing up your analytics? here's how you can setup reverse proxy to make it harder for them to block analytics (I'm so split about this as a dev and a user of the web though)

• API which you can use to implement your own analytics dashboard (useful for B2B2C companies)

Here's an example from Posthog's docs of everything you will need to follow if the user does not consent to storing cookies:

You can read more about it here.

Although I might have written the posthog part like an ad, I wanted to emphasize on all the things in analytics and how the "unique visitor" count differs from the platform you choose. Hopefully this article helped you understanding how tracking is done from a technical perspective. Every tool is useful in it's own way and will need to be understood on where and how to use it.

credits:
- blog cover image generated with coverview and custom icon from here.